📹 7 Ways D&D Players Destroy Their DM’s Plans
Dicebreaker host and D&D Oxventure Dungeon Master Johnny Chiodini brings you the seven ways every DM will get derailed by …
How much should I spend on lifestyle?
The 50-20-30 Rule is a budgeting strategy that divides income into three spending categories: Needs, Debt/Savings, and Wants. It suggests that 50% of net income should be allocated to living expenses (Needs), 20% to debt reduction and savings (Debt Reduction and Savings), and 30% to discretionary spending (Wants). The goal is to ensure that the majority of income is allocated to these categories.
What is the average age of a D&D player?
The Dungeons and Dragons community demographics are analyzed in an infographic, showing a 40 female player base, 60 males, and less than 1 non-binary player. The largest age group is between 20-24, with 24 players. The infographic also highlights the increasing popularity of Dungeon Masters, who are the puppeteers during sessions. More players are purchasing Dungeon Master-oriented books, such as the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide, to find new groups to play with. The infographic also highlights Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and the Magic the Gathering collaboration, which are popular sourcebooks for Wizards to provide new content.
Does gender matter in D&D?
Dungeons and Dragons typically does not have a mechanical effect on gender, but there have been some exceptions throughout the game’s history. In the original 1974 version, no special rules were implemented for female characters, and male pronouns and terms were used. However, in Dragon 3 (Oct 1976), special rules were introduced for female characters, including lower Strength scores and a Beauty stat from 2-20 instead of Charisma. Women also have unique class abilities and level titles.
What is the best age to play D&D?
Dungeons and Dragons is a social game suitable for children aged 6 and above, with adults, educators, or older children acting as Dungeon Masters. It encourages collaboration and quick closeness among players, making it suitable for younger children who may need more time. Pre-teens and teenagers can lead the way and enjoy independence. Dungeons and Dragons can be played both in the classroom and outside, with a Texas high school club resulting in higher standardized test scores.
What percentage of DnD players are female?
D and D, a popular dark fantasy TTRPG game, has grown significantly due to demographic and cultural shifts. With over 50 million users worldwide, the game has allowed queer and trans players to create stories and adventures that align with their interests. One of the biggest changes in D and D culture over the past 30 years is the concept of “Session Zero”, where players and DMs meet to discuss expectations and rules, setting boundaries such as avoiding sexism, homophobia, and X-rated humor.
Does lifestyle matter in D&D?
PCs select a weekly lifestyle, paying the requisite gold cost. The cost of a lifestyle is determined by the desired lifestyle, with cheaper lifestyles resulting in penalties and more expensive lifestyles resulting in bonuses.
How do lifestyle expenses work in D&D?
Lifestyle expenses in a fantasy world are essential for maintaining a character’s lifestyle, including accommodations, food, and equipment maintenance. These expenses are calculated per day and can change depending on the character’s finances or remain constant throughout their career. The lifestyle choice can have consequences, such as making connections with the wealthy, avoiding criminals, and potentially attracting thieves. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully consider lifestyle expenses when choosing a character’s lifestyle.
Can you get paid for playing DND?
To earn money in Dungeons and Dragons DM, offer coaching, courses, or consulting services as pre-recorded courses. As an experienced DM, you can help improve skills or create engaging campaigns. Create modules for customers to purchase and download, offering value to customers. Include printables, guides, or freebies to attract students. Tools for passive income include audio and video suggestions.
Where do most DND players live?
The states of Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Maine, and Vermont have the highest rates of participation in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in the United States. This is followed by New York, New Jersey, Mississippi, Georgia, and California. The most popular class is that of the Monk, with 19 states indicating a preference for this option. The five states with the highest rates of D&D participation are New York, New Jersey, Mississippi, Georgia, and California.
Can you play D&D for a living?
In a recent interview with CNBC’s Make It! Millennial Money series, 36-year-old game master Mari Murdock discussed the potential for hobbies and artistic endeavors to serve as a source of income. Murdock, who organizes and narrates tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, highlighted the ways in which these activities can be monetized.
📹 A Crap Guide to D&D (5th Edition) – Monk
Joseph makes a dumb Dungeons and Dragons guide for dumb people intro/outro music is original piece by JoCat ▻Support me: …
I remember that my DM once planned “Oh, yeah. I’ll have them fight against a purple dragon.” Now, keep in mind that this is 5e, where there are no purple dragons at all. The DM full on homebrewed a boss in. But then, during a bit of chit chat as they were approaching where the dragon would ambush them, the tiefling was recounting during his childhood when he used to play with a purple dragon. This was completely unprompted, it’s not like he had any plans or anything. This complete non-sequitor had basically invalidated the encounter. When the dragon did eventually ambush them, he was just “Eyyy, it’s my homie Vernus.” Who says roleplaying can’t help you avoid encounters?
I’m playing my first ever campaign and so far we’ve adopted a platypus and made it our mascot, spent a full thirty minutes figuring out if dwarves float, completely derailed our DM by not killing a ship full of pirates and instead convincing them that they needed a vacation, and spent too long shopping for hats. I’m having the time of my life!
Lol, the meat grinder. Reminds me of my first time DMing. Me: ok so the bard is now putting on a show for the other guests in the hotel. Dragonborn fighter: I’m gonna provide him with pyro technics. Me: what? DBF: I use my breath weapon. Me: um, ok, roll damage. DBF: What? Me: roll damage. DBF: happens to roll the maximum Me: haha what shenanigans, 4 people died in that fire.
“Without hurting or disadvantaging anyone why don’t you…” The next day, “Alright skeletons, how is it going?” “Orphan walls done.” “Orphan walls? You mean orphanage?” “Orphan bones make good mortar, orphan walls.” “I said not to hurt anyone!” The featureless bone face managed to convey a sense of accomplishment, “Broke neck, fast death, no pain.” “Oh, for… Surely death is a disadvantage?” “Skeletons very dead, not so bad.”
PC1: I have an idea! We have 2 wizards with us. Have them summon stuff and we’ll intimidate the pirates with numbers. DM: What’re you going to summon? You’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean PC2: Uh… it says here Dolphins are summonable at Summon 1 DM: Dolphins… Ok make your rolls. PC2: “I summon 3 Dolphins.” Me: “I got 5.” DM: (after verifying everyone’s rolls) …Ok, you outnumber the pirates 12 vs 8. Roll to intimidate…? PC1: (Nat20) “Throw down your arms or prepare to face the full fury of the deep!” And that was the story of how my playgroup developed “Contingency Plan Alpha.”
First time DMing I watched this 3 times in order to prep myself with sage advice from the master. The one peice I particularly clung to was beware of flimsy characters as I knew the girl I was going to be playing with was the kind of person to make friends with everyone she can and I didn’t want to have the prison guard incident happen. So I made sure I had a name and general backstory for every single living intelligent character. Keyword “Living…” …she ended up ignoring all of them and instead made friends with a robot I had nothing planned for!!! (It was actually really adorable and allowed for extra tension in the final boss, but still!!!)
One time our DM was trying to be an ass and present us a “mysterious, potentially unstable” potion in one of our earliest encounters. He described it as “bubbling red liquid with the slightest yellow glow and slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature to the touch.” So I asked “Is there a label?” There was a moment of silence and he replied with defeat “Yes. It’s a potion of Cure Light Wounds.” I think that counts as derailing because almost a year later he told me his newbie-GM brain thought it would be a good idea to evaluate how paranoid the PCs were with magical objects when there were mundane solutions in front of us. For a few sessions after that I felt compelled to ask “Is there a label?” every time we came across magical objects. Lol
10:26 A group I played w/ once had a prison guard who we were meant to either Drug or otherwise incapacitate in order to break free from a slaver’s camp. One of the more charismatic character stepped up and instead of simply coaxing him to let us go free or anything like that, they straight up convinced him that what he was doing is wrong, talked him not only out of being a slaver, but managed to get him to help with breaking all the other slaves out and killing off the other slavers. From there we convinced the DM to make a character sheet and play him for the ENTIRE REST OF THE CAMPAIGN. He was quite literally an NPC who existed for no purpose other than guarding a jail cell and we ended up making him a part of the party up until the very end of the campaign itself. Side note: This campaign was also being run as a “World building” campaign, to set up things that are to come later on since our DM wanted to make his own setting. At the end of stopping the potential cataclysm that was at the base of the campaign he made our characters into demi-gods to establish other religions in the setting he had set up, this included the slaver-turned-hero. So, in total- We coaxed a slaver guard who was meant to be a one-time NPC into helping us save the world, at which point he became a demi-god who is now a benchmark in every campaign to come in that setting as he is a widely worshiped figure by slaves hoping to attain their freedom.
So, in my first campaign, I ruined my DM’s plans by IMMEDIATELY breaking the law. While in prison, I grabbed a brick out of the wall to use as an improvised weapon, and used my massive brain (and rage) and unarmored chutzpah to beat the guard to death with it and escape. He was really unprepared for our entire campaign to exist with myself as a fugitive.
I remember one of my group members, the DM’s husband, our druid, would use storm of of thorns to seal off a doorway and then use thorn whip to yank them through the storm of thorns, utterly shredding them and utterly covering us in what we called, “human salsa,” and I was regularly used as a human shield by our rouge.
If worst thing for a DM is a party of unimaginative murder-hobos, then the second worst thing is players that are too clever. I’m currently running a campaign (Pathfinder v1), and boy do I have some stories to tell: Possibly my most troublesome (in a good way) player is a cleric of Sarenrae (Godess of the sun and redemption). They had just finished a big boss fight against the leader of a large gang of bandits, he preached to the entire bandit camp (around 200-300)…and converted half of them. Since then he has ended two roadside robberies in a similar fashion, while the other players get ready for battle and roll intimidation, he steps up, rolls diplomacy, and makes would-be robbers rethink their life choices. I then had the party investigate some missing cattle, which were being stolen to be used in a ritual sacrifice. They decided to watch the field at night, as I expected them to. Before night fell, the cleric says that he places numbered markers on all the cattle. “Okay,” I told him, “but it will take a few hours.” One of the cattle starts walking off in the middle of the night, going 100 ft before completely disappearing. The cleric asks which number it is, of course I have him roll. “Number 39.” I don’t remember what spell it was, but we tracked tag #39 (I’m not well versed in divination seeing as I never use it as a player). The cave that it led them to wasn’t quite ready for them, but I let them find some clues anyway, so it worked out pretty well in the end. Most recently, they made me have to completely and totally change an entire story arc.
That last bit cracked me up. When I used to play D&D, our DM came up with a big long quest for us to honor a friend of ours that had died. Part of that quest took us thru a forest full of elves. Since our friend always hated elves, the DM decided that these elves were not friendly. We were being overrun with elves when someone in the group had the idea to light the forest on fire. The idea was that we throw out all of our lamp oil and booze and then Willie (dead friends brother) would throw a lamp and light it so we could escape. Our DM doesn’t give any breaks tho, so after Willie threw the lamp he looks at him and says, don’t you wish you would have lit it? So, then it comes to my turn, natural 20 Fireball. We ended up burning down an entire elf kingdom and our DM had to completely redo a section of the quest since the Elf Kingdom was a later part lol.
The most interesting thing about this article is hearing Mr. Chiodini talk about coming to understand these things. I DMed my first adventure back in 1983. It was a disaster. But over the past 36 years, I’ve learned a these same lessons (and many more), and they mainly come down to: “Don’t tell the story in advance.” A lot of people have trouble with the idea that you can’t script out a tabletop RPG in the same way you can a computer/console RPG. So, if you’re running The Witcher or Dragon Age (or _Dungeons and Dragons_) as a GM, you’re simply not going to have the same level of control that the writing staff at CD Projekt Red or Bioware can exert. So detailing a story to the same degree is always going to backfire. P.S.: And here’s a candidate for a #8 from my own experience… Halting the catastrophe that’s supposed to be unfolding before their eyes. Players are experts at finding ways to interfere with the foolproof plan that your villain has to set something off. So if it absolutely, positively, needs to happen, then it takes place off-camera, while the players are otherwise engaged.
One of my all-time favourite things I’ve ever done, that I was sorry to the DM for, was derailing the campaign something fierce. But by golly, was it beautiful. Essentially we were on a side mission to find out where some missing mages had gone. We found out through a few encounters that demons were behind it and tracked them back to the head honcho of the operation, a Night Hag in a swamp(think like, Crookback Bog from Witcher 3). We engaged in a huge old boss fight with the hag and her minions and got the better of her. Our warlock and I were in melee combat with her when she decided to cast Plane Shift in order to escape. In the heat of the moment, I asked the DM “Can I grab onto her like a port-key?”, and the warlock agreed to do the same. The demons we’d been dealing with had been using the Ethereal Plane to escape us in combat throughout the quest, so we figured we would just be there and be able to hop straight back once the hag was dead. It may have been a bend of the mechanics, but the DM allowed us to grab onto her and be transported with her to her destination, at which point the DM took a long moment to prepare something, telling us she hadn’t prepared for this. And then, we were told that two of the stronger members of our 4-man party had been transported to the Abyss. We are still there, looking for a portal back home, fighting off demons and accepting the fact that we’re almost definitely going to die in Hell. So that’s how I turned our campaign from a Sherlock Holmes missing persons case, into a chapter of DOOM.
My first DM gad an interesting new player moment: the party had to get into a tower whose only features were blue spots. The newbie walked around the tower, asked what they saw, and was told that one spot looked like a door. They said they walked into the door shape. Everyone joked that they hurt their nose walking face-first into a wall, but the DM had this look on his face, and went “No, guys, she’s right, that’s the way in.” In my defense, I’d already seen that gimmick in a book.
Next time they go out chasing nowhere just go “And there, you find a merchamt, selling crimson earring, and he says ‘crimson earrings, only crimson earrings over here’ ” And if they don’t get the indirect, just make a fisherman show up and punch the merchant in the face saying “Oy, ye can’t sell your earrings here, this be the red herring market” Then just make him sell red herrings to the party. If they still don’t get it after that, burn their houses down.
Those final words…..I love it. D&D is all about the TABLE having fun. Those moments of “derailing” for the DM are pure moments of the players thinking as their CHARACTERS and not as themselves. My players ignore the massive plot hooks I’m throwing at them left and right, and I want to pull my hair out, but thinking on your feet as the DM is what makes that role just as fun as playing a level 10 War Mage.
I love Johnny’s games though and a large part of that is for all of the reasons he talks about here. Some DMs DO try to railroad their players in order to avoid a lot of these factors and it can quickly become really unsatisfying to play. The Oxventure games, however, have a madcap, zany sandbox feel to them where the players are free to approach a situation limited only by their imagination. And that’s good D&D. You’re a great DM, Johnny, and I love perusal you at work!
The first one, I experienced that just the other week. I’m running Dragon Heist, and am using a bunch of extra PDFs I picked up on Dungeon Master’s Guild. One of these is “Residence of Trollskull Alley”, which fleshes out a lot of other businesses to have as neighbours for your players, with each of these places having two or three adventure hooks. The funeral home had one where the assistant turns out to be a budding necromancer, and all the hook says is “The corpses are dancing in the basement”. So I just have the two brothers in the tavern, when their assistant comes in and says “Oh, it’s so wonderful. The young couple are having one last dance together.” Now, I had this set up so that the party could find out that they had someone who could deal with dead people, like talk with them, animate them, etc. because the next little adventure was going to be a murder mystery that started at a grand gala put on by the head of one of the more important noble houses later in the session. So I have the party tag along back to the funeral home… …and they decided that, “Wait, these two were murdered, we have to find out who did it!” So I’m sitting there calmly, listening to their plan, while on the inside I’m going “Oh crap oh crap oh crap! Okay, it’s a rival suitor that hired one of the bad Zhents. Which house is he with? What was he doing?” And at one point the thief decides to follow this guy to see if he slips up with anything. So I had to come up with a bunch of things for him to do during the day, including going to see an afternoon bit of entertainment.
Another way that a player can derail the DM is to INTENTIONALLY manipulate the narrative onto a track that would take MULTIPLE campaigns to resolve (e.g, a player making a melodramatic comment at the end, such as staring at a burning building and waiting for another player to talk to them before saying something like: “This fire shall soon spread, consuming the world you once knew. Night has already fallen, and war… has officially begun).
I once DM:ed an encounter where my players were trapped in a clock tower… someone had the “bright idea ™” to cut the bell free to send it down the tower and scare the city guard away… A series of complicated calculations later the two and a half tonne brass bell smashed down onto the second floor which proved sturdier than imagined, the beams holding it up however did not. They smashed the entire guard deployment into paste with a solid wooden floor weighed down by nearly three tonnes of brass. That’s the first time I’ve ever had to force a group to roll fortitude rolls to stop from puking themselves unconscious.
As a DM I’ve always held a “I’m the DM, what I say goes,” stance with my players. But mostly due to the sheer number of players that argue with me about the rules. Derailing the game the way that the Oxventurers have done and surprising the Story Teller with the unexpected is healthy for the game, we should always want to see our players succeed.
When I was DM In a dungeon that was converting humans into different types of monsters. The final boss was this massive giant on steroids with a couple minions. The party left, went to the tavern, bought all the liquor, booze, alcohol, etc you get it. While the boss was sleeping one party member manages to get both minions to fall asleep while on duty. The party placed their soon to be fireworks display all round the monsters and the boss. My final boss, my plan, along with the minions, literally went up in flames. The wooden support beams of the dungeon they were in collapsed and the party died too shortly after.
I remember when I derailed my DM’s plans… I was playing a Dragonborn barbarian (very original, I know) and we had just killed an ochre jelly that came through some rubble in the walls. I decided that I wanted to break through to the other side. Rolled an 18. Combined with my dumbass barbarian strength, I had a 22 right there. I broke through the wall from the 3rd room of the labyrinth we were in to the last. Barbarian is dumb
Robbing boss battles….now before I tell this pls note that I was working my own campaign according to the D20 system (so not strictly D&D) and one of the things my party really enjoyed was that critical hits and misses would affect bodyparts (like a critical hit to the head would kill humanoid creatures, limbs might be severed, etc etc etc). So here my party stands facing a giant vampiric hydra (high lvl party) and the traits for that specific monster described how it was especially vulnerable to ebony wood piercing weapons (wait for it) and in that party was a hunter who had bought some ragtag flimsy arrows (he was dirt poor) that happened to be made from ebony wood. He rolls for initiative and my monster rolls a crit miss so I was like “yeah; that’s okay…kinda gives them a shot before I bring down the pain” …hunter rolled a critical hit so could go first. He takes aim and fires on whimsy; scoring yet another critical hit for his attack roll (okay; no biggie, I thought). He rolls again for the critical hit allocation and guess what….straight through the heart. Vampiric + Wooden stake (in this case an arrow) made from ebony wood…. Yeah….shortest boss battle ever in my histroy as a GM
One time I was playing a session with a guy with his own custom campaign in a zombie setting and we encountered a dude holed up in a complex. He had guns and weapons and ammo in there to fuel a small army and was planned to be a big mission for the whole story. His chars character was meant to push the story along and introduce the villain. We had a stand off and he revealed that we couldn’t attack him due to his higher ground and having his whole area protected by land mines hidden. So at the time the whole company was trying to talk to him and convince him to let us in so we could get info and possibly some néw weapons. While that was going on, I was playing a character who was insane after the zombie outbreak and would flip a coin in real life to make either sensible or stupid decisions. I flipped it and it landed on tails. All I said next was, “I kick a rock into the land mine area.” Everyone looked at me funny and all I expected was one cool explosion. The dm rolled a Nat 1 and that mine activated all the land mind around his safe house killing the dude, nearly killing us and totally derailing the entire campaign. He just closed his eyes, sighed and said, “I’ve spent the last week planning this whole story out.. so what do you guys wanna do now? I got nothing else planned for this session.” As we couldn’t stop laughing. Although shortly after I killed off that character to prevent any more hiccups like that 😂 He was quite happy to see that character go
I just remembered one of the times where I was the one who derailed the DM’s plans. We were following a thief who had stolen a map we had (which we had kinda stolen ourselves but that’s beside the point), he was supposed to run into a tavern and close the door behind him forcing us to go around but for some reason we catch up to him (I think he slipped or something) so he can’t bar the door completely. As we enter the tavern our dwarf who is wearing magic armour skids across the stone floor and just completely wrecks the bar as somehow we recalculated his armour points as damage points seeing as he was at that point basically a missile. The thief manages to exit the backdoor and slam a plank across it stopping our elven archer but me being half ogre simply grab the dwarf from the wreckage of the bar while running and subsequently use him as a battering ram. another set of complicated calculations later we get the verdict that we had basically exploded a six inch thick oak door to kindling using a Mithril clad battering-dwarf and managed to knock the thief out cold in the process. Neither dwarf nor DM was very happy with my quick thinking.
I was in a one shot where we were all cultists defending a castle from a group of adventurers. We threw a party, invited as many adventurers as we could, poisoned them, and took them to a sex dungeon we made in the summoning room. Needless to say, we derailed pretty bad. (In the end we sacrificed 10 people to our god, and we converted two people.)
On circumventing boss battles: My very first D&D experience, our DM had us crawling in cramped cobold infested caverns. We come across a gigantic spider, successfully sneaking into the room with our nightvision people upfront and we didn’t alarm the spider, go back to the corridor to formulate a battle plan. Well the DM had sort of off-hand mentioned while we were making our way through the webbed caverns, that “as you poked the web with your torch it sort of fizzles like iron wool” or something to that effect. And we as the players remembered that and figured well shit, the web is flammable, let’s do a few volleys of flaming arrows to start the battle! We had three guys with ranged weapons, they managed to sneak into the cave of the massive spider and do three volleys of arrows with +flame damage, and then our paladin did a massive critical strike and the spider was dead. Zero damage taken by anyone and the boss battle for the session was done. Same group also had a person who charmed three separate bosses out of a battle. And we also derailed a basic bountyhunt: Originally supposed to be a “this is the name of the rebel leader who is bothering the town, bring them to the sheriff dead or alive”. I had the idea to talk our group into doing a revolt. The rebel leader had a claim to the lands, and I disliked the NPC running the town. So we got basically made a plan to overthrow the local human government, sowed the seeds of discontent by having our bard sing praises to the rebel leader from the severs so it could be heard everywhere as a sort of a background noise.
Once, our group met with someone in a tavern to get a job. The job was killing some wizard or so, but that didn’t matter, as we all got hammerd in the same tavern the evening before the kill. A fight with the bartender ensued, and thus our group accidentally discovered the HQ of the Mafia we were supposed to work for.
I kinda stopped planning things out and went heavy improv in most of my DMing because my players are a complete mess. One of my players in a shadowrun game infiltrated a hotel and posed as new employee. I had the hotel manager and some of the upper brass portrayed as somewhat shitty people, because I felt like it, but I genuinly had not caught on to this players biggest stick, all of his charackters have a major problem with authority. And while i am ok with that, combined with the top brass having authoriuty over him and being somewhat unlikeable, with a tendency of power abuse, led to him doing the following: Earlier his charackter went out to find a black market trader whom he could buy C4 from (major red flag, but I was still somewhat new to DMing in general and his behaviour in particular that I allowed that, stupid move I know). So he bought C4 “for when he might need it” and we went on. The crew wanted to get some intel from the hotel manager and also steal a macguffing (I don’t know what it was esactly anymore, it was important to the plot) and so they decided on who should infiltrate the place. So C4 Players Charackter gets picked, he goes in, he hates it from the beginning, everything goes smooth, the other Charackters manage to get the intel and the thing, they get out and then he decides “hey now I can use the C4” and starts to stuff a freaking bed with it. And gets out. And detotanes the exploves. In the middle of the day. Because his supervisor was mean to him. Needless to say, with a bodycount of 81, his charackter became instantly unplayable and while the players laughed and cheered, their charackters hated his guts from that point.
The best derailment my party have had was when we returned from a quest and one of our members tried to make a rousing speech but rolled a one and started a riot instead. But wait, there’s more. After the city guard came and broke it up, we all went to the tavern where the same guy got drunk and started a tavern brawl. I got stabbed in the stomach and was one saving throw away from death while the other three got arrested. The next session started with their trial. What was supposed to happen was we were supposed to get our reward, have a long rest, talk to a guy and then get sent on our next quest. We are still trying to rebuild the tavern
As a DM, I have a few tricks up my sleeve. At any time, I have no less than 5 fully built NPC backstories with names and families and the whole shebang that I can whip out and attach to any faceless NPC my players decide to randomly pull into the story. Second, no matter what I always have several combats planned that can be seamlessly inserted or removed from a dungeon/quest/scenario just incase the players manage to completely miss one or circumvent it by being clever. That isn’t to say I always put a combat in front of them but if they are hankering for a fight and accidentally avoid one because they don’t recognize it I can satiate them. Third, I always have a backup plan for if my players kill an NPC and I never put an NPC I can’t live without in front of them. More than once my players have correctly surmised the identity of the BBEG and started the boss fight several sessions early. And finally, I just got really good at improvisation. I’ll scatter plot hooks and evil NPCs everywhere like caltrops and whatever ones the players step on get used. It takes quite a bit more work tbh but you’d be surprised how easily a dank necromancer’s dungeon can be turned into a evil Witch’s tower of evil on the fly.
Yeah I understand about the players messing with your plans. I had created a situation where they would have to fight a Great Wyrm Red Dragon and they decided to have the bard do poetry and sings in order to seduce the dragon and the next thing I know the bard and the dragon are married completely derailing the entire campaign since the dragon was meant to be the main antagonist
I once had a group de-rail my game, pretty badly. Some context, they had completely ruined a circus by killing the man who charmed all the creatures in the circus (not even the bad part) and then, after spending some time in the town (the capital city) they went to the biggest academy. The ranger tried to sneak into the school which was on lockdown so his best plan, was to set an actual fore in the courtyard. After some shenanigans the ranger got caught and the party was taken into the protectorate (a clan in the city which is basically just upper class guards). The artifice caused a large fight to break out and eventually they killed an ENTIRE WORKFORCE OF ADVANCED GUARD PERSONNEL. Then they fled and escaped the city.
Most recent way I derailed my DM was outside a castle we were infiltrating. There was a group of about a dozen guards at the back entrance, and we were hidden in the tree line. Our wizard has the spell Sleep, and wanted to use it on the guards he could reach. I decided to help increase his odds by rigging a bell and piece of string in the bushes. The plan was: I ring the bell, get the guards to come closer, thus giving the wizard more targets to hit. It worked perfectly. All the guards converged on one point, and BAM, sleep spell goes off, and all fail their saves. DM was impressed, as he was expecting a fight that would take a few minutes, and it was over in a few seconds. Though he did get his revenge later, when our party got our asses kicked by a mirror.
I live for my players going wild and encourage them to get crazy with their solutions! Letting them follow their own leads has brought about some of my favorite moments in our games. In fact, my 2 players for my main campaign solved a murder mystery together wherein a sleazy hotel owner had kidnapped and held his rival’s daughter hostage, ultimately knocking her out and leaving her in a walk-in freezer to die. The guys followed all the clues and found her body literally frozen, but each guy has a laser sword, so they actually thawed her out. Then, my Paladin asked if her body was essentially preserved in that freezer, and I told him it was. He then wanted to blast his healing spell full force into her and dump every spare point of health he had to revive her. We rolled for it, and it was a massive success! I never planned on having her as an NPC in the story, but thanks to the players, we’ve got a whole brand new character to help flesh out the world.
This makes me think of the time I sent the party into a child’s dream that was candy-themed. At one point, one of the PCs used speak with animals on three swedish fish in a fudge lake. The fish spoke very broken, individual words to point them in the general direction of the dreamer. The guy ended up befriending them, and inadvertently ended up turning these fish into Gods within the astral plane that became his patrons. Later on, they also ended up making a babi cotton candy sheep they had to rescue into the king of the sheep. They even named the sheep: Vance. And the fish are named: Blub, Mub, and Tub. The fish became one entity known as a quori that wanders the astral plane named Blumutu.
I sold two fellow players to a giant queen in order to get out of her stronghold unmolested. I went back for them a little while later after a quick rest, turned them invisible and we all left together. They never quite trusted me completely again after that though. Also I once killed a man for his horse because the DM absolutely refused to sell me one despite the fact I was offering anyone in a village 20x it’s worth in gold. My feet were really sore. That character wound up with a bounty on it’s head and eventually took party money and left. We met them again as an NPC running an INN, and doing some really shady stuff on side. This eventually lead to us killing my former self due to my greedy halfling rogue mastermind having turned to the dark arts and becoming a cultist. I guess that DM never forgave me for stealing the horse. And lastly I was a gnome druid on watch while the party rested. I had been roleplaying my druid as a bit of a coward in combat who focused on self preservation. One of the party members doubted that I could handle myself if anything should happen and told me to just alert them as they would handle it. I took offense to that. We were attacked at dawn by a large group of bandits who had been tracking us through the night. I used spikey growth to create a large spikey “runway”, then I drank a haste poiton and transformed into a giant eagle. I proceeded to grapple two bandits by their heads, one in each claw, and dive bombed the spikey growth dragging them through the thorns shredding them in the process and then flinging the corpses into a tree where their entrails where strewn through the branches.
I feel for you mate. As an assignment for uni, I made my own version of d&d, and had some mates from the class to test it out as the players. They were on a quest to kill a robot cowboy who was hiding in a pyramid, being used as an oil rig. I had an NPC guide them there, who was an anthro pig, and they decided to trip him down the stairs, break his neck, then eat him. They didn’t even get to the boss battle, they blew up the pyramid.
In my last group, my GM decided to have one session be horror themed. We were asked to get an object out of a haunted house. One of the things we were told was to start running if we heard rattling chains in the forest. Our dwarf Grimnoir kinda derailed the entire thing by himself. He marched right into the house, ignored everything in it, and grabbed the macguffin before the rest of us could really react. On the way back to town, we heard the chains. Everyone except Grimnoir starting running. Turns out the chains were from a ghoul that then attacked Grimnoir. It took about 6 rounds of combat for the rest of the party to notice Grimnoir wasn’t with us and run back to save him. Thing was, Grimnoir was our tank and he was VERY good at it. The poor ghoul couldn’t beat his AC to get the chains wrapped around him! So Grimnoir just stood there whacking the ghoul with his axe each turn. Thing was half dead by the time we got there. It was so hilarious.
I was a first time player to DnD. The campaign I played the DM was super nice. But, when I mistaken a word as a secret code name, I spent two hours trying to “decode” it. Only to be told after making an intelligence check that two letters had to been switched around. Each players started laughing, but when I looked at the DM, he looked like he was screaming internally.😂😂
“…no fun or flavor in the instructions…” Preach! Once, my characters left a necroticly charged pile of bones so I used a backstory hook to hint the players to get rid of it. Twice! Yet, because the first was a riddle and the second was a feeling of dread, they absolutely ignored it. So I gave them a wendigo as punishment. They ran away. So we’ve spent the last three sessions and counting fighting an ever-growing undead threat. That’s about twelve hours! Truly, “…brevity is the soul of wit…”
Very recently, I had intended for my players to engage in an intense roleplaying challenge. Essentially, the first mate of the airship they’d chartered got fed up with the captain’s recklessness and decided to stage a mutiny. I’d planned to have the characters make their case to the crew members who sided with the first mate and convince them to stand by their captain a little longer. What does my buddy’s ranger do? He grabs the first mate, stuffs him into a barrel head first, seals him in, then paints the words “MUTINOUS BASTARD” on the side of it. At least we all got a laugh out of it.
I’ve recently started dming, my players are concerned for my sanity. I made their first encounter a trip into the desert to save a party of bards from a convention of kobolds in fur suits. They quickly coated them in grease and set them on fire. Point of the story. If you want them to fight a lot of things make sure they can’t kill them all in two rounds.
My DM once threw a nearly impossible encounter that the party was supposed to run away from. There was several (upwards of 20) wisps and a major boss. Wisps didn’t have a lot of health, but they were plenty and overwhelming… Until our Cleric casted Spirit Guardians. The rest of the party (Rogue/Warlock, Fighter, Moon Druid, and a Hunter Ranger) focused on the boss. Now we have an ongoing meme where someone will randomly say “I cast Spirit Guardians!”
So the campaign I am doing atm is my first campaign ever and it’s been going on for a year now. I had heard so much about mimics that I was paranoid about everything that looked innocent. We were in a dungeon and it was a quiet corridor with multiple rooms and a rug. I was so convinced the rug was a mimic and spent 45 minutes rolling as many dice as I could to get my DM to admit it was a mimic, he eventually had to say ‘Morgan, seriously. IT IS A RUG!’ Later on in the campaign, I go to put something in a chest and finally come across my first mimic, being grappled to the floor as my DM is like ”So where is the 45 minutes of dice rolling?’
I’m still a very new DM and my players have pulled me through most of these lol. 1- Fixated on a minor detail: They spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to weaponize roast beef sandwiches because I mentioned they were the lunch special in the tavern they’re staying at off handedly. 3- Going rogue with NPCs: They stole a bandit’s mechanical legs, refuse to call their main quest giver by his actual names, and in our first ever campaign, kidnapped a goblin and kept him around as a mascot. 5- Boss avoidance: They managed to convince a green dragon the cultists they were going to fight was actually plotting against the dragon and got it do kill them instead. Also, they managed to deceive their way through half a dungeon, because Goblins make shit insight checks. 6- Surprisingly powerful spells: Had a player learn and abuse the hell out of the spell Catapult. Many things were flung into enemies for a surprising amount of force damage.
This could just as easily be titled “How DMs get players to destroy the DM’s plans.” I recall a time, as a player, that a DM was frustrated by his failed attempts to get us to leave a town. The reason we didn’t leave was because the DM kept giving us reasons to want to stay in and around this town due to an imminent threat of goblin invasion…
My recent session was with a twitch streamer. Usually the steamer is the DM and people of the community are the players, along with people from chat who can affect what’s going on with donations. Stuff like this player gets a heal, or this one gets a nat 20/0, and some of the higher tiers for a roll on wild magic chart. But nothing unfair like insta kill or stuff like that. This last session the steamer was a player and we had another member of the community as DM. I was a tempest cleric. I was also a person who turned a picture I made into a meme where the streamer was a penguin. Well first wild surge right off the bat was luckily enough a 1 min. polymorph, so the donor said penguin. Well that got whole chat riled up and laughing, us players were laughing, the DM loved it. Another donor choice was extra mobs. Well the donor asked for a horde of penguins to attack in middle of very first battle but they didnt attack the streamer because he saw them as cute cuddly thing that explode into candy, everyone else saw demon penguins that explode when you kill them. It went down hill from there where penguins became a main part of several characters story, the streamer is sees talking to a penguin as normal while rest of us see him talking to a wall, another is haunted by the penguin king that is constantly at edge of his vision and taunts him. All this happened in the tutorial/prelude of going to ravenloft. Lol so this picture went from meme to integral part of the story and ur DM is working on how how to proceed now that it became a major story point.
How I single-handedly derailed more than 1/2 the DM’s early-game plot threads in our first session: Last D&D campaign I was in was based on the anime/manga DanMachi (AKA Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon). One of the things about DanMachi is there’s a level system with 10 levels for members of a Familia (a group of adventurers working under the banner of one of the Gods, who walk around on earth and are forbidden from using their godly powers on earth). So that was pretty easy to work into the game using Mythic levels (so any time I mention lvls in this, I’m talking mythic levels, not normal levels). Our group were going to be new adventurers who had been invited to join a smaller familia. Most of the party was from out of town, one was switching from a different familia to join the one we were joining, and me… My character had worked in the city for years as a messenger/currier, and as a result I had quite a bit of knowledge (local) (on top of the points I put into it, the DM gave me 2 extra points in it from my backstory). We started or first session separately, but all walking through the city to the base of the familia we were joining. When we got to the building, we find it completely wrecked (obvious dmg from a lvl 10 mythic spell to basically call down a meteor), with a number of people attacking and killing the few survivors (they were all lvl 1 scrubs who had used up their magic weapons/items already, but we didn’t know that at the time). We were all lvl 1, and some of us didn’t even have any weapons yet.
Our major derail was when through some horrible acting and what I thought were lies at the time versus an idiot we managed to convince the dungeon boss that we worked for the same BBEG. After doing some research and teasing some information out of the guy, we discovered that we actually WERE working for the BBEG indirectly. Now, instead of walking into the reveal completely blind like our DM planned, we started prepping for the apocalypse.
I’m a new DM so I haven’t had many derails just yet. But I have had a ‘I did not expect that’ moment. I was describing an old kitchen in an abandoned mansion. I talked about a crate of decaying meat to really sell how long the mansion has been abandoned. One of my players said “Can I eat some?” And I, very tired and expecting chaos, said sure, roll constitution. Nat 1. And that’s the story of how I almost killed a character in my very first campaign.
I’ve been on both sides of this. In a Werewolf: The Apocalypse session I was running many years ago, the PCs entered a dingy alley and I made the mistake of mentioning, for flavor, a rat scurrying away. They insisted on following and then trying to talk to the rat. With Spirit Speech. (For non-W:TA players, that only works on spirits…not normal animals.) In my little sister’s D&D campaign we’ve developed a habit of adopting enemy NPCs. In a bout of conscience my paladin convinced the party to rescue (/abduct) a gaoler we’d just been fighting from a sort of supernatural genocide wiping out the town and he turned into a recurring ally we go to for info. Instead of fighting the succubus second-in-command of a cult, we very nearly had a, um, “party” at her pad and convinced her to betray the leader. We gave a worg an existential crisis and convinced him, too, to turn on his pack and goblin riders, and is also a recurring ally. Combat is great but as the books will tell you, they’re not the only way to win an encounter!
I remember a homebrew I ran in the heyday of Harry potter that took place in Durmstrang. My players had to go to a cemetery labyrinth and their characters first boss encounter was with a grave imp that was skill\\lvl appropriate. My wife’s characters first reaction upon seeing the hairless, winged, scorpion tailed beastie was “OMG IT’S ADORABLE!!!” At which point she made a nat 20 charm roll… His name became Fester and there was many an encounter that the party would have wiped without his assistance. Soooo best advice I can give in a situation like that is just roll with the punches and think of interesting backstory or plot mechanics to apply to unexpected party members like demonic sensing or minor prophecy. Then there was the insane dwarf with a half eaten God fish… But that’s a story for another time.
Best way the players ruined my plans: I was running a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game. Players were out on their trial of passage. Come back to the Cairn to find it under attack by dudes in helicopters who were immune to the usual “hey I’m a human seeing a 9 foot tall furry death beast, guess I’ll go temporarily insane!” thing. Guys were coming down ropes in to the cairn. Helicopter threw down ropes close to the party. Party shifted to Crinos (that’s the 9 foot tall death beasty form) and grabbed the ropes, then *pulled*. I did a bit of math… yeah, no way a helicopter can deal with that weight. They killed my neat set-piece battle, saved the carin (it was supposed to have been utterly destroyed), and completely derailed the first half of my planned campaign.
I’ve had an experience with over specific instructions. Well, less over specific more it was just an idea that was dumb and should not have happened. I wasn’t running the game but I still think this applies. The party I was in used a lot of uncommon races. We had two dragonborn (My brother and a friend of mine), a tiefling (me), a dark elf (my sister), and a wood elf (my best friend). For some reason my brother and I insisted on there being a racist shop keeper. So our dungeon master responded by making the potion salesman a racist high elf. My sister went up to his shop to by potions and was told that there weren’t any healing potions left. She asked if she could be let into the back to see the potions and she was denied. Then she lied and said that she had seen him let someone else back there. He hadn’t let anyone back there but she rolled a nat 20 on deception so he believed it. He said that the person he let back there was a close friend. My sister left the shop. Then my brother went in and was allowed into the back and allowed to buy all of the healing potions. We are currently planning the murder of that shop keeper.
Uh, wickey wild wild Wicky wicky wild Wickey wild, wicky wicky wild wild wild west, Jim West, desperado, rough rider No you don’t want nada None of this, six gun in this, brotha runnin’ this, Buffalo soldier, look it’s like I told ya Any damsel that’s in distress Be out of that dress when she meet Jim West Rough neck so go check the law and abide Watch your step, we’ll flex and get a hole in your side Swallow your pride, don’t let your lip react, You don’t wanna see my hand where my hip be at, With all of this, from the start of this, Runnin’ the game, James West tamin’ the west so remember the name Now who ya gonna call? Not the G.B.’s Now who you gon’ call? J double A G If you have a riff with, people wanna bust, break out! Before you get bum-rushed at the (Wild Wild West) When I roll into the (Wild Wild West) When I stroll into the (Wild Wild West) When I bounce into the (Wild Wild West) Sisqo, Sisqo We going straight to the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West Now, now, now, now once upon a time in the west Mad man lost his damn mind in the west Loveless, kidnap a dime, nothin’ less Now I must put his behind to the test (Can you feel me?) Then through the shadows, in the saddle, ready for battle Bring all your boys in, here come the poison Behind my back, all the riffin’ ya did, Front and center, now where ya lip at kid? Who dat is? A mean brotha, bad for your health Lookin’ damn good though, if I could say it myself Told me Loveless is a mad man, but I don’t fear that Got mad weapons too, ain’t tryin’ to hear that Tryin’ to bring down me, the champion When y’all clowns gon’ see that it can’t be done Understand me son, I’m the slickest they is, I’m the quickest as they is, did I say I’m the slickest they is So if you barking up the wrong tree we comin’, don’t be startin’ nothin’ Me and my partner gonna test your chest, Loveless Can’t stand the heat then get out the Wild Wild West We going straight to (when I roll into the) the Wild Wild West (When I stroll into the) We going straight to (when I bounce into the) the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West Yeah, can you feel it, c’mon c’mon, yeah Keep it movin’, keep it movin’ ooh yeah To any outlaw tryin’ to draw, thinkin’ you’re bad, Any draw on West best with a pen and a pad, Don’t even think about it, six gun, weighin’ a ton, 10 paces and turn, just for fun, son, Up till sundown, rolling around, See where the bad guys ought to be found and make ’em lay down, The defenders of the west, Crushin’ on pretenders in the west, Don’t mess with us ’cause we’re in the (Wild Wild West) Going straight to the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West We going straight to the Wild Wild West, c’mon Woo, uh (The Wild, Wild West) Ha ha ha ha (The Wild, Wild West) Uh Dru, Dru (The Wild, Wild West) I done done it again y’all done done it again (The Wild, Wild West) Ha ha ha ha (The Wild, Wild West) Big Will, Dru Hill, uh (The Wild, Wild West) Big Will, Dru Hill ha ha ha ha (The Wild, Wild West) The Wild Wild West (The Wild, Wild West) Uh (The Wild, Wild West) One time (The Wild, Wild West) Uh, (The Wild, Wild West) The wild wild west bring in the heat, bring in the Heat, what?
It is the DM’s job to be flexible. What makes D&D great is that the players are not limited, by what a developer thought they might do.The players make their own decisions, and have to find their own solutions to problems.If you are going to stop them from doing anything you weren’t expecting, you are a railroader. It sounds like this guy knew what he was doing, and was able to roll with his player.
To mention the big daddy of DnD streaming and derailing and denying the DM an epic encounter, Critical Role did it amazingly with Control Water and possible ship to ship naval battle. Matt Mercer had gotten all these special rules and everything for ship combat, movement speed for the ships, attack ranges for cannons, the whole shebang.Taliesin Jaffe, playing a cleric, uses Control Water to create a small tidal wave and basically turned what could/should have been a solid 45 mins of naval combat in to a 30 sec of “oh hey, there’s another ship over there. it looks like they have cannons aimed at us” “control water” snaps fingers
Per example 5, avoiding boss battles: I have a sort of leonine Tabaxi variant barbarian (name of Gerald “Dandy Lion” Von Spatz) in my friend’s Steampunk campaign. He is a Earthshaker Barbarian off of dndbeyond -which, to be fair is a somewhat overpowered subclass to begin with – but nevertheless, this battle was supposed to be grueling. However, the party had taken quite a bit of damage from a series of small battles that had lead up to the BBEG of this encounter, and as such Dandy was having none of it. They were on a speeding train, and the BBEG was facing off with a couple other players between two of the cars (i.e. in the open). Dandy had been on top of one of the cars for a few minutes, doing one of the smaller battles, and when he heard the commotion happening between the cars he simply jumped down, caught the BBEG off guard entirely, and yeeted him off of the train in one swift motion (with a really high grapple check from me, aided by some of the Earthshaker traits and a fit of Barbarian Rage). Unfortunately for Dandy, the BBEG managed to place some kind of pain sharing curse on him just as he was ‘leaving’ and so the poor lion took a healthy dose of damage upon the BBEG’s landing, but the battle has nevertheless been postponed until a (hopefully) more convenient time, some levels down the road XD
19:30 “If you want to mess them up, give them lots of little things to fight” Never has that rung more true than the time we nearly had a TPK in round one of combat because we were fighting a swarm of giant rats. Only thing that saved us was that the caster rolled best initiative and was able to flee far enough behind the frontline to watch them all go down, and then he could do a Shatter spell that just managed to roll high enough damage for the rats to die even if they succeeded on their saves(that said, there were still a few of them left after this, but the DM ruled that the rest fled in fear after seeing most of their clan splattered in front of them).
This reminds me of my first time playing D&D where my paladin dragonborn was supposed to interrogate this ghoul we captured and tied to a tree. The ghoul was supposed to be pured and released after the interrogation, but in the process infecting my DB with a zombie flu. I (as a player) was sipping on a drink as my DM was describing what was happening. She abruptly told me I had just been infected with this sickness we were looking to cure a city of and I spit my drink and started coughing. The DM used that opportunity as an attack to start spewing acid breath on the poor ghoul which promptly threw in motion my entire party of various lizards to beat it with lutes and staves to death (there were 3 bards and two druids) … We were supposed to make it tell where it hid a map to the next dungeon which held the cure… We spent a solid hour digging up graves to find it.
Last game I mastered, the two other players completely ignored the constant rumors of undead gathering at the south end of town instead they decided to visit the family crypt north of town… they all but refused to question the other occupants of the town, instead spent the time explaining their characters backstories. One being a tiefling rogue, who had a bad upbringing having a demonborn dad while the other a human fighter, who retired from the local constabulary, when his family was slaughtered by a roving band of thieves and cutthroats. Several hours went by this way, even though at every opportunity I tried to ‘railroad’ the party into hiring some merc’s to go down south and kick some zombie asses, and when they finally did see combat failed to search the bodies for loot and clues…. After three and a half hours I decided we were done! The whole plot of the story revolved around a were-bear wraith that was pissed off at the town, more to the point the were-bear blacksmith son of the wraith who tried to forget his tragic backstory… anyways it was disappointing and even the ‘railroading’ couldn’t contain this dumpster fire of a session.
I once derailed my DM pretty good in a session. We were traveling through a desert where a dragon was killed and when my character went to investigate its skeleton something in it triggered us having to fight husks and skeletons and all other creatures. Me, thinking I was being smart, used call lightning on the dragon skeleton thinking it would stop the skeletons from spawning. Our DM, who was hoping we’d realize this was a fight where our only option was to run, had to scramble to figure out what this was going to do. Some say that wraith still haunts that desert to this day.
I remember back when I was starting out as a DM, I had a bunch of Shadowrun 2E books, an older brother N and younger brother M as players, and kinda looked at social as that stuff you do before the guns come out and everyone starts dying. To make up for a lack of players, my brothers were both running two characters, and I had two DMPCs along as extra muscle for the team. The team consisted of: Gnome Shaman and Troll Physical Adept run by M Elf Mage and Orc Physical Adept run by me Human (or Elf) Street Samurai (cybered up special operative) and Elf Decker/Mage run by N. The team tended to get hired to do a lot of killing things, and never anything requiring subtlety. Kinda hard for a 7ft behemoth carrying an assault cannon that probably should be mounted on a vehicle to hide after all. Situation was that they’d been hired to off a mafia boss, and had turned up at the compound where he was located right at shift change. The Shaman had knocked himself out casting a Hellblast spell that blew up the guard dogs’ kennel with all the dogs inside. The Adepts had separated and started turning any guard they found into red smears as they ran around the outside of the house. The Samurai and my Mage had tried to secure the communications room/guard barracks before a request for back-up could be sent (which failed). So, stealth was gone. And N’s Mage quietly made her way around the top of the wall to look at a window into the boss’ study. N had her empty her Uzi clip, and cast Telekinesis to fling the bullets at the window.
I know how this feels for our DM, we were supposed to shut down a portal to another dimension, and in a deep pit were a lot of bodies. Something on those bodies were highly flammable, and one character just randomly chucked their smoke/cigar down into the hole, next thing we know the entire building has exploded and the portal is gone. Was supposed to last for a entire second DnD session that normally lasts 5 hours give or take.
My party avoided having to actually fight the boss wizard of my last campaign by throwing the halfling at him. The wizard had been walking around the party while invisible talking to them, trying to learn about them while his minions waited at the side of the room. The barbarian asked if she could figure out where he was while he was talking and rolled well enough for me to say yes. So, with the other player’s permission she picks up the halfling and throws her at the invisible wizard. She didn’t crit but rolled well enough that I counted it as a hit, the wizard was walking slowly. The halfling, a bard, then wins a grapple check against the wizard by a large enough margin that I consider the wizard too busy to cast spells. The rest of the party deals with the minions so fast that two turns later the wizard untangles himself from the bard only to get immediately put out of his misery by the whole party without getting a single spell off.
I am in no way an expert on D+D – I’m not even an amateur for that matter, as I don’t play the game – but I can foresee players just going against the Usual Lore, and do things that make sense to their character. For instance, Centaurs – they don’t like being used as mounts, save in extreme emergencies, from what I’ve read, and I’m assuming that applies also to being used as Beasts of Burden (as in being used as a pack/draft animal), but what if one decided that it didn’t mind being used as a mount/beast of burden, in exchange for a bigger cut of the loot – at the very least, the party could carry more supplies/loot, and maybe even have a cart to haul stuff around. Also, by having the centaur allow itself be used as a mount, the slowest party member would gain that mobility, and the centaur gains an extra set of eyes and ears, thus avoiding traps and ambushes more easily.
The first boss my group ever went up against was a Wizard Glasstaff, and we didn’t exactly “defeat” him in the traditional sense. We managed to sneak into his room without alerting him, cast Sleep on him before he woke up to make sure that he wouldn’t attack us, and then tied him to the bed, before slapping him awake for information. To ensure he would give us the information we wanted, following proper bedcare instructions, we flipped the bed a few times. We didn’t want to actually kill the guy for some reason (this happened ages ago, I can’t remember all the details), so we tied him up and stuffed him into a large chest that was in the room and carried him around for a while.
I’ve done that, where I accidentally cut out quite a bit of content. Like when my Arcane Archer had much much MUCH longer longbow range than the DM expected and sniped down the baddie we were supposed to capture from like 700 feet away. What was supposed to be an epic chase across the countryside, dodging ambushes and traps… was cut short by a warforged and his magical bow. Whoops.
Johnny, here are 7 ways you can really make your players’ skin crawl and make them nervous or be put in peril. 1. Temporarily shutting off the switch to their “go to” ability. When they get the easy button cut off from use, they start to panic. 2. NPC bosses/sub-bosses that are specifically designed to counter the party members. Example, Eggbert’s a paladin, immune to fear. An anti-paladin’s Aura of Fear completely negates that. 3. Put the characters in an environment that is completely unappealing to them. The problem is that with Prudence, she’ll probably be absolutely be right at home if the Oxventure group were sent into Apocrypha. 4. Appeal to their greed, but don’t follow through. This is a good tactic for both good and evil NPCs. Alphie’s description of the chalice was perfect for that, but the bad guys could easily use that same tactic. 5. Learn your players’ tactics and be prepared to counter them. Corazon has an unbridled confidence, sometimes a little too much, might lead to his downfall at some point, especially if he is challenged in a way that if he declined or needed assistance would bring him WAY down on that ladder. 6. Boss NPCs that always seem to escape and are forever recurring. What has website been up to recently anyway? 7. Seemingly unimpressive spells that are underrated but are being utilized in a way that will make them fear it. Scrying, for example, cast by a powerful sorceress, with a high casting modifier, while in possession of a piece from the target such as hair, nail clippings or a kidney, especially if that target has virtually no chance to resist it.
At the orphanage, I they would have said what they have at first, I would have made the orphanage collapse after the city is rebuild. After all, they did not specify that the orphanage should be sturdy! If they specify that, you could just make the completed building dangerous or cursed/haunted (beds that eat children or something like that). Alternatively, you could make a word limit for commands. If the command is limited to one sentence with 8 words, they will always leave at least one opening. It could be about outsmarting, where you let something open, so the “wish granter” takes the bait, while the players try to counteract that misdeed – or trick the wish granter entirely. That sounds much more interesting than just formulating a prefect order/wish.
The only way I’ve ever derailed a game that I knoe of is by outsmarting the DM and completing the quest that was supposed to be a whole multiple session long story arch in a single session. What happened is that the princess of my characters home kingdom had been (re)kidnapped and brought to a shitty kingdom of slavers and murder. So our group had to journey to the other kingdom and get her back. Along the way my character’s sister went off on her own to stake out the castle and the DM rolled a nat 1 for what happened so she also got kidnapped. When we finally got to the big “welcome home” ball that was being held at the palace (long story short the princess had fled the country as a kid an was raised elsewhere) two of our four players immeadiatly fucked off deciding that me and the warlock had things covered. Almost as immeadiatly we learned that the reason the princess had been kidnapped was to be offered to an ancient black dragon in exchange for not killing everyone. This obviously horrified me and the warlock especially because our two party members leaving to seduce not only another princess but also THE FUCKING EMPRESS made any plan much harder. What ended up happening was that the warlock and the black dragon (who knew eachother because edgy backstory reasons) argued while my wizard sat in the corner terrified. Luckily for us as the conversation went on a character from my backstory showed up. She was the third princess and was the problem child who they sent off to wizard school not realizing it would make her a protagonist.
My players once spent two hours real time trying to move a bookcase that was literally set to revolve, but was locked in place by magic. They thought there was a passage behind it. After an hour I broke DM and literally said there was nothing behind it, they kept trying regardless and to this day say that it was a good plan.
I would say, our greatest moment where we actually really pissed off our DM was when we all basically just arrived at a boss battle against a dragon and a dragon rider. Our bard ended up casting Unnatural Lust on the dragon and our DM rolled a nat 1. She wasn’t very happy with how quickly we destroyed that battle of hers because she apperantly planned on what will happen in this battle for an entire month and we barely started the fight. We love teasing her about it still.
One of my favorite things to throw at my players is something that does passive status effects and passive damage without an action. My players were more threatened by a single fire elemental in a small but open room than they were by a massive bonemass boss that they managed to neutralize with a grease spell and a doorway. I think in the first round of combat the fire elemental had set 4 of 6 players on fire simply by moving through their spaces. It then actually attacked the party warlock and put them in the red on health. In like 18 sessions, it was the first encounter the party chose to flee from.
I never understood why on earth Dm-s “make” quests. When we played fantasy games like this everyone I played with completly and 100% assumed without ever even mentioning it that you have to make up EVERYTHING on the fly. Literally everything. First. Where the whole thing starts? Well it directly comes from the player’s characters. So the starting area is always a place where you can imagine all the players be there for a reason so they hook up one another. If they really batshit bonkers, you just go the “you wake up in a dungeon” situation and thats it. Second. The actuall quest itself comes from theire initial interaction. If they feel like causing trouble, you just drop an even on theire head thats big enough for them to mess up. Like a random caravan of lots of stuff just arrived to do some big ass carnival. If they feel like getting to know each other more or found that they can help each other in some fashion, you just facilitate theire ideas by putting in more detail into theire area that they can harness to do these things. Like yeah there is a river near by you can see the clearing of some trees that suggest a river pass from a slightly rocky hill, such resources probably hold some settlers etc etc. And if they just sit there dumbly waiting for some epic adventure to happen by the DM, you just pick a completly random fantasy event you experienced and just tell them that. Usually I try to remember some of the quest chains from Baldur’s gate or Icewind Dale, or the many DnD books I read and just go with it as much as I can remember and fill up the gaps.
Johnny, that’s not how grappled works in 5e… Grappled characters only have their speed reduced to zero. They still have both hands free to attack and cast with. The grappling character only uses one hand to grapple with and they still have one free to attack. Even a character with the grappler feat can at best only restrain someone, which still lets them cast. To stop a caster with grappling you’d need to cast zone of silence and then hold them in there. You don’t need to play by every rule, but some like these ones can save you if your campaign is getting completely derailed.
The first campaign I ever ran, a 3.5e homebrew campaign The players were facing one of the big bosses, an evil blood mage drawing power from a pool of blood. One of the players dump a vial of poision and a bottle of orcish moonshine into the pool and on a lucky percentile roll ended the fight right there.
In my first campaign we adopted a living mushroom, had a player who was possessed and had two or three of the players wanting to eat the mushroom. (who’s name was Shroomy) this lead to an all out civil war amongst the group after the three teamed up to eat shroomy. The fighting caused me to kill one of the three which then caused the demon inside one of the other players to use hunger of hadar on us. Half of the group died after fighting and the possessed player died leaving the demon without a host which forced me to be possed because we needed the demon. For about an hour and a half it was absolute chaos. Edit: shroomy was poisonous
I became the reason my DM made all of his creatures resistant to Thunder, Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, and Acid damage while also maxing out their HP and doubling it. All because I abused a little spell called “Glyph of Warding” that I abused with my DM’s wording on how it worked. Sure the party nearly died in the process and the DM said “You can’t have fun and cast spells without components anymore because somebody ruined it for everyone else.” as a result. But I also planted landmines in a friend’s yard, forgot where I put them, and told her the mailman may explode in the morning but It’s only bad if he steps on one so I don’t think I’m the bad guy here.
Met many players that for some reason like to brake the game even when it is a good one. Most often, I learned decades ago to always have one or two alt plans for a scenario that really matters, and basically who to watch for and how to keep them on track better. Learning that the best story telling works with the players and knowing the group you play with. Often side adventures are even pre planned knowing how some play. I have been running a campaign now for three full years this Aug and we are no where done. So I story tell, havent barely got to play in ages but its fine with me, if they enjoy such a long story, Using a bit of Amber and Kingdoms of Dancing Gods game. As long as every one is having fun then we go with it in general.
Had a player tell the NPCs of town that he and his group were spies and were there to free the town of a band the NPCs actually thought are heroes, but are actually evil monsters… I actually gave him an opportunity to rethink his statement and the entire table were telling him to shut up, but he said, no, he wanted to say that…. I physically crushed the entire day’s planned mission, threw it across the room and had the day turn into a 2 hour chase out of town. Now this would have been slightly understandable if he wasn’t used to being a spy… but they had been a group of spies since the start of the campaign, 6 months earlier….
I had a amazing situation in vampire the masquerade where my character was backed into a corner with a guy who was about to shoot her with a double barrel shot gun and my stamina 1, 4 health character simply rolled a double crit to a 13 success roll to entrance him into just walking away. Everyone in the group thought I was going to die
We accidentally got involved with the mafia, and 1 of our players are basically forced into said mafia. As were tryin to gather info to make a trade off for said player, I accidentally completely ruined a dungeon by skipping through it all straight to the boss. But it made so much more funny rp as well as a bonding moment between my character and the boss. (She almost died <3)
In my current main campaign, I’ve had all of these happen: 1) In a dungeon, they came across an empty chest. After noting it was empty, they spent the next 20 minutes doing every possible check they could on it. Even animal handling. 2) After a grueling fight on a raft to get to some caves, they arrived and heard some alarms going off. They were supposed to go right and deal with the sailors looking their way. Instead they made a straight rush to the boss. 3) So many to choose from…they’re convinced that a Hunter they came across is a Vampire, so whenever they see him try to assault him with garlic. Said Hunter they also pushed to being governor of a town that had evacuated to a fortress after the Hunter’s lodge was destroyed, the town was attacked by a dragon, and the party had killed the mayor. I’ve also had to make a pretty respectable priest an asshole because the priest’s deity doesn’t care for undead and the party’s cleric is a necromancer. 4) The party is fond of making requests that I just didn’t go along with. Nothing too crazy as in the article. 5) The party has mostly been good at taking out the bosses. However…there’s one dungeon in their first campaign that they never actually did. It might have been one of the more challenging ones. But the idea was that they would negotiate with some Wererats who would agree to leave a mine if their former home was liberated from some Orcs and Ogres. Instead the party just killed most of the Wererats, and the remainder were sent off to a Gnome stronghold.
i played as a bard and while the dm was making a speech i said something (a joke, was drunk at the time.) it hit so hard that Matt (our dm) blew smoke out of his nose and started coughing/laughing really hard. Well after putting out his cigg and catching his breath, our party pestered him into translating his real world laugh/choke into the game world… Upon which our rouge and wizard ambushed and killed the big baddie. TLDR: my drunk ass made our dm choke so hard on his cigg that the big bad guy in game died.
my fiancee wanted to try out mastering D&D, and she thought out a adventure for me alone. She did a good job, great idea, the story was well thought out. The ONLY thing she DIDNT do was checking what my class could do, especially, which spells i could cast. So, the adventure started, my paladin found himself in a detective Adventure, and i came to the part of finding a certain item. Out of pure luck i had Detect Item. And the item i should find was a one of its kind item…a wig of the mayor…soooooo, long story short, i cast the spell and found the item without taking the 1 hour questline she prepared for me (including finding clues and the culprit,) That was HER first lession to always be prepared when it comes to the players xD She improved on that since then. A lot xD
I really annoyed my last DM, who was a good friend of mine, when I kept predicting his plot twists. One such example was when he placed me and my party up against a demigod. At the time, I played a female Vrykolaka Executioner and in that particular bossfight, we were confronted by massive gargoyle with a cute little girl with pigtails on its shoulders, when the reality immediately dawned upon me: “Go for the child. She’s the boss!” And my friend then shouted, “Goddamn it, Julia!!!” He was very pissed about this one, since me and my female catfolk monk teammate easily took down the demigod. He gave up being our DM when I kept unravelling his plot devices in real time.