Worst Campaign Train Wreck

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Dec 17, 2008

Filed under: Tabletop Games 128 comments

No GM advice this week. The Big Project continues to bear down like an unbearably overbearing… bear. I don’t have time for the fancy writing and whatnot, which is why the previous sentence was so appallingly lame. Seriously, I don’t even have time to highlight it and hit “delete”, that’s how amazingly busy I am. So let’s have a topic for discussion instead:

This won’t apply to people who run or play freestyle off-the-cuff games, but for those who strive for some sort of specific plot:

Players

What is the worst derailment you’ve ever perpetrated? Usually player cleverness leads to more interesting situations, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it just wrecks an NPC / location / dungeon / conversation that promised to be fun. Maybe you killed the bad guy without even realizing it. Or you alienated a key ally. Or caused a cave-in of a dungeon before you even set foot inside. What is the one thing you did that put the GM off his script, and which you later regretted? (As opposed to all the other times you put him off his script, just because that’s half the fun.)

Game Masters

What is the worst railroading you’ve ever perpetrated? Maybe one time when you manipulated things so that they went according to some overarching scheme, and afterwords you realized your plans sucked compared to what the players had in mind, or you realized that things would have been more fun if you’d let the players have their way.

If you want to answer both, go for it. You can even do so in two different posts, if that helps. I know it sucks trying to write long comments in that little box.

 


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128 thoughts on “Worst Campaign Train Wreck

  1. Shamus says:

    I’ll go first, although mine’s not very interesting:

    In the first game I ran, I had the players caught up in a crazy cursed, lifeless land where everyone who entered fell into a dream state and saw things as they were hundreds of years ago, when the place was green and full of life.

    The players KNEW they were in a dreamworld because they had discovered the curse going in, but they weren’t sure how it worked or what the rules were. They tried a lot of actions to try and find out how it worked. They had a different idea of how it should work than I did, and since I wrote it, I stuck to my version. But there was no real reason to do so. If I’d reacted the way they had expected, then the world would have been more intuitive to them. They would have understood it better, and a lot of later confusion would have been avoided.

    Sometimes their way is best simply because that’s the way they understand it, and its easier to roll with their idea than to teach them yours.

  2. Skeeve the Impossible says:

    I remember in my first campaign I ever played in, the DM
    had this boring storyline about some curse on the land or some crap like that. (i wasn’t really paying attention) The land we were in was suffering from famine to the north. So we as the players took it upon ourselves to transport food from the south because the local govt. wasn’t going to. Long story short the GM hadn’t seen that one coming and had to stop the session right then and there. HE took the next week coming up with the rules to transport food to feed communities

  3. MintSkittle says:

    As a player, I don’t really have any derailment stories because either the GM was so hidebound that we couldn’t get off the rails if we wanted, or was flexible enough to adapt.

    As a GM, probably the worst railroading I did would have been my first game, where I used an adventure book. I didn’t do much planning for that one, because I had the book, and I thought that was all I needed to pull off a game. For those interested, the game was Shadowrun, the adventure book was Brainscan. We didn’t do more than a couple of sessions before it fell apart.

  4. Sarah says:

    It’s likely someone already informed you, but I thought I’d give a shout, anyway. In this week’s edition of The Escapist, the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section seems to be based on a forum post that is a direct quotation of one of your own posts.

    Have a look: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/letters/5583-Letters-to-the-Editor-Guilty-Pleasures

  5. patricles says:

    My group just started a 1950’s Cthulhu game and the group went to a new city with some vague information. In an effort to find out more information, 2 of the characters walked up to the back of a hotel, scrounging through the garbage. The GM had a cook come out back, and thinking they were homeless he offered them a plate of food, plus a job in the kitchen, which gave the players a chance to gather more information. The problem was both players rolled extremely high for their ability at the jobs, and were rewarded with an almost instantaneous pay increase. The money was good (even though we didn’t have much need for it at the moment) and they didn’t want to leave. Our joke now is “How do you split up a Cthulhu party? Offer them jobs.”

  6. EvilGod says:

    Our GM sent us on a voyage on a ship to someplace or the other. We encountered a ship with its crew all dead and a cargo hall full with treasures. He planed for us to grab the loot and for us to find out that it was cursed and haunted by the ghosts of the dead crew. But our group’s priest/cleric decided that we would have to give the ship and its crew a “proper” burial and torched it before we could argue or get some of the cursed treasures. The GM had to end the adventure because he couldn’t even argue that the player’s actions were out of charakter.

  7. Sven says:

    I had a player sort of deflate my plans in a D&D game I was running. They were working against the Church of Bane (Forgotten Realms 3rd Ed.) and I had been building up the reputation of the high priest all adventure long. There were rumors about his atrocities, underlings that were more afraid of him than of death, and assorted other details I’d thrown in that had my players genuinely afraid of this guy.

    He took them by surprise by coming out of a door in an temple the players thought was abandoned and crushing the Ranger with his mace for a ton of damage on a critical hit. The players were scared, the mood was excited, everything was perfect for a great encounter.

    Then the Shadow Mage won initiative and cast Phantasmal Killer using Shadow Evocation. In order for this to work, he first had to overcome spell resistance, which wasn’t too high so he passed that. Then the high priest got THREE saving throws, two Will and one Fort, to completely ignore the effects of the spell. His saves in both of those categories were very good, he needed only low single-digit numbers on each, and he proceeded to fail them all.

    The high priest dropped dead.

    As it turns out it wasn’t so bad, because that is a story we still tell around the game table.

  8. Ken says:

    My one experience gaming at a convention was involved a session of, as I recall, the space-opera expansion for GURPS. I was assigned a sort of Indiana-Jones-in-space type character. The mission was to explore a deserted temple on a moon or something and determine what bad things had been happening there and why.

    The Big Baddie was some sort of space vampire. For no particularly good reason, I concluded with absolute certainty that the big secret/plot twist was that the space vampire was actually some sort of good-aligned benign spirit that had been badly misunderstood, and that we were supposed to figure this out and befriend him and clear up all the problems resulting from cultural clash between him and new settlers, etc.

    Of course, that theory was complete ass. It was a space vampire. There was no plot twist. But when my character — the best combat character in the group — basically surrendered to the space vampire, telling it how sorry we were for the misunderstandings, it threw the group into an off-the-rails turmoil that culminated in the entire party being slaughtered.

  9. Probably the worst derail I’ve ever managed was in a shadowrun game with a novice GM when I almost managed to be paranoid enough to not get gassed by the Johnson’s tricks (who of course we were scripted to get captured by).

    Luckily I fluffed a few rolls at the end of my daring escape attempt and got tasered down, but if I’d made that last test we’d have had a party split problem.

    Railroading-wise, I’ve had to run several campaigns out of books, and sometimes the investigation-style things rely on the PCs figuring out one or two things. If they miss them, you sometimes have to basically tell them so that they get back on track.

  10. Illiterate says:

    Worst derailment?

    It wasn’t with ingame actions.. The GM described how we were surrounded by ghouls..

    And I started a round of awful Ghoul puns involving songs.. “Shalalalaala my brown eyed ghoulll…..” “Ghouls just wanna have fun!!!”

    I felt bad for the GM. It was a lowdown dirty thing for me to do.

  11. Nevermind says:

    We had this one game where the GM just didn’t have what it takes to run a campaign, so we (the characters, I mean) just went to a big town and started a business there selling alchemy potions. As opposed to defending our home village from goblins and then avenging its destruction…

    Ah, you mean “not fun” derailings? Well, in one game the PCs were supposed to be some people who accidentally meet behind enemy lines (in a war setting) – like, a soldier who’d been cut off from his regiment, a spy, a lost camp follower, a marauder. And we were supposed to somehow form a party so that we could survive together. But the characters were far too different for that to work. We met, we quarreled a bit and we parted. The game pretty much ended at that moment.

  12. I once played in a campaign – probably the worst one I’ve had the misfortune to experience – run by a guy who has, thankfully, been removed from our social circle.

    The setting is thus: An island, the size of England. It’s beaches are made of gold-dust, exactly half of the land is Limestone, and the other half is Obsidian. There is only one city on the island, owned by the Elves. They prey on small tribes of “Supreme Builders” Humans (despite having the design skills of a herring, and living in mud-huts). But it was ok, because Raven (his GMNPC) was a god-like psion who could make it all better.

    We tried to have fun with the setting, come up with our own ideas, but whenever someone came up with something that didn’t *exactly* fit the GM’s story, thier character had an epileptic fit – I am not kidding!

    There were about a million different ways our creativity was restricted. It ended with us storming the Elf Palace, arriving just in time to deal with the Elven Lord’s bodyguards (while Raven battled with the Lord, of course), and then got to witness the Big Bad get beaten by a different NPC (It was said that “He defeated him single-handedly, barring a few small distractions”. These “small distractions” were our 2′ arrows sticking out of him, and our 5′ Thief clubbing the b*gger over the head.)

    I’m pretty sure this constitutes as very, very bad railroading.

  13. locusts says:

    I dislike D&D for the railroading DMs I encountered early on. I jumped the rails in two games and never went back.

    In the first I asked about the party so that I could build a character that would be balanced. When I got no feedback of any sort I came up with a fighter that had a grudge against mages. I show up to the first game to find the rest of the party were mages of one ilk or another. The first encounter was an illusionary door that they all pass checks for and proceed through. My character fails his save and can not find the door, nor can he charge the section of wall the rest of the party walked through. So I sat through most of the first session rolling a save throw versus illusion to see if I could find the door, while the rest of the party went on to the adventure. Finally, getting bored with the “stupid mages” I swiped the horses, rode back into town, and sold them all at auction. Then I used the money to hire goblins to wait for them outside the entrance. The DM, a friend of mine, was so shocked that I would hose the party like that he did not retcon that part out, even after I left the game.

    The other was a long character gen to make a very interesting highwayman. Classic Hollywood style, “Stand and deliver” character to the hilt. First adventure the party gets “beamed” to a sci-fi setting where our skills “some how translate” to the sci-fi setting. Then we find out that the DM is running the plot of Aliens. The mood was slow and the combat hackers in the party were loving it. The guy that convinced me to play and I hated the adventure. So between the first and second session we hatched a plot. First encounter with the aliens in the second session, our characters stand behind the fighters as they rush the aliens. Our characters shoot the fighters in the back, hit their knees, and open their mouths as willing hosts. The DM was so pissed that he grabbed the character sheets and as he ripped them up in front of us said, “This is a graphic display of what the aliens are doing to the party. I hope you jerks are happy.” The thing was, I was just glad to be done with the adventure.

  14. Jimmy says:

    Since this is my first time commenting on this blog. I just want to say that I enjoy reading your blog very much. I found it through a link to DMotR and have been surfing the archives. I very much enjoyed reading about your D&D campaign.

    With that out of the way, my story involves a campaign where I was DM. Overall the campaign was a success. I managed to take the players from level one to level nine, which makes it the longest running game I’ve been involved in as player or DM. That being said I did have some bad railroad tendencies.

    One time in particular I had the players travel to the heart of a lost city to destroy an evil artifact they found on their travels not the most original plot, I know). I had decided that the city was enchanted such that many of the buildings in the city were actually illusory. The city was located in a desert was enchanted such that every few minutes a wind would pick up and a cloud of sand would blow through the city. While the player’s vision was obscured the locations of the illusory buildings would shift so the players would get trapped in a constantly shifting maze.

    How they were supposed to solve it was by using detect magic to determine which buildings were real and which weren’t. Attacking an illusory building would cause it to disappear and the players could walk through. If they attacked a random building it had a one in three chance of being an illusion. The players attacked a random building and it turned out to be solid, so they figured the buildings were probably all solid. They decided to put a stake in the ground and tie a rope to it to keep track of their position and make sure that they were heading in the right direction. I forget the details, but the plan would have worked, it just would have been a little slower.

    If I had let them solve the maze their way it would have been more fun and more challenging for the players as they faced more random encounters. Unfortunately, my railroading instincts kicked in and I tried to steer them toward the “correct” solution. I changed the maze so that it shifted the player’s locations as well when the winds blew through. The rope and stake came with them so they didn’t lose them, they were just no longer useful in gauging the player’s progress through the maze.

    Eventually, the players became suspicous and the party paladin used his pegasus (this was a 3.5 game) to survey the situation from the air and see how the party was progressing. He discovered that the party’s location was shifting when the winds came through.

    As my players would later point out, the trick of having the player’s location in the city shift ruined my intended solution as well. In the end the party decided that it was better to just fly into the center of the city. I had warned them that flying straight there would be risky and might not even work, but they saw no other way to solve the maze.

    I gave up trying to railroad them and decided to let them fly straight to the heart of the city. When they landed they got stuck in a web hiddin by an illusion and ambushed by a giant fiendish spider. It was a fun encounter, but not too difficult. They killed the spider, destroyed the artifact and went home.

  15. Jay McKinlay says:

    @Sven – Phantasmal Killer is a sure climax killer. We were in a high magic campaign and my Pixie Warmage hit the enemy Deuregar Cleric with it. Despite the SR roll being lower because of the LA adjustment, and the Cleric having high Fort and Will saves, he failed, and died . . . whoops!

    The worst railroad derailment was not *entirely* my fault. The DM’s pet FR campaign had my Kobold Rogue with two forces battling for his soul. My relative inexperience with FR meant that I had no idea what was going on. Bane was apparently shielding me from a demonic posession (I think), but I was under the impression that no matter what, I was a killer. So, when the Curse Life Stealing Dagger of Evil appeared, I took it and started killing. . .the Druid abandoned the party for RP reasons. . .and the campaign ended. I don’t think I was supposed to do that.

    Jay

    PS – yes, I do have a thing for non-standard races.

  16. Nilus says:

    Our GM had planned an epic battle with a Mind Flayer in a sewer. At our current level it should have been a tough fight(I believe it had class levels and such). What he didn’t expect was that our Wizard had just got polymorph other. First round of combat, on botched saving throw and instead of a big bad mind flayer we were fighting a big bad kobold. Sure he had all his HP and technically some of his psychic powers but he couldn’t eat our brains anymore.

  17. krellen says:

    I can’t tell any stories, because I’m hardly ever a player and I don’t railroad. I could tell a story about players ruining my game as a GM, but that’s not in the parameters. :D

  18. Roxysteve says:

    How about we flip it? How about I tell you of games effectively trashed by unnecessarily idiotic play by my players?

    I once ran a game of Villains and Vigillantes in which the single clue the team needed to identify and thwart the menace du jour was in a locked filing cabinet draw. Two minutes into the game Player X says “I grab the drawer handle and use my powers to heat the cabinet to red heat”. No earthly reason to do that. Player Y could have easily pulled the cabinet apart with his super strength powers. Two minutes in and it was Game Over due to incinerated paper clues.

    A couple of months ago, during a Call of Cthulhu game, Player Z went off-script and decided to play the “Action Adventure” phase of the scenario before the “Information Gathering” part (Call of Cthulhu scenarios have a long-recognised overall schema that it behooves players to adhere to). In doing so he alienated an entire village of otherwise helpful NPC people who held the key to his solving the mystery and figuring out how to beat the mosnters without getting substantially hurt. No earthly reason to do what he did. He called it “role playing” but if a real person had behaved so spontaneously erratically they would have been in jail pending transport to a lunatic asylum in a heartbeat. I played it through, but it became D&D in the 1920s instead of the thing it had been carefully put together to be, something that never ends well in Call of Cthulhu.

    I venture to suggest that in both these cases the enjoyment factor was reduced to a logarithm of that available to the players at game start by stupid and irrational play. In the V&V episode, the player was good enough to admit he’d been a tad dimwitted and appologised to the others, but the CofC player honestly believes to this day that he played “well”, despite his “team” not having succeded in even one facet of the challenge presented to them by the scenario.

  19. Dys says:

    I used to DM for a few friends, games were usually informal and rarely lasted long, but they were fun for a while.

    I remember one time I set up a small maze in which there were hidden teleports linked in pairs, with some random rules for if and how they worked. It should have been fiendishly difficult to figure out how to get to the exit.

    The guy playing came up with his own idea of how the place worked and by some fluke chose a route through my shifting labyrinth which took him from start to finish without a single error. I still have no idea how that happened.

  20. Ozzie says:

    So we’re playing Eberron. I’m a Gnome Paladin of the Sovereign Host. Veeery low wisdom.

    We are hired by a member of one house to escort a caravan to a town. Our escort is supplemented by a bunch of Minotaurs, some of whom detect as evil. This being Eberron, though, I say OK.

    Then we’re stopped by a rival house. One who controlled shipping. Seems not everything was in order, legally. After looking at her papers, what she said legit. Between the law and the evil Minotaurs, I switched sides. My party members didn’t.

    My side lost, but the battle was bad enough that the party was unable to deal with some Bodaks later on.

    We started over the next week with new characters, and things went quite well after that.

    1. WJS says:

      A paladin with low wisdom just sounds weird to me. I know they’re not as focussed as clerics, but isn’t that still their primary ability score?

  21. Mike says:

    The worst one I was a player for was when we were supposed to be infiltrating a city, we found an alternate route through some caves – the DM, however, wanted us to get caught and imprisoned, so when we escaped after getting the information we were after, actually RETCONNED the escape, saying that one of the characters did something that was impossible so we had to replay it – with guards OF COURSE entering the caves now to find us. *sigh*

    The worst one I perpetrated was in Greyhawk. The party wanted to go to the last of Ash, but I had nothing ready, so I put a forcefield over it. ALL of it.

    Unfair, but at least it wasted some time while they beat on it and tried to research it. :)

    As for players wrecking a game – we had one player that was infamous for screwing things up. To the point where anytime his character received a clue of any sort, everyone else made sure to harass him until he shared it.

    He ALWAYS kept all clues to himself, wanting to be the hero by figuring it out, I guess. We missed several missions and treasures because he never shared info.

  22. Robert says:

    Locusts, you sound like the kind of player that all DMs dread to have. Expecting you not to be a dick is not “railroading”.

  23. Scott says:

    As a player playing Alternity with a first time GM we were double crossed by a “supposed” ally. He stole some valuable cargo we were carrying, and left us with a bomb about to go off. The GM forgot we had a teleporter onboard our ship, and the next thing he knew we sent the bomb back. He lost his flagship and the main villain should have been killed. He scrambled for several minutes to come up with a plausible reason why the guy survived the blast and we continued on with a greatly shortened adventure.

  24. Christopher says:

    In my first DM experience ever, I had a whole plot line worked out in the seedy underbelly of Waterdeep. It involved a well-intentioned rogue, his father, and the Thieves Guild. It was a great story arc. The only problem was, the rogue was my PC in a game I was running. So the other players were basically watching me tell a story about my character. When they decided to do something entirely off the rails, I got angry and basically ended the game. It wasn’t until much later that I realized my mistake. Now, there are no more DMPC’s and I write my games for my player’s characters, not for my NPC’s.

  25. Casper says:

    To Robert & Locusts:
    The mages should take some blame as well. Couldn’t they have led him trough the door or something? Even if there is no friendly feelings, the fighter is still their “meatshield”. You need one in a dungeon.
    To Scott: The villain could have had a anti-teleportation field there. Otherwise everyone would be using teleporters as weapons. Unless the teleporter was an ancient alien artifact of course.

    As for railroading, I only decide what the villain is planing and where the PCs first encounter the evil plot. After that I improvise a lot- players are too unpredictable anyway. I do usually adjust things so than PCs would be challenged but had a good chance to win.

  26. Matt K says:

    The closest I ever came to screwing with an adventure was a D&D adventure where we were in town and supposed to help the rulers with something (so sue me it was a long time ago). At the time I was flipping through the Monster Manual and came across the JuJu zombie entry. I thought the name was hilarious (I was thinking of Jujubes candies) so when it came time to mention what our pay was I suggested a hefty Juju Zombie clause (some ridiculous amount of money). The problem, which became apparent later, was the we were in fact going to encounter Juju zombies (it was a pre-planed scenario by the DM). The ruler eventually talked my PC out of it by essentially dropping the treasure amount if we didn’t encounter them. It was pretty funny during the adventure when it turned out my odd instincts were right though.

  27. Eric says:

    In one 7th Sea game I played, 5 of the 8 players were related (note: not characters, players). They were two brothers and three of their adult children. We were the top crew of a pirate ship and we encounterd a mysterious, abandoned ship out in the middle of nowhere.

    The mystery was completely killed when all 5 recognized the mystery ship as the Marie Celeste, which was connected to their family history in some way. This totally derailed the GM’s plotline, and remains a group in-joke….

  28. Martin! says:

    This just happened in a game we were playing. We were becoming the heroes of a town. The church even built a statue of one of our fallen comrades. And then, we went on a little, easy, side quest.

    Long story short, as a result of our actions, a NPC killed himself. My (bad, but in character) idea was for him to pay for the information as who was bankrupting him. He could not pay for it because our thief stole all his money. (My character didn’t know that… But I did)

    We were accused of pushing him over… The statue was brought down. We were ban from the city… This was really bad for the team spirit as the paladin won’t speak to us anymore!

    And to make thing worst, we needed to be in the city to finish the main quest.

    The DM was crying… He has this whole town with a lot of details and we can’t even go back…

  29. Matt C. says:

    My regular DM wasn’t initaially used to having a cleric as a PC so I managed to inadvertantly spoil three encounters that were each intended to take most of the night.
    -A demon burst in to stop us from following our long time nemesis. I won initiative and cast Dismissal in the first round of combat.
    -A team-mate touched and was posessed by an intelligent weapon while I happened to have Detect Evil running. I cast Magic Circle Against Evil focused inward and then had plenty of time to remove the curse properly.
    -Some variety of homemade end-of-the-level uber-naga starts to mouth off at us from across a pit. I cast Circle Against Evil focused inward again but with reach metamagic this time. We got locked out of reality for a year of game time immediately after this one. Odd that.

    I seem to make up for these though by critically failing some basic skill checks. I don’t really mind though. Frankly I have some great fun enabling our DM to screw us a bit while my PC refuse to be convinced of his mistakes.

    My first attempt at DM’ing was an on the fly session. Since there was no planning I chose a story I knew well but the players were unfamilliar with. I didn’t realize then how much time players spend messing up your plans by being “clever”. Eventually I had to give up and say “I need you to run away now or your characters will die.”

    Also, in immediate retrospect I realized that real life siblings shouln’t have been allowed to pick the characters that become lovers in the original story. Never, ever do that.

  30. Anaphyis says:

    Very first tabletop session.

    “Don’t worry, this is your first game and this is a fucking beginners adventure, you really think you are going to die?”

    [30 minutes later]

    “Ahem … well … ah fuck it, lets do that battle again”

    [5 minutes later]

    “Ok, suddenly the tentacles of the swamp monster retreat due to it suffering from food poisoning after chewing off the wizards arm.”

    [60 minutes later]

    “This module sucks! Seriously, why are they putting that piece of shit in a god damn beginners box? OK, Ill improvise from here on.”

  31. Claire says:

    I was an awful player. I once got myself and my friend killed by a shopkeeper, after he refused to haggle on a ring of protection +1. (Not worth 20,000 gold in Forgotten Realms, btw.) I decided the appropriate response to his bullheadedness was to defile a dark corner of his shop. My hide check went off fantastically. My move silently, not so much.

    Eventually, I got such a reputation for screwing around in town and getting myself stabbed without ever advancing the plot, the other players would turncoat on me whenever they suspected I was scheming. Simply creating a bard, rather than a barbarian or sorcerer, was sufficient grounds for them to kill a guard, frame me for murder, and attend my hanging.

  32. Martin! says:

    One day, I was DMing a nice classic adventure. The story was about the daughter of the mayor of a small town that was supposed to be abducted by orcs. The players were supposed to be unable to prevent it. Well, they where planning the fight with a lot of teamwork, which they never do normally (Fighter to rogue: I don't care about flanking your target and allowing you to get 5D6 of sneak damage. If I move here instead, I'll have some cover. ).

    So they would have teamed, and would have saved the lady. I decided they would not be wearing weapons and armors as it was a party with ladies and dancing and that they add some drink so where to have a -2 on all to hit… There was some protesting but the daughter was abducted (and a rogue almost died)… When I reDMed this adventure for a different group, I let them prevent the abduction… Now the adventure was not to get back the daughter, but to learn why the orcs just wanted her and didn't kill anyone else, which was a lot more fun…

  33. quicksilver_502 says:

    this one wasn’t my fault but our party was in an inn trying to finish this quest when we bumped inbto this npc. he was rude so we killed him.m(we were all playing fairly morally dubious characters). turned out he was a prince. we get hauled in front of the king and are desperatly lying to avoid execution. we were just about managing it when my friend(who was playing a very stupid orc) said “you talking about that prince we killed?” things degenerated quickly after that.

  34. clouviere says:

    As a player in a Star Wars table top campaign, I shot the Jedi that the GM had us escorting. Couldn’t help it. I was broke and in debt, and one of the guys in our group said he would pay off all my debts and I would end up with some spare change after the deal was done.

    So I calmly told the GM in a note that I was going to shoot the Jedi in the head and push him off of the speeding…um…land speeder we were in. I roll, I got the shot, he failed to defend, he died, fell off the speeder and the game ended right there and we never went back.

    So yeah, didn’t even get paid…

    cl

  35. Factoid says:

    @Roxysteve: In your first example with the incinerated paper in the drawer couldn’t you just have ad-libbed a bit? Maybe the clue was inside a box that resisted the inferno and was only slightly damaged?

    Or maybe despite the fact that they destroyed the clue in the drawer, another clue or method of success would be presented to them?

    And in your second example why should an entire village be alienated? Surely they are not all of a single mind. There must be one or two people that agree with the actions of the players for whatever reason, or at least aren’t mad enough to withhold vital information. They might have to work a little harder to find people willing to help, but eventually they should find someone.

    Some would call that railroading or destroying the notion of actions having consequences, but people are sometimes unpredictable and I don’t think it’s right to deny them the most fun an adventure can offer just because of that.

  36. Tango says:

    In one of the first games I played, the heroes had been given a letter from the ruler of the land they could use to enlist help as needed on their quest. Having never met said ruler, and perhaps being a bit over-wary, we failed to use it, ever. As a result, our GM kept having to have more and more interesting excuses as to why these friendly NPCs we’d been avoiding giving details to kept showing up to help us.

  37. john_alexander says:

    I think the worst railroading I ever did was, in fact, a literal railroad. In my first game I ever ran, we were playing D&D 3.5, and there were magic trains (I know it’s lame, but I was 17. It was cool at the time). They got on one, only to find that one of the big-bads henchmen was there. The point was to have them capture him, or defeat him, or SOMETHING (I wasn’t too specific). Instead, they said ‘hey! This dude is one of the important baddies, and we are only level 4. He’ll kill us’, and promptly tried to leave. I just said that the train was going through a valley at the time, and to jump off would be about 100 feet down. In the end, they still didn’t get him; they avoided the dude the whole trip. So I had the dude get arrested at their destination, and had the Captain of the Guard (whom the PC’s were there to met) do the interrogating. It was rather lame, having an NPC interrogate another NPC, but they needed the info.

    As for jumping the rails as a player, I don’t think I’ve ever completely ruined a story, but I have ruined a single encounter. We were fighiting a bunch of priest-like dudes in 4e, and when they died their bodies either exploded, or they got up as zombies. The first time one stood back up, the DM said we were afraid, and had some penalties for fear (provided we failed our rolls, which most of us did). Then I piped up with a few points: a) We had just fought goblins, kobolds and a goddamn MAGE who threw fireballs at us, why do guys getting back up surprise us?, and b) my character was 40 years old, if zombie-people are common enough to be a random encounter on the roads, I think I’d have heard of them by now. The DM said no, I was wrong. I brought up MORE things about his world that probably would have numbed me to zombies (dungeons that operate like the matrix? I still don’t know what that was about), but he still said no. Finally, I let it drop, made my roll, failed it, and was content to move on, but apparantly I had convinced the other players that I was right, and now THEY argued my point for me. That was the only time I ever ruined a game session, but that whole game was one long series of crap, and I felt like saying ‘okay, I sprout wings and fly away, because everything else seems to be possible in this world, why not that?’

    In the end, we killed the zombie-priests and never played that campaign again.

  38. locusts says:

    @Casper

    I asked the DM why, if the mages could walk through the illusion my character couldn’t try the blind rush. After watching four party members go through the same patch of wall, something must be wrong with the wall. “You can’t,” was his reply, “It’s solid for you until you pass your check.” When I asked why one of the party couldn’t lead me through, I got the same answer. As to why no one would simply dispel the illusion? “It’s too powerful to dispel.” Hence me sitting for the session making saving throws every ten minutes.

    @Robert
    Perhaps you are right, perhaps I am a dick. I just thought that asking to make a character that would not be a hindrance to the party in the first game was a good thing to start asking about. I was not trying to make the anti-party character, but it made me very grumpy to find out that that was the result. So I roleplayed accordingly, the mages would not help my character and the DM said I could not join the party until one roll was made, what am I to do? Perhaps my solution was not the one you would have chosen.

    As for the second adventure, I did the ground work for that one, or so I thought. I picked a character that helped balance the party and then got to get a level progression, because the “adventure was too hard for first levels.” That should have been my clue, but as I said a friend had invited me to play and so I stayed. When everything went south, obviously my friend was in on it, but the fighters loved it. They were stunned and then spent the time laughing as my friend and I got our character sheets shredded. My friend dropped out of that game and the other two said that the game was never as fun as the double cross. However, again, perhaps you would have made a different decision. Looking at it from a different perspective though, I agree with you. I was out of line. Thank you for giving me perspective.

    Sincerely,
    locusts

    1. Rheylix says:

      Amazing. I realize that I am posting this years later, and those involved will probably never see this, but I simply had to say: This is one of the most mature and reasonable responses (to what could be construed as a judgmental attack) that I have ever seen on the internet. It is things like this that gives me hope for the internet and humanity in general. Thank you.

      1. Slothdon says:

        Y’know, when I go on Archive delves like this, it’s always cool to see remnants left by other people who were doing the same thing. in a weird “finding the corpses of the preceding party” kind of way.

  39. Hotsauce says:

    @Locusts:
    Did it in neither case occur to you to say “Hey, this campaign isn’t what I was looking for. Have fun with it, and let me know when the next one starts”? Because “I’m not having fun, so nobody else is allowed to either” seems a touch immature.
    On the other hand, since you’d created a character with a thing against mages, I suppose what he did was kind of in character…

  40. Hotsauce says:

    @Locusts:
    My comment above simulposted with your second one, so I hadn’t seen it.

  41. Mistwraithe says:

    Frankly locusts, both of your examples of GM railroading actually sound MUCH more like the first of Shamus’s questions, deliberate player derailment of the destructive kind.

    If there are others in the group who are loving it then the problem isn’t that the GM is railroading you into a boring game, the problem is you and that the game doesn’t suit you.

    In that case you should gracefully say as much and stop playing. Trying to destroy everyone’s fun instead is akin to throwing your toys out of cot because the GM had the gall to make a game which didn’t suit you perfectly.

  42. Namfoodle says:

    I used to know a guy who was the worst railroading DM ever. Not only was the plot on rails, but the DM had his hands up the backs of all the PCs so he could work them like puppets. This guy would actually take over both sides of a conversation between two player characters, even when both players were sitting at the table.

    With that guy as the paragon, nothing I’ve pulled comes close. There was the 1st level party that tried to use a good great tracking roll to go straight from the initial encounter of the campaign all the way to the 3rd level boss fight. Even though the party cleric and one of the fighters were down to 1 or 2 hp each. I threw an extra unscripted fight in their way and introduced an important NPC early, but they were having none of it. They wanted to keep charging on. Finally I just gave up and said “oops! night falls and you lose the trail; time to go back to the inn.”

  43. Kevin says:

    As a player I once got really scared going into a town that the DM had stocked with plague zombies. He’d walled us in, and had set up several sessions of gaming there “” unbeknownst to me.

    Unbeknownst to him however, was my spell for making man-sized openings in stone walls. Bye-bye zombie town! (And bye-bye three weeks worth of adventure!)

    As a DM the worst railroading I ever did happened when one of my players suddenly piped up that he didn’t like the city magistrate anyway, and that the party should just go off and find their own adventure. They began to argue with one another, and I just crossed my fingers and let the clock run out on them for the session. Between sessions I wrote an update detailing how they had proceeded to the adventure from that point, and were now deep below ground in the dungeon. When the next game started they tried going back the way they came, so I flipped the map and told them they were lost. (That WAS twenty years ago… though I still get teased about it today.)

  44. Ozzie says:

    I’m currently playing with a railrod-happy DM, and rather enjoying it. He always has at least 3 hilarious DMPCs in the group, and all our fights are far too much for us to handle and end with some sort of Deus Ex Machina or us running away.

    This used to piss me off till it was pointed out that this style is more of an interactive story than a D&D game.

  45. SiliconScout says:

    I have a group that gets together once a year for a mega “man weekend” that lasts about 4 days of gaming. It’s almost the only gaming I get and we have been doing this for going on 12 years now.

    This takes place in a custom world with an RPG system that we developed ourselves.

    The party we are playing with is a group from the “Great Gorge”, it’s an area chock full of monstrous humanoids. In our case we were some of the few of these types who become heroes. So we had an Ogre Shaman, and Ogre warrior (who rode a giant boar), and elven orphan (who thought he was the monster)and a half-Ogre Scout.

    My Character is a Minotaur named Xaviour who wanted to be a Paladin but is actually more of a Divine Champion of Siridawn (God of justice, honor and the like), in many ways better than a standard Paladin.

    So about 4 years ago nearing the end of our weekend, our Heroes managed to defeat some Bugbears. Now in our world a Bugbear is a fearsome opponent, I'd rather battle a giant (and they generally kill in a single blow even a Hero) than a group of Bugbears. The group we downed was a particularly nasty bunch but the Heroes prevailed barely. Once item that we recovered from them was an Iron Arrow. Merely touching the item attempted to corrupt and influence the Character. Wielding it as a melee weapon however gave it great power, the ability to consume souls even (on a lucky roll). In fact during a subsequent battle it was the only item the party possessed that could harm one of our foes. It nearly corrupted the 2 different Heroes that ended up wielding it however.

    Xaviour being the most steadfast (highest Will Power) and the one who found the item took it in his possession. It was locked in a small chest full of tin and copper pieces and packed around by him with is avowed quest to find a way to destroy this minor artifact of evil.

    That is where that session ended.

    So a year passes of real time and our GM spends literally 200 hours or so planning out a new campaign direction given Xaviour's avowed quest.

    We get together 12 months later and learn of an Arch level enchanter of tarnished character but good intentions who would be likely to either possess the knowledge of how to destroy the item or be able to discover it on his own.

    The party journey's to this NPC's Tower and works their way through his various traps and obstacles meant to keep out all but the most dedicated and worthy visitors. Arriving on his doorstep relatively unscathed and in good spirits the Heroes are granted and audience.

    After some discussion and a nerve wracking event where the Enchanter needed to actually handle the arrow (we were sure we would have to try and kill him) he leaves us to discover what he can about the item.

    Returning some hours later he declares that he knows how to destroy the item and possesses much of the materials needed to do so already and those he does not have he can procure in the near future. We were happy with that news but he states that unless we do him a service (I honestly don't remember what the mission was but it wasn't anything “evil”) he won't destroy the arrow or tell us how to.

    He also added the caveat that the arrow must remain with him while we do the mission.

    Well Xavior being the Holy Zealot that he is had some significant issues with this. The GM played the Enchanter as some what ambiguous and gave off a huge vibe that everything he did had ulterior motives. He purposefully gave the impression that the man spoke in half truths. Xavior feared that he was under the arrow's influence or worse yet wanted to divine all its secrets to be able to produce more of the same so he refused the deal. Xavior felt that the arrow was safer on his back in its chest that in the Enchanters arms and the party walked out.

    The GM was somewhat shocked, and had the Enchanter toss some of his more creative baddies at us when we were nearly out of there and that only further cemented in Xavior's mind that he could not be trusted. In stead the party decided to follow a very minor subplot of one of the characters background and see if there was more to that. Further they decided that the arrow would be destroyed when they found a nicer Enchanter or the method on their own.

    A full year of real-time preparation was tossed out the window and the GM had to completely improvise 4 days (about 70 hours of playing) gaming creating a plot from scratch around what was essentially an irrelevant footnote in one characters backstory.

    It was by far the worst derailing I had ever seen or been part of in 28 years of gaming, AND it was my fault to boot.

    I felt horrible but there is no way that particular character EVER would have agreed to those demands and the GM really should have known it.

  46. rlor says:

    This isn’t the worst but a better story than the worst.

    We had a GM that liked to punish the party for not having a certain class present for a game. This included if a player of said class called in sick. In this case the rogue’s player was unable to make it due to being out of state for a month which meant that the GM seeded every place with 10 times more traps to “prove to us we needed a rogue to do anything”. We couldn’t really hire an NPC rogue either or gain access diplomatically so it seemed like a pretty hopeless situation. We were either supposed to basically not play the game or else just eat the traps.

    In his world lead was a common material and for something completely different my wizard character had purchased a large amount of lead. To make it easier to carry he had used shrink item to turn it into smaller bits of cloth. So when we get to super trapped structure #5 we began cutting up cloth, sticking it by or in doors and setting them off with command words.

  47. Galen says:

    I was playing D&D 3.5, and we were in a dungeon crawl. My orc cleric and a few others had just crossed a lake via a little lift and were approaching some ruins when we were attacked by a handful of spawn of keiss (or however you spell that). Naturally their first move was to attack my cleric who managed to fail his save and quickly became diseased. We all turned to run but my Int. finally hit 0 and my new zombie began attacking the party members. I managed to infect both of them before they killed me, and the two ran for their lives. They reached the platform and the one with less intelligence operated the platform for the only survivor. He managed to make it back to the town and fight the guards who he infected. From there we decided that the whole city (like 300,000 or something) eventually became infected. Eventually another party member who had been waiting in the city because he was trapped in a bubble, returned to reality and managed to get a few blocks before becoming infected also.

    It’s also worth noting that the cleric I had was officially the high priest of banthulu (from the Order of The Stick comics). We made a deal that if I could convert 6000 people to Banthuluism then the true banthulu would be resurrected. It was nice to remember that with the whole city of zombies the 6000 quota was filled and a new god of chaos had been born from the uh… chaos.

    We decided to rewind and just skip the battle with the spawn. I kinda wish we had continued with a new party and tried to infiltrate the city…

    On the plus side we DID save the city form the cult trying to set of the volcano…

  48. Vadimirin says:

    I’d have to say the worst derailment my friends and I ever did was the thorough trashing of a hotel in a Scion game, and it’s repeat in another game. The first time we were Legend 5 (powerful, but not the top of the food chain) Demigods and some of us decided to A: order the menu, B: order the beer and wine list, and C: order a rugby set from the local sporting goods store. We ended up playing Extreme Hallway Rugby and trashing a whole floor of the building!

    We then wanted to perpetrate a repeat of it in an Exalted game while in Yu-shan, the game’s equivalent of Heaven (AKA The Bureaucracy of Heaven). Our GM didn’t want us to that time though :’-(

  49. Gotelc says:

    I have never been railroaded or railroaded my players all that much. But i have Foced DM’s to do some quick thinking to keep their games from locking up. and the same has happened to me.

    The most recent was In a 3.5 game my friend is running. I had been out a few sessions and in order to get me back in hte game he thought it would be a great idea to have me as a captive by the enemy. Great idea on his part unfortunately i am a wily bastard sometimes. The Enemy was planning to make an attack on a fort later in the session and they had a big army and a massive amount of captives on the order of a few thousand. Well i was a cleric so i could not do much with locks so I schemed. I asked for a spoon with my gruel so I could carve a holy symbol. the DM said “they just throw raw meat into the cages” so I was stuck. Until it hit me to carve one out of some bones in the meat! The DM let that go since i was so determined. so i get a full compliment of spells, only used spell that had no material components (i was lvl 15) and had no other equipment than a bone holy symbol. I manage to bust th cages open, freeing all the captives and get to my equipment without much hassle. then i run into the big bad wolf, well he was a half Iron-Golem werewolf. He blows this whistle and all the captives i was freeing turn into werewolves and go ballistic killing everything and each other. Needless to say i get recaptured but i took out the main part of the army in the process. so there was not epic war that session much to the dismay of the barbarian.

    In one of my 3.5 games the party had snuck up on part of their evil counterpart. And they were eavesdropping the evil wizard and the evil fighter, when the rouge says he wants to make a called shot on the evil fighter. i think to myself “the odds of him hitting are really low, he would have to roll a 20 even to hit” so i allow it. He rolls… well low and behold a nat. 20… well i said “roll to confirm” and he rolls a second nat. 20… Now I know some people use an optional rule that if on an attack a player roll 3 20’s in a row it is an instant kill. I was using that rule. I asked him to roll again… and as i feared he rolled another nat. 20… i was flabbergasted. He killed the NPC that I had made the previous day, for the specific reason of kicking their asses in one surprise round with the only non-magical weapon that the party possessed. All i could do was laugh.

  50. Abnaxis says:

    This isn’t so much my own actions of derailing, but rather my players. Any time I have ever tried to run a modern sort of game, it usually goes like this: 1) miscellaneous intrigue, 2) players defend themselves from an attack 3) players go to the police (because in The Real World ™, that’s what people do when they’re attacked), 4) I try to figure out some way out of roleplaying weeks worth beuracratic happenings as police investigate and can never come up with anything that doesn’t seem contrived.

    I still haven’t come up with anything really good that doesn’t involve ludicrous amounts of railroading. Maybe I just stink as a DM…

  51. Bill says:

    Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs walked the earth (1988) our GM had planned a final climatic battle at which he could kill off one of his greatest NPCs and some of our high level PCs and close the entire campaign.

    Unfortunately for him he gave us far too much information beforehand and so with some planning and five minutes game play we’d created an impenetrable fog, invoked a vast horde of demons/devils (I can’t remember which) headed by major one which a score to settle and buggered off via other planes.

    The look on his face when we explained what would happen when the fog cleared was priceless.

  52. Alan says:

    Ok, as a player I am proud to say that I have helped prevent several fairly major derailments, sometimes to the detriment of my character – eg shadowrun, spotting that the Johnson didn’t have the money to pay us with, but knowing that the GM didn’t have anything else to play, just thought, “Eh, run with it. Should be fun”. I quite liked the GM style of that guy, so I trused him enough not to screw me over with it.

    Actually, still as a player, the biggest major derailment I have seen was perpertrated by the guy who gm’ed the above.

    The game was WFRP, and this near the end of a long campaign. We were supposed to rescue the original Hammer of Sigmar. This is an awesome item of mythical power which had a full page of stats encompassing various abilities, and would unify the Empire which was falling apart at the moment under some internal problems, so in short, this was an important item.

    We had just rescued the item, which unbeknownst to us, was holding back a giant rift in the fabric of the world. Not a problem this was in the plot, all we had to do was run.

    Ok, I can do that.

    We were then cut off by a stretch of water which threatened us until we found a conveniently moored boat. We got on the magically powered boat, and were easliy outpacing the rift (Which was going at the speed of plot), until we started arguing about something, I forget what, and the GM decided to hurry things along by moving the vortext close to us to focus our mind.

    Thinking to stave off imminent death-by-rift(tm), the person holding the Hammer of Sigmar threw the hammer into the rift, presumably landing somewhere in the Chaos wastes, leaving our party still in as danger laden territory as before, but minus one hammer.

    o_o

    There was a pause at the table at that point where we struggled to absorb the ramifications of this.

    Having an idea, my character tried and failed to catch the hammer (He was a dwarf with abysmal dexterity), but the roll to crack the player that threw the hammer round the head succeded.

    In the end, after shaking off plot related stun damage, we went to the nearest Dwarf hold and begged them to make a replica hammer of some kind. The GM then -badly- re-wrote the game to fit this in, and the ending of a few months worth of mostly very good gaming came to an unsatisfactory end.

    As a GM, I have had players try and run away with games, but normally, because I -now- create games that have a definite target, but no other real rails. However, my first game that I gm’ed, was admittedly a horrible railtrack builders dream. I basically forced the players to get to a mansion. After a couple of armed squads failed painfully to knock them out leaving corpses around, I pinned the blame for their deaths on the characters, put them in jail, then had the owner of the mansion come and bail them out into his ownership.

    After another small bit of plot discussion with the main NPC, what followed might have made an interesting survival horror type game, were it not for the fact that they were cooped up in a large walled mansion garden o’death where I had to contrive ways to stop them climbing out because that is what the pseudo-plot required.

    The players then displayed little originality, not using any of the cunningly placed items of rocks or items, just sat in a hole and got picked off. Although having said that, there was an amusing aside where the players got attacked by squirrels which is still referenced.

    Hmm, just realised that this post is getting a little long, so this other one will be a little shorter.

    My second player problem where a player broke the rails was again in WFRP, I was running a game from a sourcebook where events built upon themselves and would eventually lead to a climax. There were about 120 fully detailed characters, intricate plots, and amusing asides.

    The players spotted the plot express and decided to jump away.

    They made a bandit camp on the outskirts and started attacking people as they came in or out.

    -Thanks guys, you made all that preparation worthwhile.

  53. Anders says:

    Was playing in a Feng Shui campaign. I was playing a Monster Hunter, specializing in hunting down and destroying dangerous demons and doing quite well too. The rest of the team was your typical hero group for Feng Shui.

    In the previous campaign we played, which sort of was a prequel with some charaters showing up as NPC in the later one, there was this kind frog demon. The frog demon people had been almost extinct but where slowly recovering at the moment.

    We meet the frog demon to talk about helping out, already a possible no-no for my character but he was aware that not all demons where bad, and we get to visit the spawning chamber where the frog eggs are resting.

    Due to the description by the GM instead of us seeing something positive we get a strong feeling that this is like the egg chamber in Aliens … not the right feeling at all and with me as a monster hunter there was arguing. The other players agreed with my conclusion and it ended up with us leaving and me with planing about returning with more guns.

    Next session we created a new group, the new description of the room was rosy, good and clearly shiny without any sort of trace of Aliens or anything bad.

  54. Bryan says:

    I used to play with a political science major. While not every issue was strictly railroaded, when it came to his politics it was his way or the graveyard. Here’s an example:

    While in Greyhawk our party was relaxing in an inn when one of his major protagonists came in with “several guardsmen.” Earlier in the campaign this guy had set an ambush for us which we spent the evening avioding. We didn’t know the guards were the city watch, or that the guy had blamed us for a village he had destroyed, until after the fact. The guards rushed in to grab us, and we fled thinking that these were the villain’s personal guards. The city’s citizens then began throwing rocks at us and trying to cut us off. We managed to escape by hiding in the water under the docks and freezing half to death.

    This type of thing happened to us a lot for the first 3 months of the campaign. Finally, when we all told him how tired we were of sneaking out of every town and disgusted with his campaign in general, he mentioned that we were supposed to be captured in the first ambush so we could help a noble escape from the villain, and that since we hadn’t eliminated the villain he had been free to rain distruction on local villages and blame us for it. His recurrence was supposed to put us on the tracks so that he could continue his original campaign which we had avioded for 3 months.

    I learned a valuable lesson from this for my own campaigns: NEVER predetermine what the players are supposed to do, especially when they don’t know or have any clue what you are planning.

    I think the worst railroading I’ve done was when I decided that a PC couldn’t determine the effects of a magical clothing item by placing it on an animal. I let the guy try on several animals before the guards arrested him. It seems that the animals’ owners did not take kindly to a mage experimenting on their animals. His guild was forced to give him a trial, and he was forced to pay for the animals he experimented with. He also got a stern warning from the guild to never try that again. In the end, I believe he threw the girdle of giant strength away rather than getting it identified.

  55. Miako says:

    “How We broke the Game Session”
    basically the plot was that our Werewolves (WoD) had stumbled into a self-modifying video game (sense wyrd and sense weaver both positive) that was slowly decaying. We were supposed to solve the adventure game, and leave. This was SUPPOSED to be aided by a genie who would show up, talk to us and give us a few clues (basically that you had to use stuff in places where it wasn’t found). Well, my friends’ characters pissed the genie off. Broke it really, and it disappeared before telling us anything useful.

    We understood about one of the four puzzles, and the rest of them were REALLY hard. One involved cutting Hydra’s heads off until you had 256, at which point you would get zero. Again, self-modifying video game (not that the characters knew they were in a video game).

    We basically spent the whole freaking game session trying to solve puzzles, and getting flummoxxed. Again and Again. Four hours. It was BAD.

    Then we went over to Kulthea.

    Wherein occurred a GM’s railroading. Or Whatever You Want To Call It.

    Basically, out of character the GM decided he wanted to have a Magic the Gathering game to test out his new deck. He claimed that the priestess to the Goddess of Invisible Gears (involving i at some point), had been transported to the main library, and that she had started a fad with some Magic cards that she had possessed when she came from the WoD world. So we had to play the GM (a world-class strategist) in Magic the Gathering.

    I did get a nice spellbook out of it, though.

    I don’t know WHAT you call “let’s play magic now”, but to me it seems railroading…

  56. Scott says:

    Kinda hard to de-rail a campaign that has no tracks but, as players, somehow we managed to do it in a homebrew Rollmaster game.

    The party was ‘supposed’ to become suspicious of the owner of an old house that we were staying in and try to find out what was behind the plans of this old man who was trying to ‘heal’ his daughter. We never figured out, until the very end, that his daughter had died (even though we were explicitley told a few times) and that he was searching for a method to ressurect her. Unfortunately, the party was used as a tool for her ressurection and ended up inadvertently destroying a fairly large city (killing all but 3 of the inhabitants) by unleashing a horrendous blood monter.
    Looking back, we sided with the wrong people and faught the wrong people… It was a mess, but it ended up okay in the end. Well, not for the city and all the people in it.

  57. I once enjoyed a game of 7th Sea in which the GM’s plot was something that we players dignified only with an occasionally glance. Most of the time we were far too busy making our own entertainment.

    We had acquired some property, presumably as part of a GM plan to get us to a particular city. Upon claiming it, our first thought was “How can we make this place turn a profit?”

    Problem one ““ the local gang wanted protection money, and we weren’t willing to part with our cash.

    Dismissing the obvious ideas of opening a brothel or a casino (given that there was too much competition), we eventually landed the idea of opening a theatre.

    Problem two ““ the other two theatres in town weren’t too happy.

    We took a look at the competition and started working on our own production. We needed a cast, so we lured the actors away from one of the rival theatres with promises of exciting new innovations in theatre.

    Problem three ““ a theatre, which had access to big strong men, was very unhappy with us.

    Obviously we had to get the word out, so we attended a few balls and put the word out. One of the player characters started a brawl.

    Problem four ““ brawls are not gentlemanly. We had made an enemy of half the nobility.

    We needed a plot, but lacked great writers. The obvious solution was to pinch something ““ so we decided to perform The Garden of Eden.

    Problem five ““ theatre plus the Bible, a sure fire way to offend the religious.

    We also had a distinct lack of budget. So, we settled for a plain white set, no props, and no costumes.

    Problem six ““ nudity would cause a scandal.

    Problem seven ““ religious nudity would cause a huge scandal.

    I’ve no idea what the GM had in mind when he guided us towards that town, but I rather suspect the mob chased us out before it could come to pass.

  58. Lethe says:

    In one Shadowrun session, our party was tasked by an unnamed Powerful Individual to bring a breifcase from Seattle to New York. We were then accosted by another Johnson who offered us a very large sum of money from his employer, “The Dishwasher” (the GM didn’t have a code name ready, and opened the Yellow Pages randomly), to take the briefcase to Denver instead. Given that we all lived in the Denver area at the time, I should have taken the hint. Instead, I was instrumental in convincing the group that betraying our current employer was going to bring down more trouble that it was worth, and that we probably didn’t want to work for this Dishwasher guy anyway, since he was clearly shady. (Yeah, I know, in Shadowrun, all of your employers are shady.) So, we declared that we would remain on I-80, bypass Denver, and continue East. The GM looked at us for a beat, chucked a large stack of papers onto his discard pile, and said, “So much for THAT adventure.” To his credit, he was able to improvise or retask bits he had written to still give us a pretty good gaming session, though.

  59. ehlijen says:

    The worst derailment a player has done to me also led to some of the funnest adventures that party had:

    They players had gotten themselves caught up in a power struggle between the king of an evil city, some his internal rivals and the leader of a orc war tribe besieging the city.
    More than one party had hired them to kill the king, steal the crown and bring it one of their employers (killing the king and claiming the crown was the standard procedure of succession in that place, although the PCs were never specifially told that).
    What does the halfling rogue do after his buddies kill the werebear king and just as more guards arrive?
    “I claim the throne!”
    It suprised the party as much as anyone else. Just as it actually working suprised the rogue…
    Suddenly I had to write adventures for city rulers instead of a band of lawless opportunists…

    Not sure it qualifies as a derailment as the players had several options open as to what to do with the crown. I just didn’t expect that.

  60. John Callaghan says:

    To Abnaxis: There are two methods of preventing your players letting the police solve all their problems for them that occur to me. One is the Call Of Cthulhu solution – the goings-on are so weird that no-one official would take them seriously.

    The second might work better – have your players take on the rà´les of the police!

  61. Annikai says:

    I’ve got a few stories of me derailing a game as a player.

    The first time me and a group were playing Call of Cthlulhu and from the very start I was trying to derail it. I had just gotten a lip ring that week and it had kind of become a huge topic among my friends. So much so that I added it to the character that I was creating (which was out of place considering that the game took place in the twenties). So me and the GM spent about 10 minutes convincing the group that it was possible (the DM is a really good friend of mine). So we get that passed and I realize that I have to leave just as we are about to start playing because a girl called me for a date. So I tell the GM to play the character for me for a while and I leave.

    So I make it back and the game is still going on (College is fun like this). Well I take the reigns of my character back just as me and on of the other characters is breaking into a house inhabited by two other characters. So we hold them at gun point. One of the characters was played by my friend Josh who is very religious and he made a Catholic Priest even after we spent about a half hour convincing him that his god did not exist with in the Call of Cthulhu universe. But he insisted so I wrote in my character background that my character had an intense hatred of the Catholic church. Well the game goes on for a while and my friends take out the main monster (I hid outside for the fun of it). Well I run back in and see the blood left from their battle and then I role play that my character had gone into shock. His shock took the form of becoming trigger happy and he began to shoot his gun at the priest. The priest was injured on the ground from the earlier fight. I did this once and missed when one of the other characters used his abilities to soothe me. So from there when it was my turn again I say “Okay I shoot the priest but this time of my own volition,” and I shot the priest agian. I did this about 4 or 5 more time when we heard sirens (my character had really bad aim). The cops entered the building as all of the characters left with the exception of me and the priest (who was severely wounded at the moment). A cop looked looked at me and said “Freeze Punk!” To which I responded by shooting the priest. The Cop shot me and I shot the priest. The cop shot me again and killed me but not before I reduced the priest to about -9. A few paramedics came in and saved the priest as I lay on the ground dead.

    The after math of this was that not only did I die but the priest was sent to the hospital. Now you’d think that the priest would be safe at the hospital but you would be sadly mistaken. He was kidnapped twice, tortured, and attacked by a star vampire. To make things better, during the torture the torturer asked him the names of his comrades. I told him out of character that it would be fine to give my name because my character was dead and it would be unlikely that they could track down the rest of the group. He thought of this for a second and he gave out my character’s name. The thing is that my character’s name was X which sounds like an obviously fake name. From there the GM had his character beaten more. This lasted for about two or three more sessions and it was all because of me.

  62. Wonderduck says:

    Once upon a time, half of my party of adventurers killed the other half without knowing it.

    They had been captured by the evil lord of the land, and had hidden them away somewhere in the town. We figured that they’d be in the keep, so to cause a distraction, we found an abandoned warehouse-type place (so as not to cause civilian casualties) that was near the keep, lighted a small, smoky fire, and ran away to watch the guards put the fire out.

    The warehouse-type place burned merrily, the guards went out to quench the blaze, we took down the remaining guards, got into the keep, and went into the jail… or, what we thought was the jail.

    It turned out it was more of an underground passageway, well constructed… and filling with smoke.

    The “abandoned warehouse” WAS the jail. It looked abandoned because there were never any people entering or leaving from the warehouse because the passageway was much more secure.

    We did, eventually, find what we thought was the other half of the party. Maybe. Kinda hard to tell. Did you know that burnt elf smells like roasted chicken?

  63. Jeff says:

    As a player, I’m probably one of the most cooperative guy you can get. Every one of my characters will have a justification for getting along with the party, and I tend to choose a class based on party needs. I tend to follow plot threads – probably because of old school adventure and RPG computer/console games. I like to explore and discover the story. As is, the ‘worst’ derailment I’ve caused was giving my DM a headache from my mage being overly prepared.

    Two stories as a game master. My most heavy handed move was when I once had a recently joined player who totally tried to take the game in a different direction then what had been happening. Of course, he was a problem player to begin with (he wanted an Evil character, I refused – from the beginning of the campaign a few months back the rules were already in place, that there were to be no Evil alignments and that everyone had to get along. He went to neutral, and then proceeded to act exactly how he intended to in the first place, continuously trying to bait me into switching his alignment to Evil for his actions.) At one point they reached a set of celestial monks (they had the sole purpose of giving them a reward after a rather insane dungeon) and picked a fight. His own party member ko’d him from behind – with me making it automatically succeed. He subsequently did all sorts of things that finally had me arresting and exiling the character. Player left as character exited, stage left.
    I don’t regret tossing him out at all, but the railroad I DO regret… I had a big campaign idea in mind. What happened was that the throwaway start area (an university) actually was the primary focus for a while (the PCs were students). It was great, the interactions and interschool activities. Then I more or less launched the main story that sent them out into the wilds to explore, away from the university, and it kinda collasped from there. I shoulda seen how well it was going and instead had events occur in and around the school. Ah well.

  64. Brian says:

    Can I flip it, and do the worst derailment I’ve ever been subjected to as a GM?

    I was running Star Wars d6, and planned out a story arc set after the Timothy Zahn trilogy. The idea was that a faction within the New Republic was plotting to control the Corellian shipyards, build a capital ship comparable to the Death Star in power, and use it to stage a coup of the Skywalker/Solo controlled Republic. The players, a third party to the conflict as a team working for Talon Karrde, would stumble upon the plan accidentally, run into the “grey Jedi” who was part of the plot (the plotters were more of a “Greater Good” type than Palpatine-like evil,) and would have a significant say in the finale whichever side they decided to fight for.

    When the party ran into the Grey Jedi, they refused to join him, as expected. That was the end of the second to last game.

    The last game opened with the party on their ship, leaving Corellia, when they discover that their engine’s been tampered with, and a few electronics checks later, they discover that their ship is being forced to Tatooine, so they won’t be able to warn and help the Republic leadership. I let them decide…

    “Eh, we’re not on anyone’s side. Let’s just go to Tatooine.”

    “You can fix the hyperdrive! You’ve got a mechanic!”

    “Yeah, but why?”

    And I sit there stunned, realizing that I have no good way to put them back on the rails. And go straight into epilogue mode, as the New Republic is overthrown.

  65. GregT_314 says:

    Haven’t been put off my script in years, ever since I realised there was nothing wrong with stopping and saying to players, “Hey, what you’re about to do is going to result in a very different game from what I have planned. I’d recommend trying to find a reason to not do that consistent with your character – I can provide some if you’d like – but if you’d really like to explore what happens if you do this I’ll see what I can do on the fly.” I rarely need to do that more than once a game, and the benefits vastly outweigh the brief break in immersion.

    As a player it frustrates me intensely when I ask for that sort of feedback from a GM and don’t get it. I want the best story the GM can tell me, not the best patch he can stick on the story to repair my misguided actions.

    In an ideal world it would always be obvious what does and does not advance the story, and players would contribute to the narrative with a focus and drive that matches any other medium note-for-note, but it’s not an ideal world and there’s no crime in acknowledging it in order to create a better game experience.

  66. Kaitain says:

    I’ve actually had a campaign fall about due to lack of railroading…

    It was a World of Darkness: Mages: The Awakening campaign. The last campaign I ran was a D&D 3.5 and I was still getting the hang of DMing so I was using a module (I’ll only use them for reference now.) The D&D campagin sort of fell apart because I was following too closely and railroading the players, so I thought in the WoD one I would avoid that problem by giving the players almost full freedom and rewarding good ideas.

    We reached a point, when the players had to find a paranormal investigator and camera crew inside of a haunted mansion. I had every room in the mansion planned out, with several battles and other events for the players to run into. As they proceded to go around the house, they skipped every room that actually had something interesting happening in it.

    When they got to the second floor, there were about 20 guest rooms. In some of them were various ghosts and the like that would challange the players, as well as the camera crew. There was also one room, on the very far left, with a secret escape in the closet that they could use later. In the hallway was an indestructible monster that would not leave the hallway. When the players got to the hallway, they got spooked, and ran to the left. Once there, with all the rooms to choose from, they rolled a die and chose the one room that had no monsters, and just the secret passage way.

    I guess the gist of the story is that, throughout the rest of the night, they just avoided every bit of combat that I had planned for them. And at the end of the night, everyone felt a little bored. Though once I explained what happened, we all had a laugh about it, though the campaign kind of died after that.

    I’m not sure if the story is interesting to anyone, but I thought it kind of fit. My next campaign with those same people is an Eberron one, so I’m hoping it will go smoother.

  67. Brian says:

    Oh, and worst/silliest derailment as a player: We were playing mid-high level characters in Eberron, v3.5. I’m playing a human psion with a Warforged sidekick, the Warforged being a psychic warrior. The other player is an Ashbound druid (better shapeshifting, no animal companion.) Our GM leads us into a dungeon that is essentially a carbon copy of the Mines of Moria sequence from Lord of the Rings.

    Sequence 1: We come upon a large group of orcs leading a war troll. The GM set the numbers such that it would be a plausible direct fight. Instead, I stand behind a corner, and implant a false memory into the troll’s head of horrific sexual abuse at the hands of goblins (I was playing Neutral Evil.) After the looks of horror from the other player and GM subsided, the GM properly narrated the troll obliterating the orcs and running away.

    Sequence 2: We come upon the great hall, with a narrow bridge, lots of hidden orc archers, etc. Again, was supposed to be a great set piece battle. Instead, we toss Haste, Invisibility, and Skate on the Warforged, he picks up both human characters, and simply glides at extremely high speed past all the enemies–jumping over the two that actually block the narrow bridge with ease.

    And so, a dungeon with multiple great planned set piece battles, expected to take 4 hours, gets completed in 1 hour with no actual fighting.

  68. Bogan the Mighty says:

    After that boring dreamworld campaign there were a couple fun times. Like when I made the group able to walk over water to skip a good chunk of stuff. Oh and there was the time we discovered the wonders of the spell Silence and how it can be used for fun and thieving.

  69. Meatloaf says:

    I think there’s one thing all GMs need to realize: never underestimate the power of a clever spellcaster. There are no rails for them.

    I had a campaign a while back in which one of my fellow players actually killed one of the important NPCs, resurrected him, and mind controlled him.

    Needless to say, he sent us off on random tangents for no reason at all, much to the amusement of the GM.

  70. Spider Dave says:

    So we were in a town investigating some werewolf related murders, and when we got suspicious of a townsperson, we cast suggestion and made her tell us everything they were keeping secret. (There were several peaceful werewolves in town but they were being exploited by an enormous one, but nobody knew who this one was) So we went to the place where he was last seen, used a superiffic track check to follow him back to his house. The adventure assumed we were going to meet in in a specific location with all the town’s werewolves to help fight, but we caught and killed him in the town square, saving the day, and taking down a CR 14 baddie at level 8 (oh the rewards!).

  71. Evlkritter says:

    GAH! No one will read mine because of how obscenely late in line it is, but oh well.

    Worst derail was in my first campaign. The GM was always busy and had a lot of friends. Because of this we had something like twelve sessions over two years, and because he had so many friends and the games were always called last minute and we changed a lot over those years there was only ONE character (mine) who had been with the plot the whole time, sadly a cleric of the lord of benign chaos, Gonzo.

    Basically the plot died, NONE of us, absolutely NO ONE in the group remembered what we were supposed to do, as is I can only remember what happened, not why we did it. We were on an airship so some city for some reason involving hunting down a vampire lord. A ambassador from somewhere whom we had ‘befriended’ (under duress) gave us a number of unlabled magic items for our use. We had two mages in the party at the time, one Chaotic Evil, the other Lawful Evil. Yeah.

    Anyway, we had reason to suspect that he was on the airship, at least I think we did, and we began to attack people (mostly each other and people who we fully believed were innocent), and in the fight it was revealed that the LE mage lied to us about the perpose of the wand weapon our half-celestial bard had. It wasn’t a wand of charm person, it was a wand of contagion.

    A hour or so later half the ship was undead, the Lord Vampire revealed himself and ‘convinced’ our LE mage (who had been turned vampire by the contagon) to switch sides, the ship was on fire, and a war between the Living and the Dead was being waged, many from the former side involentarily switching to the latter during the conflict (including my cleric becoming vampire), and we ended up crashing into the airship tower at high velocity.

    This all ramped up to me trying to solo the Big Bad Vampire. I couldn’t overcome his DR and he all but killed me. Then a newly recruited druid PC picked the Wand of the Magie from the debris of the crash, warp-wooded the wand into a stake and tried to stab the vampire. He missed and decided, screw it, and he snapped the rod in half.

    We ended up on the coldest level of hell, the druid, vampire, and me, where we both died and the vampire made an alliance with a huge faction of devils and dissapeared into the depths of hell to consult Asmodeus.

    Shortly after the campaign ended because we weren’t meeting often enough.

  72. Iudex Fatarum says:

    The worst I’ve had was recently in a 4e session of DnD I had a party of a nieve eladrin wizard, jaded aasimar warlock (homebrew race), human fighter, dragon born LG paladin, and an eladrin rogue. The wizard had just set up some tense negotiations between two waring cultures on neutral ground. at which point the rogue convinced one of the people on one side to pay him for killing all the other race. He promptly took the money, blew everything up, and the party couldn’t do anything about it. wrecked the session and caused one player to cry, yes the player. Needless to say that PC is now the BBEG NPC.

  73. Michael A. B. says:

    Playing Call of Cthulu, we had discovered a lair with a glowing magic circle in the center of an ancient cavern. A cult was performing a ritual around the circle. After a brief discussion outside of the cavern, we decided that the best option would be to roll a belt of grenades into the cave and deal with it that way. (Our team was composed of criminals that happened to have discovered the occult was real.)

    Well, it worked to stop the ritual, but turned out that the circle was actually a seal on a dimensional rift that the cult was trying to break. Being old fashioned, the cultists had not thought of explosives. The only way that we could figure out how to stop the creatures pouring out was to open a rift to 2 other dimensions that were known to be hostile and hope that they could fight each other to a standstill.

  74. Eldiran says:

    I haven’t had any of my campaigns get truly derailed, since my players tend to be (almost a little too) willing to follow plot hooks. There was one occasion that threatened a massive plot rewrite, but was thankfully averted.

    Essentially, the party was tasked by a warring country to retrieve an extremely powerful artifact from a recently unsealed cave. With them was an NPC Paladin soldier to help them along. The opposing side in the war had also sent a small group to retrieve the artifact.

    So, after travelling to the very end of the cave, the party faced off with a giant (homebrewed) blob corpse monster, and, well… failed miserably. The party wiped, but I decided to be merciful (within reason) and had the opposing country’s team show up and finish off the wounded monster. Since the team leader was a nice guy, he rescued the party and left with the artifact (one Rod of Flame, to be specific).

    The party needed the rod for the story to progress; they chose not to pursue. This isn’t even the derailing part. While they were resting, the NPC Paladin decided to chase after the enemy group alone, and in a vicious (offscreen) battle, managed to defeat them and return with the Rod and one single hit point. (Man this post is way too long.)

    Now. For some BIZARRE reason, the party halfling rogue chose to tail the paladin and await his return. When Mr. Pally gets back with 1 hit point, the rogue jumps out from the shadows, perfectly concealed, and tries to sneak attack the paladin in the back. …miss. An initiative roll later, the rogue gets another attack. Miss. The paladin turns around, and with a single stroke, cleaves the halfling in two, instantly killing him.

    Needless to say, it was a stroke of luck (for me) that saved the story, since the paladin was a fairly important NPC. Not to mention it was, and is, hilarious.

    Not sure why I felt the need to type it all up though… >.>

  75. Coyote says:

    1. This one time the GM had a job board up in the town, assuming that since we were enterprising adventurers we’d take up the cause of the local townspeople. In this case the job that should of stood out the most involved dealing with a pack of Wyverns.

    But me, all I could think upon hearing the word Wyvern was “Save Vs. Poison or Die.”

    So instead of going to fight Wyverns my ADD bard-type character decided to pick the job where a little girl had lost her kitten, and then took the entire party to a ballroom dancing competition.

    2. A friend who never GMs wanted to try GMing. So we all made decided to make evil dwarves without checking with him. We were supposed to be trying to deal with an opposing evil faction, “The order of the Pick.” Instead, we spent 14 hours of game time systematically ruining the life of a barmaid who made an offhand comment rebuking the CHA 6 dwarf hitting on her. We broke into her house and burned something different each day until she had literally nothing. One day we went and cut off a toe. We used magic, gossip and planted evidence to have everyone in town think she was a lying thieving adulterer, and eventually we had her committed to an insane asylum.

    3. I had a Marvel Superheroes character with the mutant ability to travel through alternate dimesions. Part of his backstory is that in his travels he came across an alternate dimension where wars, courts and politics were resolved using the most efficient method they could think of: Baseball. Their baseball bat technology far more advanced than standard Earth, and it was the character’s weapon of choice. Eventually every second adventure eventually devolved into a ridiculous trip to Baseballdonia.

  76. Bill S. Preston, Esq. says:

    One time we were playing 1st ed. AD&D, and I, an evil assassin, had been bugging the DM for weeks to let me try an actual assassination job, instead of being relegated to a second-class-thief-who-can-kind-of-fight role, which is basically what I’d been doing. He relents, and has someone hire me to assassinate some NPC.

    At the time I was supposed to do the deed, the NPC in question was meeting with another NPC in a room in a tavern. Now, I hadn’t been given much description of the NPC, just told his name and profession, so I was supposed to use my Spying ability to find out which was the target, kill him, and quietly escape without being seen. I, however, was too impatient for all that role-playing, so I just took two poisoned daggers and assassinated them both, took their valuables, and left.

    Of course, it turns out that this was supposed to be test to see if I was good enough to join the Assassin’s Guild, and the other NPC was none other than the Guildmaster Assassin himself, to keep an eye on the new recruit. Naturally, my killing him did not go over well, and the Guild was out for revenge against me and my party. After a few attempts, they did manage to assassinate me, but not before two of my party members died in the crossfire.

    Since then I’ve been forbidden to play assassins.

  77. K says:

    I have to go with Locust here. Mistakes made:

    – Group/GM does not work together on character creation.
    – Player creates character which hates X, where X is very likely to be partymember.
    – GM does not block unworkable character.
    – GM insist on single roll to be made for story progression.
    – GM again blocks inventive character AGAIN.

    I see four brutal GM mistakes there. Just run with it, have the fighter come back with goblins, hope the mages wing it (not hard to do since as a GM, you “roll” for the goblins) and declare the ex-PC a random encounter. Then be nice to the player and cooperate to make a new, more fitting character. Creating a character which hates Mages is an easy mistake to make early on. I’ve got players playing this game for a long time now and they still sometimes write up such characters. “I’m the introverted, egocentrical witch who won’t talk to anyone” – Guess how much fun that character will be.

  78. Avilan the Grey says:

    Never (well almost never) been a GM.

    As a player…

    Well first one was not “Bad” just ruining the mood.
    Horror Game, we were holed up in a hotel somewhere in England, waiting to go out and investigate the hauntings at a nearby cottage.
    During the night a (don’t remember the monster type) supposedly badass, imune to almost everything, monster crawls up the wall and into our room to take care of us. The problem was that my character did not only pass his saving throw for not panicking, but he also had almost world class skills in Boxing. Hilarity ensues when my character, unarmed, gives a right-left-right combo in the face of the unmentionable monster and it plummets out the window. Three times. (The monster tried the same thing two more times during the night, my character passing the check every time, and the monster flew out the window every time).

    Second one, a homemade D&D world:
    The party got so pissed off by the two warring factions they were supposed to mediate between (to create peace in the region, followed by joining everyone against the big Bad’s invading army later in the campaign) that we simply started a third faction taking on both the others. The whole campaign got derailed as we basically locked the whole game world into a three-way struggle for power for several months. (I still partly blame the GM; Since none of us were extremely Good to begin with (Two Neutral Goods, One Chaotic Good, One True Neutral), and everyone we spoke to in leading positions in both factions were @$$holes and totally unsympathetic we just decided “have it your way”).

  79. Felblood says:

    I think the worst railroad move I ever pulled was building a campaign with no rails at all.

    I created a number of factions, all of which had goals. I provided the players with useful factions they could call on for information or quests, if need be, and I provided a number of hostile factions, a few of which might be willing to accept the PCs in if they asked.

    I lined out all the towns and bases on the map and let the players go, confidant that they would fall into my web of interesting interconnected subplots, no matter which way they went.

    Rrrrright.

    They just kept trying to find the rails, no matter how many times I told them there weren’t any. They kept trying to trick me into letting them skip to the “end” never realizing that the only rails was the one that said they made their own ending.

    Eventually, they grabbed onto what was supposed to be foreshadowing for a later side quest and stubbornly pressed on, against my every attempt to dissuade them, that this was the wrong way. The place they ended up walking to was days and days away in the middle of a jungle.

    When they got there, they fought in a tournament that they weren’t supposed to enter, against some guys that I depowered and slapped back together too quickly. Two of the four players killed all three opposing teams inside of a minute, winning an invationion to join the most evil faction in the game world, which they didn’t take, for fear the druid would lose his powers.

    Having wiped out the other evil minion candidates for that year, it was quite difficult to convince them that they couldn’t likewise overcome the evil mastermind, who hadn’t been depowered, and had much stronger minions on hand. That done, they still felt cheated when I gave them an out, offering them a teleportation gate back to civilization, instead of a horrible death in the mouth of some demon.

    There are a lot of players that would have loved that campaign, me among them, but you have to know your audience. Those guys just wanted to kick in some doors, and fight some monsters, with stats that they had memorized out of the Monster Manual.

    I thought I was giving them the freedom to write their own story, but I found them expecting me to write it for them, while they and their characters came along for the ride.

  80. Nine of Swords says:

    Hmm. I remember this one time I joined my friend’s Castles & Crusades group. I was playing a Githyanki fighter who was more unpleasant than I intended to be (sessions were held late at night, I had class early that day and the following day, so I was usually tired and irritable when I showed up). Anyway, the DM introduced a somewhat evil DMPC (he told us that the party *must* have an NPC).

    My character and his got into an argument because they were both rude buggers, which culminated in a fight. The party joined in and we all flailed around in a bunch of spell effects as we tried to fight him, until my character almost died. Then for some reason DMPC joins us anyway and we move on to find the plot.

    When we found it we ended up fighting a portion of an enemy army. Lots of time was spent weakening them and later we entered a huge battle with the command retinue, and won. However, the DMPC was severely injured doing something else elsewhere, where as my character was doing reasonably well. When more enemies came after us I instead attacked the DMPC (okay, maybe not a nice move on my part, but at least it was in character and everyone else found it amusing). The DM had this system of compels to keep us in character. I passed those checks and knocked the guy into negatives. So DM started compelling other characters to stop me. The wizard tried to cast sleep on me but I resisted. Next round I coup de graced DMPC. This didn’t actually affect the outcome of the rest of the battle though, and I didn’t think it would.

    Later we found out that he was going to betray us, but we ended up missing out on whatever else the DM had planned with him. So, I guess this qualifies as a bad derailment (not that I ever found out what was planned), but honestly the only fun I ever had with that group was when my character killed that jerk. It just wasn’t the right group for me, I guess.

  81. Unconvention says:

    I once murdered an entire campaign in its infancy.

    The setup was classic: a demon lord has been imprisoned for a thousand years, and that thousand years is coming to an end. A group of misfit heroes is recruited by the gods to… I can’t remember exactly, but it was along the lines of ‘collect the seven orbs of demon imprisonment’ or some such.

    However, during the divine briefing, it was revealed that the Demon Lord had been imprisoned last time by some vastly high level mage… who was still alive.

    When my character quit saying the mage could just imprison the Demon Lord again, the other PCs saw the wisdom of this and joined me. At that point – and to my great surprise – the GM also saw the wisdom of this, and he quit too.

  82. General Karthos says:

    Worst Derailment Happening To Me:
    I almost never play, so this is really the biggest story I have. I’m running a game for three or four people; I can’t remember. It’s 1E D&D (I love that edition, in spite of its failings), so there are some rather unbalanced spells, particularly the illusionist’s level one spell “Phantasmal Force”. That comes in later.

    So the basic plot has the group going out an killing a small goblin war party, and coming back with a few hundred gold pieces, then getting robbed. After they get robbed, they track down the local thieves guild and start planning to get revenge. Well the thieves guild gets wise to their plan and hires an assassin to kill them all in their sleep.

    Because the thieves guild had robbed them, the group could only afford one room, so they all got hear noise checks for the assassin coming into the room who UTTERLY BOTCHED his move silently check. (I seem to recall saying that on his way into the room via the window he managed to shatter the window, knock over a desk, and crush a chair.) Anyway, they wake up, kill the assassin, and the illusionist is PISSED.

    He figures out the location of the assassin’s guild pretty quickly because he’s TIRED of doing things the easy way, so he intimidates the hell out of a couple of people who happen to know some stuff.

    The group equips, selling some magical item that they were very proud of having, but that served no real purpose. Here’s where I probably should have figured it out, because that group NEVER sells magical items.

    Using the gold from the magical item, they bribe a few influential people to hire the guild for a variety of assassinations, all at around the same time. Then they storm the assassins guild while every high level assassin is out, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and burn the guild headquarters to the ground.

    Not content with revenge on the assassins guild, they go to the thieves guild, only to discover that the assassins have set up shop in the thieves guild, allying themselves with it. Facing a force that could easily overwhelm a party twice their level, the players don’t retreat, instead, in one of the most astonishing invocation of Murphy’s Law in history, EVERY SINGLE high level thief and assassin fails to save (needing to roll a two or higher) against the silent dragon illusion created by the illusionist (Phantasmal Force. Failing a save results in the damage supposedly being dealt, actually being dealt), which proceeds to kill almost the entire guild by itself.

    Then they steal everything not nailed down, and torch the guild. They are hailed by the town as heroes, and the original plot I had is forgotten. To be honest, we all had more fun with the improvised adventures that followed, but eventually, due to a lack of any overarching plot, the game kinda petered out and died.

    So I guess the shame was that the game didn’t last as long as it could have. And my main plot was pretty cool, requiring them to learn something about the thieves guild (I can’t remember what anymore) and proceed to unmask their leader (Who it turns out was a vampire. And extremely vulnerable to fire. Damned Red Dragon illusion and my insanely bad save rolls) and in doing so more or less peacefully disband the thieves guild, but make an enemy of the assassin’s guild and… plot proceeds from there through many adventures.

    And there’s a lich. There must always be a lich.

  83. Daemian Lucifer says:

    About number 2:
    I had to send a huge iron golem almost from thin air,because my dumb players wanted to spend days and days digging through a landslide that the vilains trapped them with,instead of looking for an alternate rout.Later,I had that same golem fell through a pit,because I didnt want them killed in the very begining.

  84. FuzzyDuck says:

    One of the weirdest (yet funny) derailments i participated in involved a village under attack from zombies during their midsummer festival… we had a high-level party, I was playing as a chaotic neutral sorcerer.

    The attack began, and we quickly determined that the zombies were being controlled by a single, more powerful undead wizard – while this one was active, the zombies were just getting back up after being taken out.

    At that point, I cast Control Undead on the undead wizard controlling the horde & was about to get it to simply march them back out of the town. Until another player (chaotic neutral bard) suggested we have some fun first, and promptly cast Irresistable Dance… on the peasants who were cowering in terror.

    Naturally, i couldnt resist the temptation and we turned the midsummer festival into a rather dire rendition of Thriller.. then got run out of the town when the spell ended, completely missing out on a major quest line & forcing the GM to improvise for the next 4 hours

  85. Tom Davidson says:

    I was running a Call of Cthulhu game set in Dunwich (using the Dunwich sourcebook, one of the best sourcebooks ever written). Pretty much every NPC in the town is detailed, and many have hidden secrets and schemes that have nothing to do with the main plot. In an attempt to do the depth of the sourcebook justice, I ran the game in a deliberately “open” fashion; while the characters knew there was a larger plot they had to stop, I didn’t prevent them from getting sidetracked or following red herrings. A minor NPC witch — a member of one of the main clans in the game, but who had become isolated from them due to her distaste for their end goals — wound up befriending the party after they defended her reputation from a group of paranoid (but entirely accurate) witchhunters, and ultimately struck up a romance with one of the two college professors in the party. She accompanied the group on several of their main quests, and as a consequence was present when the party stumbled across something that would enable her to achieve HER goals. Privately, she confided in the professor: she really was a witch, and would gain Supreme Ultimate Power ™ if he helped her get this one thing. He pointed out — correctly — that his friends would probably object to letting anyone in her family access a source of Supreme Ultimate Power ™, to which she coquettishly (and half-jokingly) laughed that it wouldn’t be a problem if he killed them in their sleep. She’d even split the world with him. Much to my surprise, and to the surprise of the other players, he agreed. A few failed skill checks later that evening, the other PCs were dead. And, of course, when he reported successfully back to her, she killed HIM (not, naturally, actually wanting to share the world with anyone). It ended a campaign that’d been running for MONTHS, but was worth the anecdote.

    ——-

    Worst derailing _I_ ever did: as a cynical third-level rogue, I’m approached at an inn by a mysterious old man who wants me to retrieve something for him from an abandoned ruin. I can keep everything else. Being cynical and suspicious, I turn him down flat. Upon leaving the inn, I am jumped by thugs wearing an insignia linked to the description of the item the old man wanted — clearly an attempt to give me an in-character reason to go to the ruin. But it was SO transparent an attempt that I decided my character (with an INT of 15) saw through the subterfuge. I returned to the inn and killed the old man. When the other PCs met outside the city at the appointed time (which I knew because he’d given me the same spiel), I told them that I’d been hired by the old man to lead them. *grin*

  86. roxysteve says:

    [Factoid] (Ad libbing) In point of fact I did ad-lib a game session, but since the adventure that was planned and carefully clued-to the eyeballs had to start with that one clue, and since I am of the school of DMing thought that players who play stupidly should live with the logical consequences of their actions, *especially* if those actions are completely without any sort of in-game motivational foundation whatsoever, they didn’t get the rather enjoyable ride they did on future games when they kept a tighter rein on the “I do it just because I can” style of game-play.

    In real life, how long would you cultivate the companionship of someone who at any given moment would behave totally unpredictably in possibly lethal ways? We call such people “insane” and tend to lock them up in the real world. Remember, PCs in V&V are *heroes*, not evil gits (the game explicitly subscribes to the comics code).

    As for the Call of Cthulhu setting, due to prior events connected with the character’s uncle, yes indeed it WAS possible to alienate a whole (small) village. The people were insular and suspicious, something I went to great length to ensure the players “got” without any need for rolls. The players had a diary in which the (now deceased) uncle stated in black and white that he had managed, by dint of his persistent prying into things the townsfolk considered private, to alienate the vast majority of the on-stage town (the most visible part anyway – the general store owner and every one of the older people who routinely sat and gossiped in it). Player X walked into town, started behaving erratically both in and out of game and went about being deliberately offending as many people he could. Result – all the people who would normally have opened up if he had, say, bought a cup of coffee, sat and played checkers, basically killed ten minutes of real time for a couple of hours game time schmoozing. The shame of it was, these geezers (who let me remind you had nothing better to do than jaw, did so all the time and might therefore be reasonably expected to have a shirtload of annecdotal material which they would probably love a new audience for) were universally offended to the point Player X got told to leave and not come back, and to take his friends with him.

    Setting aside the player shooting off his own foot vis-a-vis removing a vital source of information (information gathering is of primary importance to the Call of Cthulhu in any scenario, and the designers, writers, players and GMs expect players to use the begining of the game to go into overdrive getting that done) and of removing the nearest source of supplies (they were going to camp in a shack on a mountain for a couple of weeks) forcing a totally unnecessary fourteen mile round trip (on foot no less) to get food, ammo etc, the player had done all this for no actual reason other than he felt he should be twitchy after “his war experiences”. I repeatedly pointed out to him (softly) that he was under no such obligation, and that later on he very well might be, but I also have an ironclad “let them play the way they want until the others start complaining” rule.

    Sometimes, saving a PC is railroading. I won’t finesse a situation a player works overtime to engender on themselves against advice to the contrary.

    The players did have a good time, but it was mostly down to my improv skills since I now had to turn what should have been the final act – one that the players had a very good chance of finessing in a way they would have been proud to brag about if Player X hadn’t gone about it the dimwitted way but was now showing all the signs of becoming a boring dice battle (players rarely win those in CofC) – into an appropriately Weird Experience. I did everyone proud (the players themselves are still wigging out over one episode) but it was all so…unnecessary.

    Steve.

  87. Miako says:

    If your players want to go to the police all the time? Why not make the police either corrupt or hostile? AKA “we’ve got murders to solve. why should we help you?” OR “You stole how many thousands of dollars in the past DAY? No WAY we’re not locking you up right now”

  88. Mike says:

    I had the players exploring a mine for leaks, and flooded it to get them into an ancient dungeon with no other clear entrances.

    They crawled up a chute filled with ancient refuse and ended up crawling out of the toilet seats in the guardroom. We had some sticklers in the group, so the dungeon had sources of water, external entrances too small for any of the characters, but big enough for food for monsters to get in.

  89. Luke Maciak says:

    It was a Star Wars D6 campaign. I was playing a smuggler, my brother was a fledgling Jedi and his friend was a droid or something like that. It was a fairly standard courier mission. Some dude working for the local Hut crime lord agreed to pay us big bucks to transport a box from planet A to planet B.

    So we go to the agreed spot, and pick up the package. It is a huge metal crate, with strange markings. It is hermetically sealed, and seems to have no obvious locking mechanism. Our contact explains that this is intentional so that we are not tempted to look in the box. It is coded to the recipients DNA and voice. It will open only when that person touches the box and says the correct keyword. We are paid extra not to ask questions. Fair enough.

    On our way to the ship we get attacked by a lightly armed group. And by attacked I mean approached. They obviously wanted to talk but since they seemed to be intent on taking our box away we preemptively killed all of them.

    One of the survivors was trying to tell us why we should not take the box to the destination but we decided to mercifully take him out of his misery before he could finish.

    We got attacked by stronger and stronger groups like that, all of them hell bent on negotiating and explaining to us that the box cannot reach the destination or something horrible will happen.

    After few hours of this we finally got the hint that there is something really, really important and/or dangerous inside. So what do we do? We decide to open the box.

    We figured that whatever is inside must be worth more than what this mob guy is paying us. Perhaps we can even flip it around to the other faction, but we need to know what it is first.

    So we stop by a hardware store and blow out advance money on cutting lasers, and explosives. We blast at the box, try to blow it up. We manage to only make a few small dents in the casing. The GM is visibly annoyed trying to do everything to get us off this crazy scheme and back on the rails. But hell! We’re not going to be railroaded.

    Finally in a stroke of genius, the Jedi pulls out his lightsaber jumps on top of the box, and plunges it inside cutting it just like they were cutting the blast doors in Phantom Menace.

    Turns out that the box contained some nasty nano-plague that was supposed to wipe out the population of the small moon where so that the mob can take it over and install mining operations there – or something like that. We never really found out the details cause we all died. Whatever was in the box, was deadly, and killed us instantly when the case was breached. :P

  90. YaVerOt says:

    As a player, my two biggest derailments came from:

    1. I actually ending a Star Wars campaign by “I go inside the building and hit the fire alarm.” It effectively finished all 3 quests of the day with a single action. The GM didn’t have the plans for what was next.

    2. This happened before the other one, about half the group was the same, different GM. D&D. I forget what we needed, but we’d found a genie who could get it for us. He had “everything” and wanted something unique he didn’t have. The GM’s plan was to send us off to a dungeon to get something, I nailed down the genie on what he wanted in exchange for what we needed.
    Then I pulled “a picture of saz-tam from before he was a lich” out of my bag of holding. The GM had forgotten he’d given me such a priceless/worthless item. He left the room, came back, left of ice cream, came back.

    Oh, I missed the regretted part in the blog. Oh well, already typed it.

  91. NeilD says:

    Not exactly a complete derailing, but something of an abrupt shortcut to an non-optimal ending…

    Our DM was running a 3.5 campaign that incorporated the Posleen race from John Ringo’s fiction — none of us were familiar with it at the time, so they and their weapons/devices were completely unknown to us. We quickly learned, though, that their technology (floating transports and beam/projectile weapons) were powered by extremely volatile crystals — impacting just a small, low-charged was something like a hand grenade; larger and more-charged ones got exponentially more destructive.

    Aaaaaaanyway, these creatures had appeared from nowhere and were overrunning the countryside — oh, did I mention they also breed like rabbits? They had taken over a nearby fortress as a base of operations, and we were tasked with exterminating them.

    For a change of pace from my usual lawful and/or good character choices, I was playing a female halfling wizard that was bloodthirsty, reckless, and just pure chaos. The party fought its way across the territory, and we finally launched our attack on the stronghold. In the battle, I singled out their leader and (flying with greater invisibility) got off a baleful polymorph spell that succeeded in turning him into a small turtle. My next move was going to be to fly him up a hundred feet and negotiate their surrender, but the DM wasn’t about to let it end that quickly. He had the bodyguards scoop his turtleness up without hesitation and hustle him inside.

    I gave chase (still invisible) but only got so far before they brought him through a crowded room and the DM decreed I wouldn’t be able to follow them without bumping into creatures and giving myself away, even flying near the ceiling. Reluctantly giving up on plan A, I explored a little in another direction and found the armory. Remember the volatile crystals? Here was a room full of them, small and large, weak and strong.

    Now we had been fighting these things for a number of sessions, and they had been a right pain in the ass to deal with. Compound that with the frustration of having my brilliant plan thwarted, and the somewhat kamikaze and sociopathic nature of my character, and there really wasn’t anything else she could do at that moment.

    I forget exactly what I rigged up, but I set up some sort of leather thong that would hold for a few moments, then drop one of the crystals to the floor. Then I booted it out of there at top speed, yelling at the rest of the party to run for their lives, NOW! I think we made it a few hundred yards before everything went boom.

    When the party came to, severely wounded, half-deaf and half-blind, there was nothing left of the fortress but a smoking crater. The other party members (and players, and DM) were aghast, but my character just shrugged and said that a fight had broken out over who was in charge now that the leader was a small amphibian, they started shooting at each other in the vicinity of the armory, and all I could do was get us out of there before the inevitable happened. A shame, but what can you expect from some such brutal, violent creatures?

    After a few moments they seemed to realize that if they didn’t try to press me for the truth, they wouldn’t have to lie about it when asked. I had given them a plausible explanation that left us pretty much in the clear, and after all, we did succeed in our primary goal of wiping out the creatures (yay genocide).

    Honestly, I didn’t expect my character to survive the blast, but the DM was a good guy and didn’t exact retribution. And we helped rebuild the fortress afterwards, so there was some karma balance to make the lawful-types feel better.

    I don’t know if I’d say I regretted it, but I’m not sure I feel entirely good about it either. Clearly, it cut short what the DM had planned, and I do try to be considerate of the time and effort that any DM puts into running a game. It was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

  92. Calli says:

    Jeff @ 63:

    Regarding the ‘Evil Player’ incident, that’s not how I remember things, but your version sounds cooler. It makes me sound more awesome than I was, at any rate.

    To everyone else: yes, I am the player in Jeff’s story who took OOC rage at Evil Player’s asshattery and turned it IC, and may or may not have added to the campaign derailment. (If it wasn’t already noted, this game was set in the Forgotten Realms.)

    My recollection: pretty much the same as Jeff’s up until the attack from behind. I did 5 damage or so — and our party was an average of 5th level, so this was about the same as a dopeslap with lethal damage. (I wanted to make it subdual, but sneak attack (I was multiclassed rogue/fighter) didn’t work that way or something.) Oh, how I wish it was an instant KO. Evil Player promptly turned around to attack -my- character, and I think it was one of the NPC celestial monks that knocked him out (and probably saved my character’s life). Either way, once we returned to our home base of operations in Cormyr, the party unanimously punted Evil Player’s character. With a little help from the local authorities.

    I’m pretty sure I have logs of the session, but it would be too much of a hassle to dredge them up right now for a fully accurate account (they’re on another, currently not set up machine).

    Anyway, Evil Player’s next character? A Red Wizard from Thay. I don’t know if he got a chance to play it or not before the player himself was asked not to return, but if there had been any doubt about his attitude toward team playing that wiped it clear away. As if his constant whining about how D&D sucked, his Steve Jackson fanboying (GURPS was his One True System, ye shalt have no other systems before it, et cetera ad nauseam), and his poorly masked evil behavior under the guise of neutrality wasn’t enough indication.

    I don’t know if that killed the game, but it did end up dying some time after the incident.

    And for what it’s worth, I DO regret doing that. OOC disgust and anger should not be expressed IC. Not even when it opens the floodgates of everyone else’s resentment. It’s in incredibly poor taste, at best.

    I derailed the second Fellowship of the Argumentative pretty badly too, but I haven’t reached the point where I can think about that without recoiling and forcing myself to think of other things. So I won’t be telling that story.

  93. Burning Beard says:

    First, I’ve never commented here, but have been reading for quite a while. Thanks for all the entertainment.

    Let me preface this by saying that I live in rural nowhere, so available DMs are few and far between. This has left me with scant options for a game, and I basically have one go-to group. The DMs are not very imaginative and the campaigns are poorly veiled railroads more often than not. Supposedly that’s changed with the latest game, but I’ve lost my urge to play so I’m out of this one. But, one time I was the engine of unraveling for a big villain and it was sweet.

    We were supposed to take out this lich that had been dogging us for quite a while. This guy was not drawn out very well aside from through the attrocities that he perpetrated, but it was just detailed enough that we really wanted him dead. So, we cought up to him at last and the fight was on. But, I had a brilliant idea. I had noticed that silence is based on a radius, and not single-targeted. I proceeded to cast it on our half-orc barb, who took it willingly. He proceeded to charge the lich, grapple him, and effectively nullify all casting opportunity. Needless to say, a lich that can’ cast isn’t so scary. Our DM was enraged beyond measure, but he took it in stride. I think he’s still bitter over that since the build-up took probably three months or more of play. In hindsight we were assholes about it, but self-preservation is a mighty strong motivator at times.

  94. Jay says:

    Wow, I don’t know if Shamus intended it, but this was a real eye opener to me.

    Most derails are committed by self centered players.

    Most epic railroads seem to be run by inflexible DM’s

    Seriously, reading the derails is paiunful, I am very glad that I do not game with anyone so self centered or destructive. You don’t like what the DM has prepared so you. . .do insane thing X? And has anyone else notice the high number of these that contain evil PC’s? This is why that is a bad idea friends, it gives the *player* license to be a douchebag.

    And the railroading, most if it could be pretty easily salvaged with a little on your toes out of the box thinking. I didn’t see much that was beyond recovery there. Especially sad was the yearly game with 70 hours of gameplay lost, this should be a lesson to DM’s, your PC’s will never, ever do what you think, and your plans should be loose and ever changing, with contingiencies and backups in case things go awry.

    Not that this hasn’t been entertaining reading, mind you…

    Jay

  95. I had players decide that they were going to ally with the Cthuloid menace faction.

  96. B.J. says:

    My worst railroading experience wasn’t anything fancy but was quite textbook in its cheapness. Basically the DM auto-captured a 12th-ish level party by sending a Balor at us and having it spam Mass Hold Monster. Of course we were all instantly caught. This so he could put us in his stupid dungeon where we were tortured with a big Demon Mutation Machine thingy he got out of some 3rd party book which he thought would just be awesome. It screwed over most of the party members with crippling deformities or permanent stat penalties. Then the DM graciously allowed us to escape from the prison, minus all of our stuff. What a swell guy.

    Strangely, the final Big Bad of the campaign was much, much weaker than the Balor he apparently summoned to capture us.

  97. Roxysteve says:

    As a DM, when confronted by situiations where the players decide to do something monumentally boring instead of epically heroic in a high-fantasy setting (like those players who set up shop as bandits) I go for the same solution Shamus had the DM of the Rings select when dealing with Aragormless’s insistent “courting” (ahem) of Eowin.

    I sit back with a bored look and say “you succeed. How many months of income, death by attrition and sundry maimings through combat and disease would you like?” (I naturally kill off the NPCs first, but they get no new ones because, well, you know, everyone they meet they kill and rob). Once the message is clear we can talk about what they want from a game and we can move forward.

    I *will* DM a game that is more interesting to the players than to the GM – one Traveller scenario springs to mind about which everyone came to me over the next few days and volunteered what a great time they had had, but during which I had come close to chewing off my own leg to escape – but I won’t willingly DM real life drudgery. I get enough of that out-of-game.

  98. carl says:

    It seems to me that the derails that were nasty (eg Locust’s) were due to a combination of everyone’s being a jerk, not just the derailer.

    The thing about the door you couldn’t walk through? (1) It’s a real jerk thing that the DM wouldn’t let him follow the mages, and (2) It’s terrible that the mages didn’t wait for him (especially since in a narratable game like this, you can just say ‘and we waited until he found the door’). It was a nasty move to go sell the horses and hire goblins, but really I wouldn’t want to play with people who did that to me anyway.

    My own stories are less interesting, but more frequent: for a long time, I was a chaotic evil assassin (hehe. though not as blatantly jerk-like as the others I’ve seen mentioned here; think more comically evil, like Belkar from the Order of the Stick; my character maintains the ability to coexist with society in-game through really big lies, and coexist with the fellow party members through out-of-character friendship. My character kind of fits in with this ridiculous party, including a sorceror who, once he found some fire resistance, is determined to keep himself lit on fire at all times. This makes lodging rather complicated.). I have done a lot of silly things, like sneakly backstab guards that were helping us in a battle once it looked like we were winning (noone found out besides the party, so it worked out ok). I have managed to derail an adventure or two by killing NPC’s, but only when they were obviously bad dudes and worth killing. Of course, my (and my character’s) first instinct upon finding a mean NPC is to kill them in their sleep and take whatever map they had so we can continue on with the adventure. DM’s have sort of figured this out about my character and since things have always been comical (especially with the vast quantities of 1’s i roll) they just play along. My favourite had to be killing an NPC that was turning evil … before he really had a chance to turn evil. Managed to avoid a big dangerous fight. This was something with many sessions worth of build up, transporting various important items through dangerous locales that wanted to eat us, and with the NPC (royal mage from the elven city we were helping) asking to hold it (always a bad sign!).

  99. Miako says:

    Actually, most player derails that I’ve been in, have been the result of Serious Mental Problems on the part of the player. Getting your hand cursed into a stuck middle finger (umm… giving the finger to everyone you meet) should have taught this player that maybe the Magic Shop Owner wasn’t to be messed with (this is Kulthea. magic shops are about the biggest target for anyone who might want to rob them. therefore there are protections.). No. He tries to intimidate the poor old witch. Then he gets sent to clean the outhouse, turns into a werewolf when he realizes how bad cleaning the outhouse would be, accidentally drops the outhouse contents on an alien from another dimension, and causes diamonds to rain down on the entire town.

    Net result: character has price on his head from immortal alien god.

    I don’t think this actually derailed our game, so much as it was utterly hilarious, and would have derailed our game had it continued long enough.

    Bored GMs have fun. Letting your level one Chaotic Mage cast spells just to see what happens (net result: one portal to a negative realm where a bad dragon stumbles out, only to be polymorphed into a gold dragon who wished the whole thing away. then an anvil fell on the mage’s head).

    Letting this same character cast a spell by dancing circles around a different player character (werewolf from before. different campaign), and then seeing what happens when you have nine different “chaotic spell shields” which cast random spells if they go off, instead of the one you want.

    Net result: word of command to sleep (neutral good priest of life wanted to steal a horse so that he wouldn’t have to walk and be ridiculed — see what I mean about instability?) got turned into TurnToStone, so we now have him having stoned a stablekeeper. Then the stable boy shows up and is about to yell murder. So he tries to blackjack the kid to knock him out, but fails and kills him. (this quickly spirals out of control).

    End result: one dead character and one player who won’t show up to games anymore. didn’t have any clue and still doesn’t about how he turned that kid to stone.

  100. Swedish GM says:

    In my second real campaign one of the players played a character that had no memory of his past – let’s call him Bob. His character having no memory made it easy for me to make some interesting stuff like “flashbacks” and NPCs that knew him. I had his entire backstory written down and all the NPCs that knew him planned.

    At one point in the campaign the players were for very complicated reasons headed to a brothel to meet up with a woman who were going to give them certain information.

    We have this guy in our group who always do what seems fun instead of what might be concidered smart. As it happens, that was also the guy we now call Bob.

    I described the woman as a busty woman in her mid-fortys. Naturally the players zoned out at the word “busty”, so the rest of her description got lost.

    Of course Bob started hitting on her and this was where I started to laugh, but the players didn’t know why and looked like living qeustionmarks. (I believe that’s an expression we only use in Sweden)

    After a while the more intelligent player(s) in the group asked who she really was, because she seemed to know very much about Bob. For a moment she was quiet and stared at the table. Then she looked up and said:

    “I’m his sister.”

    We still mock Bob for this (I mean seriously, he rolled so many times against “Seduce” that one could wonder why the table was not set afire).

    Now, this was pretty bad for the game since no one could really focus on what was happening. I could just have skipped that thing about him having a sister and the result of the game wouldn’t have changed that much.

    For the record: one of the reasons we joke about Bob is because he in real life really HAS got a hot and busty sister.

  101. Swedish GM says:

    I’ve got another one too. But that’s ,pre a player de-railing me. But not in the way one would think. This was during my first campaign and there were only three players and me as a GM.

    One of the players I mentioned in my earlier post I call Bob.

    Another player who isn’t really that important to this particular story is Dà¥ken.

    And then we have the player who this is really about. We’ll call him Mr. X (That’s what he is always calling himself).

    Now, Mr. X, Dà¥ken and Bob were facing a powerful demon in a room. They had no chance of beating him, but they didn’t need to, they were just going to stall him so that Mr. X could get an artifact that he was guarding.

    Once the battle started everything got a bit confusing.
    Bob got a clean hit at their foe, but the entire party was shocked by disbelief when the wound closed up as if it had never been.

    When this happened Dà¥ken suddenly anounced:

    “Yeah, I’m not fighting that. I turn back.”

    So he left Bob to alone fight an enemy I had designed to be a three-man job. (My original idea was for them to “knock” him out with a single blow. They could have succeeded with just the two of them, their plan was better than I would have thought of)

    The players knew that within the artifact this demons soul was kept and he would do anything to defend it. What did they think would happen when Mr. X picked it up?

    The demon turned from Bob and ran directly at Mr. X. Dà¥ken watched without lifting a finger.
    I figured that they could still save themselves, but never before have I seen such a poor display of dice-rolling.

    Mr. X tried to dodge since that was his best skill. He fumbled and fell to the ground, hitting his forehead. That caused him to roll for some damage. What should have been like 2 Trauma and 3 Pain points became a serious headwound, which unfortunately meant we had to roll even more dice. His brain and spine was damaged and he could move or touch his pinkie. He was pretty much paralyzed from the waist down.

    Bob and Mr. X blamed this on Dà¥ken and things were starting to heat up at the table, almost as if Mr. X in real life actually had suffered a grievous wound. I did not know how to solve it.

    They managed to get out of there alive and eventually they got a biomantician to heal Mr. X, but his pinkie was never the same and through their poor rolling and Dà¥ken’s in-action their cool demon-manifested dungeon of Alger Icecrown, last of the royal mages, became a survival horror without a wheel-chair.

    I managed to save most of the campaign – eventually – and I think the players liked getting to try to plan every move much more (they are big fans of planning moves, it’s pretty much why they play the game). So once they calmed down and stopped discussing what HAD happened, they realised this was why played at all. Solving problems. They were in a few tough spots, but had a lot of fun.

    My only regret though is that they never got to Alger Icecrown. They had come for him and left without even meeting the guy. He was the main-villain and I had the meeting all planned out!

    Well, stuff like that happens.

  102. Sam says:

    My only real train wreck stories as a player are very minor, because the DMs I’ve played under have been fairly forgiving and can work well on the fly. I can remember a couple of times in my first campaign where I killed some big baddie in one or two hits and the DM was struggling to figure out what to do next, but nothing worse than that. But I certainly did like the look on his face as a character he undoubtedly spent at least an hour creating go down in two hits from my barbarian’s great axe.

    As a GM, I’ve tried very hard not to railroad my players. The only real instance I’ve had of railroading is to force them to continue the story by telling them that if they don’t assist whomever I have them working for, that there’d be an army there ready to make them. Of course, they asked, “Well, if you have an army, why do you need our help?” To which I stumbled around a half-assed reply, and they just accepted that this was the only way for the story to move forward. So they obliged. I need to work on that.

  103. Lime says:

    Great stories. They make me want to game again, despite their negative nature. My best examples come from a long-running Ravenloft campaign I played in. Our party was good-intentioned, yet somehow we always ended up destroying every town we came to. The best specific examples of plot-ruining are:

    -at one point we came to a town in which everyone was starving. The DM had a whole adventure planned around us helping the poor villagers. Unfortunately, we were also out of food, my character was cursed as a (rather large) wererat, and the full moon was near. He became ravenous when transformed, so if we didn’t have lots of meat handy, he’d start eating NPCs (or PCs!). Consequently, we said ‘sorry about your problems’ and headed on down the road. The DM was forced to improv the rest of the evening.
    -later, the DM had us encounter a cursed woman (trapped in the ‘domain’ of her house) whose gaze turned people into animals. However, we got the idea that she was evil, rather than cursed, so when we found her heart, the key to freeing her, we… cooked and ate it. With onions. I admit that by this point in the campaign our characters were all a bit crazy and paranoid.

  104. Thomas says:

    As a player in Paranoia: we’d been chasing several mutants, and has gone in to the local security centre to find out more. Turns out this particular mutant somehow wasn’t showing up on any of the security systems (you’d see a door open with no-one visible, for example). Anyway, who should walk in but the mutant we’re looking for! So a firefight starts up between the mutant and his cronies, and us troubleshooters with lots of plasma-generator-toting security staff. One of them asks (well, threatens with a plasma generator) me to help them out in some way, so I create a wall of ice. It all goes well for a bit – the good NPCs chisel holes through and fire though those, but the ice starts melting as the bad NPCs use *their* plasma generators. So I get the bright idea of freezing a plasma generator off, roll something stupidly high (in Paranoia, high numbers are bad), and freeze a plasma generator *on*.

    And, as plasma generators do, it quickly overheats, explodes, sets off all the *other* plasma generators which also explode, and turns the security centre along with several blocks of Alpha Complex into a nice crater. Oh, and neatly incinerates the entire plot in the process, not to mention the entire party.

  105. Claws says:

    My first GMing experience went horribly wrong because I didn’t know the powers available to the various characters well enough.
    I had the characters meet the main villain very early on, in what was supposed to foreshadow a final battle much later. One of the players had mind reading capabilities and found out everything the villain knew. I just about had to turn over the entire campaign notes to a player in the second session.
    Now, when I play a system with mind powers, I give players this option: Take only those mind powers you’re willing to have used against you or the party. I’ll only use your own weapons against you, though not strictly at the same power level. Very few players ever take mind powers now.

  106. "Ted" Theodore Logan says:

    Excellent, Wild Stallions.

  107. Satan's Pet Chicken says:

    Worst thing I ever did to a game was at the end of a long long run game. I was playing a 3.5 Cleric and using the Book of Exalted Deeds book. We go for the major confrontation with the epic level Litch Necromancer, who is the ruler of a magocracy, and I get a chance to hit him with one spell right away. I cast my brand new level 9 spell Sanctify the Wicked…and it works.

    Everyone is all geared up for the big final showdown, and first move out I trap the villan in a diamond for a whole year game time after which he is turned good. The GM had no words, and neither did one of the other players that could not understand why I would learn a spell that to use you have to give up a whole level’s worth of XP.

  108. Ermel says:

    This was in a Traveler game. GM had prepared for a bunch of villains to invade our spaceship, and planned for the ensuing battle to last for at least the rest of the evening, when instead the following dialogue took place:

    Me: Do we have anti-grav belts on board?
    GM: Sure.
    Me: Are they wearing anti-grav belts?
    GM: No.
    Me: I make sure everyone of us wears one, and that they’re properly activated. Then I use the manual override for the ship’s anti-grav system … it does have one I trust?
    GM: *rolls dice* Yeah, it does.
    Me: Okay. Everyone ready? Here we go: Plus 10 g, minus 10 g, plus 10 g, minus 10 g, and back to normal. Any survivors?
    GM: *rolls dice for a minute* *sigh* No.

    :-)

  109. quicksilver_502 says:

    in Paranoia, everyone is colour-coded by rank with ultrviolet being the top people who can influence the computer who runs things. in one of the books the game states that the GM is one of the ultraviolet. so me and the rest of the players decided this meant that he must be somewhere in the game world. cue a 3-session long hunt in which our GM pretty much gave up on his original campaign and attempted to evade us. i believe we ended up killing him by blowing up half the complex…

  110. -Chipper says:

    While I can sympathize with DMs who put in a lot of prep time, there is something admirable and fun about players finding quick routes to success that the DM didn’t expect. One of the hazards of being a DM, I suppose

  111. Amazon warrior says:

    Our planescape party once caused the GM a significant headache after he’d just thrown us in prison. Justifiably, in fairness to him. The chaotic neutral guy decided to run riot (again!) when some guards just wanted to ask us some questions. It was bad enough that he got put in a high-security cell separate from the other two of us. Anywho, a friend of his from the revolutionaries turned up and gave him some chaos stuff with acid in, or something, and he escaped. And the other player and I said words to the effect of “That’s nice, you carry on dude. We’re just playing chess over here in our cells. Please don’t disturb us.” So CN guy did his damnedest to cause mayhem in the prison while we sat and finished our nice game of chess. Our excuse for this course of action? My character was Lawful Good, and the other just enjoyed annoying and denying CN guy. CN guy was furious about this and decided to try and beat himself to death with his make-shift wooden club because he was so pissed off at us. The GM called a halt at this point and we had a bit of a chat to sort things out, then we ran it again the next week. It went much more smoothly the second time, after it was made clear to all of us that it was actually the bad guys holding us prisoner (a crucial piece of information we missed in the first try).

    What did I learn from all this? Never try to wrestle snakes less than 30cm long. It’s REALLY difficult.

    Edit: Oh, and they don’t give you reach, either.

    1. WJS says:

      Why is it so many people play “Chaotic Neutral” as “Batshit Insane”?

  112. Loneduck3 says:

    Here’s a couple things regarding my worst derailing. First of all, it was my fist time gaming. Secondly, we were playing DnD with a Munchkin (via Steve Jackson games) sourcebook. Thirdly, the DM made the mistake of giving each of us a random item from the Munchkin book. I got a little pet dragon that perched on my shoulder.
    So I have in mind as my PC this knight who seeks to purify the world through cleansing fire. We had a bit of debate over whether that would qualify as Lawful Good, Lawful Evil, or Chaotic Neutral. I think I just accepted Chaotic Neutral. So anyway, upon cleansing the alcohol soaked den of iniquity (the pub), I went to get my horse back from the stable, but the stableboy refused to give it back. (I.E. the GM, rather than admitting he didn’t want me to have a horse at this point, went the passive-aggressive route and just took it away.) So I attacked the thieving stable boy. My attempts at grappling were failing, so I yanked the dragon’s tail. The stableboy was first burned, and then trampled by the stampede of flaming horses. My party members were busy throwing up (from intoxication) in the town fountain and looking inconspicuous. And this was before we even got out of town. So yeah, that game didn’t last too long. The DM was trying to railroad us into a parody of Nuklear Power.

  113. Cybermancer says:

    Good day!

    I can’t recall the worst case of me railroading players. I’m sure there were some but I just don’t recall them.

    I do recall a recent derailment I perpetrated however.

    Our group was exploring the World’s Largest dungeon. We managed to procure some maps made by a group of previous adventurers and we were following a route we were pretty sure would lead us out, the quickest way possible.

    Not far into a new region we come to a door on the map and we tell the DM that we search if for traps. He checks the door, refers to the book and his notes and then states, “There is no door there.”

    Me, “There is no door as indicated on the map?”

    Him, “Nope.”

    Me, “The map made by adventurers who already explored this region and eventually found their own way out?”

    Him, “Well, actually, there /was/ a door but now it’s bricked over.”

    Other players, “Choo! Choo! ALL ABOARD!”

    Me, “Now shush you lot. Okay, so I pull out my sledge hammer and start to pound the bricks into dust.”

    Him, his face twitching a bit. “You’ll be there all day.”

    Me, picking up dice, “We got time.”

    Surprisingly few dice rolls later we bust through and discover half a dozen minotaur guards who’ve laid a trap for us. So we battle our way through them to discover that they were protecting a treasury. Being adventurers, we loot it.

    From there we begin to casually explore the region on our way through to a hoped for escape. We have a couple of non-violent encounters with young and old minotaurs and we start to realize that they’re not the attack everyone you see denizons we’ve grown accostomed to in this dungeon.

    Then the alarm goes up when the dead minotaur guards are discovered. Realizing that we’re hauling their entire treasury around with us, we decide to put it back. Except we run into guards on the way back.

    So then it becomes a running fight. The sorceror manages to slow them down long enough for us to reference our maps. We spot a fairly large room with only one entrance that we can hole up in. The entrance is a fairly narrow hallway that we can use a killing zone.

    The use of some clever spells and we manage to get a bit of lead on our pursuers. But that room we were retreating to? It was, of course, the Minotaur chieftans main hall/throne room. And we come charging in with his treasury atop our mule cart and half his guards not too far behind.

    Naturally we start talking as fast we can.

    To no avail as the guards finally burst in behind us exclaiming we’ve killed some of the elite guards. Most the party prepares for their final battle.

    I draw my sword and declare, “I challenge the chieftian to one on one combat to the death, winner take all!”

    He accepted.

    One and a half turns later, he’s dead, I’m unharmed and all the minotaurs are ‘cowed’. ^_-

    Later, the DM confessed that it all started because he wanted to force us to use these things called ‘warp gates’ which our route would have bypassed.

  114. Yar Kramer says:

    Ah, an old entry.

    Hmm. I don’t play RPGs, but I once heard about a Paranoia game which opened with the GM passing each player a note (different instructions from their Secret Societies, etc); the looked at their notes, then looked at each other suspiciously … and then proceded to all slaughter each other. Before even leaving their barracks.

    Mind you, in Paranoia, this sort of thing is more of a success … ;)

  115. Tacoma says:

    I enjoyed reading everyone’s replies as much as I do a normal Shamus post.

    Of course, we’re talking a lot of volume containing a few gems here and there combined to equal one usual post. But still.

    I avoided a bad derailment was when we killed this horrible golem thing and the DM said its metal body was equivalent to +4 metal. So if you made a dagger out of some metal it would be equivalent to a +4 dagger. There was … a LOT of metal because this golem was just enormous. Like 40′ cube on spider legs.

    So we get back to town and get the town leaders to send out a crew to bring the thing in. We never got a reward for removing this danger to their town, and I negotiated that they would turn this thing into 10-pound ingots if we gave them 10% of the ingots. We didn’t even supervise, so they could screw us over and take more if they wanted. We each ended up with over a thousand ingots.

    Now if you do the math, making a +4 sword and selling it isn’t normally worthwhile but if the sword doesn’t need to be enchanted suddenly you have a much better profit margin. Furthermore the metal was immune to antimagic and such.

    Now I didn’t want to completely ruin his game. My plan was originally to market the equipment as magic items that were protected from antimagic effects. Sell them to plane travelers (since the magic in an item descends as you get farther from its plane of origin, but not for these items). That would mean the items would be worth even more than standard +4 items.

    But I never did. I could have just occasionally handed him a note saying I was magically reshaping an ingot into a couple swords or a bunch of daggers. When we strolled into town I could have sold a +4 dagger here, a +4 shortsword next time. I could have used +4 items in barter when buying a magic item from someone else. Need to buy healing potions from the temple? Trade a couple +4 maces for all they have!

    Alas I changed characters because my existing one had absolutely no reason to stay and I was somewhat dissatisfied with the campaign. I needed to create a character that had to stay and help the people out. And that next character didn’t have any spiffy metal :_(

  116. Sydney says:

    I don’t have a story of my own for now – I’m too tired to type it all up, and I’m too long-winded to summarize. I’ll post it tomorrow.

    But this is interesting.

  117. Matt says:

    I created a crystal cavern based on the one found in Mexico thinking it would give a sense of awe and wonder to the players, traipsing through a cave full of 50 ft long crystals. After about a dozen failed balance checks and a half hour of near falls and pulling each other up with ropes I ended up handwaving the player with the best balance modifier across. Sometimes your great idea is just no fun.

  118. Trae says:

    I know just how Sam (#102) feels. My fighter has crazy-high attack and damage bonuses with the greatsword and Great Cleave feat, and most regular fights could possibly be ended with a few swings of the sword. The DM purposefully pits me against either many more, or more powerful, enemies than the rest of the party who gang up on whatever’s left because of this, and sometimes I still have to go rescue them.

  119. Innsmouth says:

    In generic wild west town # 26 our bounty hunter found someone who was A) worth a lot of money and B) calimed to have valuable information. He was already in prison. Logically, the bounty hunter decided to break him out (it didn’t fit the character but it fit the way we were doing things anyway). He got caught, and being the movie version of the old west the Law’s only play is to shoot at you and arrest you if you survive. So we had to slaughter all the deputies in town. There were a lot of them.
    After we got done laughing about it and we realized what we’d done there was a moment of quiet “Well… fuck”.

  120. Mrsnugglesworth says:

    In one of my sessions, my group of evil people wanted to rob some rich guys in Waterdeep (FR) so the DM wanted us to go into Undermountain, but we were having none of that. We decided to use this chest which teleported people to a spot in the forest. The plan was that I (The Wizard) and the Rogue would stay at the house while the rest of the party (Fighter, Ranger, Monk, and Cleric) would go to the spot in the forest. So I put the chest on the front door and the rogue knocks, we hide and wait. The man takes the chest, and go inside. Shit. Didn’t expect that. So the Rogue and I go up to the window and peek in. The man opens the chest and GIANT BLACK TENTACLES SHOOT OUT AND TAKE HIM INSIDE THE CHEST! So we’re freaking out, I Alter Self into a Guard, to talk to the wife. So I’m knocking on the door, she opens it and I’m like “Ma’am, I have to talk to you about your husband.” So I take her to her couch and the rogue hides in the closet. I talk to her, and then say “Your Husbands dead”, while she’s crying, the rogue comes in and rolls badly on a non-lethal damage roll to knock her out and our DM was feeling mean so he had him break her skull and kill her. The Rogue then goes upstairs and takes her stuff, and I grab the chest which starts shaking and a 10ft Black Lizard comes out with the Old mans Pajamas ripped up around him. I scream and run outside, find some guards, the guards kill said lizard, but then they find the womans body. Long story short, the Rogue got beheaded and he had to roll another character.

  121. seodoth says:

    Player:
    As a lvl 6 paladin, I once backhanded a superior commander Paladin with my metal clad hand and challenged him to a duel :D (from which a ran away). Wooops…

  122. Roninsoul7 says:

    The worst derailment I ever did as a player was with a specific character in a rifts game. I had purposely made the character to be able to make and use any type of gun, no matter how outlandish it was, even went so far as to choose the one class that was a master of doing such things. The GM had a long intricate plan where we were supposed to barely be able to beat the first wave in a multiwave war, except he left an insanely powerful gun nearby. No one else even had a chance of figuring out how to use it, but my character (a gunfighter) just had to make an easy roll. A few seconds after that, one shot later and his carefully laid escalation of battle that was supposed to take hours and make us sweat, had taken a few minutes and one roll. He had to replan everything from that point on.

    As a GM my worst derailment came when I planned out and mapped a world for my players, took almost six months to get it right and stable. The first game in, my players came across a tribe of goblins that had been raiding the human village nearby, and proceeded to do what heroes do, they went in with the intent of being nothing more than hired mercs bent on genocide. One player however, who was quiet intentionally to let everyone else get their say, suddenly takes up with the goblin fighter I had made and tells the players that the oppression of the goblin race had to stop. I was flabberghasted that he went in such a direction, and not only that, but the other characters who always had listened to his rare advice decided to run with it. Suddenly I have a party of heroes who are wandering around preaching on equal rights for goblins, designing better homes and teaching them their classes. It went so far out of what I had planned for them, that I let it go on for awhile, letting the players move along where they wished, then had to rewrite the whole campaign I had planned, since that tribe of goblins were suddenly given a new direction in life (high charisma paladin was the quiet player, and he spent time to change the whole tribe) and were now allied with the people I had planned on them attacking. The actual changes only took a few minutes, most of the time was convincing myself that I was not allowed to “punish” my players for finally getting into the role side of the game more than the roll like I had expected from them.

  123. Jupiter says:

    My best stick it to the DM moment:

    I was playing in a 3.5 Dark Sun campaign. I was a Mul Cleric, everyone else was some flavor of Psionic (naturally.) Dragon mag had recently done an article on siege weaponry, and the DM wanted to incorporate that into the game. He just so happened to have planned for a giant energy dragon thing to attack the city. He was practically giddy because what we didn’t know was that this dragon had DR of like a million…except against Magic weapons. So I (completely ignorant of this fact and merely wanting to help) walk up and cast Magic Weapon on the cannon. I swear he almost killed me…We weren’t supposed to win that fight.

    A similar thing happened when I was running an Earthdawn campaign. The party was being attacked by some flavor of minor horror that they weren’t supposed to be able to damage…and then a character rolled whatever the Earthdawn equivalent of a critical hit is and killed one. Not wounded, killed. Then the next guy did the same thing. I was pissed.

  124. Joe says:

    My personal favorite, if the epic oldness of this thread can be forgiven, was when my DM was running a pretty free-form thing where we uncovered a mystery regarding a circle of thieves and a stolen elixir. At one point, the 3 of us were separated and attacked (individually) by some thugs. Well, our Druid managed to kill his, but the mage and I (bard) were in a little more trouble; I was getting ambushed in my sleep, and he was just in a terrible situation to be fighting.

    Luckily, Rogues have poor will saves, and the both of us knew charm person. After the surprise round ends, the one attacking me crit fails his attack roll and embeds his rapier into the bed next to me. That means I’m free to charm him and have a nice long chat about his employers, the elixir, where it’s being stored, and so on. We basically short-circuited the entire story with a first-level spell.

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