Games gone awry

[RavensPath]

I am sure that all GM's have had a mid game twist by a character doing an unexpected action. Thought we could share some here.

 

We just had a small gaming convention here in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and it was a success. We ran a number of games including Champions. The afternoon was blocked out into two gaming times, each about 2 hours long. In the first session I ran a modifed 'Catch me if you can' from the Legion of Heroes stuff. Fun but mostly just battle. The second session had me with the 2 of the three same players so I improvised a game. Had Champions Battlegrounds with me so pulled Foxbat Girl and Boy out of it and had them attack a mall concert. The team of three took them out easy. Pulled Icicle from Champions Universe and had her do a jewelry heist at the same time (she hired the people to be a distraction). She knocked one player done and was fleeing when she was knocked off her ice slide by PC who is also an ice projector. He had tried to entangle her and when it didn't work he figured his powers wouldn't work on her. Icicle hit the ground and PC with telekineses pinned her down. She let loose an ice sheet across the floor in response.

 

Now this is where it gets good!

 

The Ice character says "I walk up to her and break her neck." Needless to say I was stunned. "You what?" I think was my response. "I break her neck. My powers don't work on her so I break her neck." Fine. The police came and arrested the whole team then. At the police station they are in a holding cell and the DA asks what happened.

 

His response was "Self defense."

 

DA: "Let me get this straight, she was pinned to the ground and had passed on a chance to attack your teammate when fleeing and you are claiming self defense."

 

PC: "Yes, my powers wouldn't work on her and she was going to cause more damage. I saved those peoples livehoods and lots of money in damages to the mall."

 

DA:"So you get to decide that if someone is too much of a problem to deal with that they can die? Because you don't want to deal with them?"

 

PC: "Yes."

 

She left, they tried to escape. No powers thank to power dampers. Did escape when lawyers came. Attacked police officers and fled custody. When being pursued by police decided to ice roads so that cars would crash. They did, causing millions in property damage and lost life. PC finally realized that he had caused more damage than Icicle would have. Thought about turning himself in, but then decided to become a criminal instead.

 

How is that for derailing a game. It was a ball to run, it just took me by suprise. One of the other GM's at the con asked how the game went. I said good, the heroes had become villians by the end of the session and were wanted for murder. He just laughed.

 

What are your stories?

[nexus]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Were these characters Casual Killers or something? Or just really concerned with property damage?

 

I guess the more apt question was "Did the PLAYERS realize how insane they were playing their character?"

[tkdguy]

Re: Games gone awry

 

I have to plead guilty on disrupting games by having my character kill or maim people. In self defense, it was because either I had a bad week, or the GM did something to really tick me off. Or both.

[Alex Raven]

Re: Games gone awry

 

A couple of observations...first, its a convention game which generally means that even good players lose their minds and act the fool. Second, the game was probably a blast to run AND play because the latitude the GM gave the players. I've experienced games where the GM is wound pretty tight and controls every move to fit the preconcieved scenario. I've also had the best time when playing in games that were loosely controlled and the GM was savvy enough to let the players direct the flow of the game.

[Alex Raven]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Now, when the GM has ticked me off I've done some crazy things. I remember one convention game of Champs way back when. The players were actually ticking me off so I turned on them and killed the guy who was ruining play for everyone. The Gm didn't seem to think it was wrong and turned a "blind eye" as I brutalized the PC. The player kept pleading with the GM to have me stop and also tried to rally his friends to come to his aid. They knew he was a pain too and just let me wipe him out.

 

After that, the game was great.

[RavensPath]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Were these characters Casual Killers or something? Or just really concerned with property damage?

 

I guess the more apt question was "Did the PLAYERS realize how insane they were playing their character?"

 

 

They were not casual killers. That is what made it funny. The player that killed Icicle had never played Champions before and he didn't get the fact they were heroes. After he did it he started to rationalize all the heroes in comics that kill people in self defense. I honestly believe that he thought it was okay. The character was also young (16). He said, "He's 16 so he would tend to be rash." The player later said that he always kills at least one person in every game that he plays or it doesnt' feel like a good game.

 

All righty then!

 

Just thought I would share since it was so funny and and fun to run. I've had things go bad before, but not where the hero team became wanted criminals in the space of 2 hours real time!

[nexus]

Re: Games gone awry

 

They were not casual killers. That is what made it funny. The player that killed Icicle had never played Champions before and he didn't get the fact they were heroes. After he did it he started to rationalize all the heroes in comics that kill people in self defense. I honestly believe that he thought it was okay. The character was also young (16). He said, "He's 16 so he would tend to be rash." The player later said that he always kills at least one person in every game that he plays or it doesnt' feel like a good game.

 

All righty then!

 

Just thought I would share since it was so funny and and fun to run. I've had things go bad before, but not where the hero team became wanted criminals in the space of 2 hours real time!

 

Oh it was a riot to read, but just a bit on the distrubing side to think about.

[Wanderer]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Poor, poor Icicle... Now, there are several CU villain charcters one may feel prompted to dispatch (Mechanon, Slug, Black Harlequin, Monster... and Foxbat. Especially Foxbat ) but the lovely teen blonde jewelry thief ? Shakes head.

 

Anyway, I don't have played Hero long enough to meet such a catastrophic failure, but I do remember of that fantasy convention where players started a commotion with the owners of an armorer shop over the price of a mail, and before anyone had fully realized, they had sacked the shop, massacred pretty much all the town guard and I was forced to invoke a dying curse from the local priest to send them to Norse Hel to end their reign of terror over the city (time ended as they were trying to crack a deal with Death Goddess to be sent back...)

[KawangaKid]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Now, when the GM has ticked me off I've done some crazy things. I remember one convention game of Champs way back when. The players were actually ticking me off so I turned on them and killed the guy who was ruining play for everyone. The Gm didn't seem to think it was wrong and turned a "blind eye" as I brutalized the PC. The player kept pleading with the GM to have me stop and also tried to rally his friends to come to his aid. They knew he was a pain too and just let me wipe him out.

 

After that, the game was great.

 

Which character were you playing? This seems familiar somehow, though I doubt I was present at that convention game.

[CourtFool]

Re: Games gone awry

 

The player later said that he always kills at least one person in every game that he plays or it doesnt' feel like a good game.

Gee. I wonder what he normally plays.

[Chimpira]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Back in college, I had a person in one of my old D&D games cast sleep on a girl to have his way with her. I ruled that this was an attack and caused her to wake. She screamed bloody murder and he was arrested. Did I mention that the girls Godfather was the Leader of the Thieves Guild? Half a burnt city, two scuttled ships, and the loss of all their supplies (which they were in the city for the first place) later, the PC's were standing soaking wet on a shore wondering what to do with the idiot Mage.

[CourtFool]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Back in college' date=' I had a person in one of my old D&D games cast sleep on a girl to have his way with her. I ruled that this was an attack and caused her to wake. She screamed bloody murder and he was arrested. Did I mention that the girls Godfather was the Leader of the Thieves Guild? Half a burnt city, two scuttled ships, and the loss of all their supplies (which they were in the city for the first place) later, the PC's were standing soaking wet on a shore wondering what to do with the idiot Mage.[/quote']

Cast Sleep and have their way with him.

[JeffreyWKramer]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Cast Sleep and have their way with him.

 

Better yet, leave him trussed up for some sort of nasty monster, like a troll or mind flayer, to do the same.

[nexus]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Back in college' date=' I had a person in one of my old D&D games cast sleep on a girl to have his way with her. I ruled that this was an attack and caused her to wake. She screamed bloody murder and he was arrested. Did I mention that the girls Godfather was the Leader of the Thieves Guild? Half a burnt city, two scuttled ships, and the loss of all their supplies (which they were in the city for the first place) later, the PC's were standing soaking wet on a shore wondering what to do with the idiot Mage.[/quote']

 

Most gamers I know are likable normal guys and women that like to express their creative side in a unique way. But every now and again you run into someone with some real issues...

[Chuckg]

Re: Games gone awry

 

My Good-aligned characters would have trussed this idiot up like a turkey and left him for the law.

 

My Evil-aligned ones would have trussed him up and sold him back to the Godfather.

 

... hey, a man's got to know when to cut his losses.

[OddHat]

Re: Games gone awry

 

That reads like an episode from Knights of the Dinner Table.

 

In my current Nightlife Hero campaign, my low powered players were being menaced by a powerful supernatural creature and his vampire minions. I was expecting intrigue, deal making, a gathering of power and allies, and a climactic final battle. Their answer to the problem?

 

They fled the country.

 

So, all of the careful planning around that opponent's plots has now been put on hold. I'm doing road trip adventures until I can find a way to get them to go home, or to motivate him to try to catch them.

 

Additional:

 

Thinking about it, I also remember:

1) A Champions group that cheerfully accepted a bribe from the villain to just go away.

 

2) A case where the romance between a villain and a character took an odd turn when the player decided her character would "turn evil" for her lover.

 

3) The female player of a young gay male character deciding that her character had a massive crush on Bulldozer.

 

4) The group that let Japan be desroyed by a nano-virus because they would not stop their spell research project to just go do something about it.

 

Many others.

 

These days I just keep track of what the villains and NPCs are planning, drop some clues, and let any reasonable suggestions from the players work. Trying to plot a game more tightly than that doesn't usually work for my groups.

[Blue]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Not a true derail story so much as a study in just how paranoid the players in my group have become (Not my fault! Blame the other GM! No, Really!):

 

Scenario 1, Champions Battlegrounds. The heroes have easily handled most of the villains, which is a shame, because I obviously needed to beef up the teams. But I was beta testing so I wanted to keep with the original teams or what's the point of Beta testing?

 

CB SPOILER BELOW! Don't read further if you don't want to know.

 

Two of the villains were vulnerable to mental attacks (I'm the reason that notation is in the sidebar for scenario one), so my characters easily take them out. And one guy has a "time stop" entangle. The only one they had trouble with was the villain manipulating metal (I forget his name), because he did cool things like throw one player's robots back at him and bend the basketball court's pole and hoope around another player.

 

Now the fight took a good long time. As you may know the bomb at the beginning of the scenario is a sort of "dud". So that hasn't yielded any thus far negligable result, and the fight while long still worked easily in the heroes favor, and the only hero they've actually encountered that got away was Mirage. They haven't even seen the main villain of this scenario yet, but he's supposedly hiding in the lake.

 

So after some detective work, they manage to deduce that something is up with the lake. All they are supposed to do is investigate and discover that the villian HAD BEEN there. But 1)They are so used to the twisted things our other GM does to them and 2)This scenario has gone so unexpectedly well for them that now they get paranoid. The next hour involves them plotting out how to investigate the lake. "Do we send in the robots? They're iron, that might be a problem in water. How about we for a circle around the lake? No, we don't want to divide up our forces. How about we..."

 

I started off giggling but I was laughing harder with each suggestion. After a while I felt guilty about NOT having something in the lake. But I was trying to keep with the scenario for once, so I just wanted them to move on. In fact I think I finally just said, "Okay, you investigate the lake and find only traces someone had been anchored there below the surface! Now move on!"

 

Like I said, hardly a major derail, but that's what happens when things go too well.

[OddHat]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Not a true derail story so much as a study in just how paranoid the players in my group have become (Not my fault! Blame the other GM! No, Really!):

 

SNIP

 

Like I said, hardly a major derail, but that's what happens when things go too well.

 

While I respect your desire to stick with the scenario, after all that I would have let them find something in the lake.

[Chuckg]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Myself and my friend Bob (who has posted here infrequently) once conspired to massively derail -- indeed, to destroy -- a D&D game.

 

In our defense, I might point out that the DM was not only running a pointlessly ugly and unimaginative campaign, but was indulging in massive DM favoritism for another player, his best buddy in real life. (And by 'massive favoritism', I mean 'the rest of us were finding 5000 gp and a +1 weapon in the treasure pile, and he got the Ring of Wishing')

 

Normally, we'd have just quit. But I saw a window of opportunity to destroy Dave's game world... and destroy it we did.

 

Now, this was a high-level game -- we were an 18th-level evil party. We were /supposed/ to be working towards the conquest and/or corruption of the world... not that we ever seemed to get past looting, pillaging, and sacking small towns, despite our best efforts to try and get some large-scale plot in the house (did I mention that our DM had no imagination?)...

 

I was running the half-dragon 15th level rogue/merchant, who'd majored in manipulation and negotiation. (He was also a master mariner -- seafaring trader. Not that that's important.) Bob was running the 8th level cleric/10th level fire elementalist (18th-level divine spellcaster, IOW)... the high priest of Ahriman, who in that game world was the god of destruction, corruption, and infernal fire.

 

... now, earlier in the game, Bob's character had mindwhacked mine with an Apostate spell, converting me to a fanatic follower of Ahriman (as opposed to my prior orientation of Neutral-Greedy-Self-Centered-Dillwad). Outside the game, I'd given him permission.

 

As a comparision, our characters were like Animated Lex Luthor and Animated Darkseid. Our team-up was horrific.

 

Once we'd made the decision to destroy the game world, we started searching for means. And then, miraculously, Dave the DM handed it to us on a silver platter. Not that he knew that he was doing it.

 

Underneath our game world's equivalent of Constantinople, in the extensive "undercity", secretly lived the last settlement of drow. Our group, as we went about our various evil ways, had befriended them (as much as evil has friends, at any rate) and made them allies.

 

And then I hauled out my _Book of Vile Darkness_ and, well, the conversation went kind of like this:

 

"Wouldn't it be nice if somebody, oh, opened a permanent gate to the Lower Planes?"

 

"You mean like the one you could make by first popping a Gate spell, and then dropping a Miracle or a Wish to make it permanent?"

 

"A-yup. Doesn't werewolf boy have a Ring of Wishing the DM gave him virtually for free?"

 

"Yup. Be a shame if something... happened to it."

 

"Yes, but then some high-level good guy NPC will just come along and drop a Mordenkainen's Disjunction on the gate."

 

"Ah, but I checked the _Book of Vile Darkness_. See these rules for 'aspected' areas?"

 

"Hmmmm... says here that the level 4 evil-tainted area -- 'Darkness The Likes Of Which The World Has Never Seen' -- has the property of making any spell cast by an evil spellcaster within it totally undispellable. By anything."

 

"So what does it take to taint an area so much that it's that aspected?"

 

"Hmmm... it's a short list. 'The birth of a dark god'..."

 

"That's beyond even us."

 

"... or 'the genocide of a sentient species.'"

 

"How the heck are we supposed to kill an entire sentient species? We're 18th-level, not gods."

 

"Wait one. Didn't Dave say that the last survivors of the drow lived under Constantinople?"

 

"... and that there's only several hundred of them?"

 

"Several hundred is a manageable number, if we fight like evil backstabbing bastards and not like paladins."

 

"You mean like me using Elemental Swarm (Fire) to call up some assistance?"

 

"Remember, it's an underground complex. Caves. Ventilation."

 

"... use the fire elemental swarm and some discreet Stone Shaping to block all the air intakes, and then set massive fires and smoke in the drow town?"

 

"... and choke 'em all to death. Then we swing in and mop up stragglers."

 

"You do know that these drow are our allies?"

 

"Was that a rhetorical question? We're Chaotic Evil, and right now they just became worth more to us dead than they ever were while alive."

 

"Exactly."

 

"One mass sacrifice of an entire species to Ahriman, coming right up."

 

"Yup, that's 'level 4' all right."

 

"And then we take the Wishing Ring and make the gate."

 

"A permanent, undispellable planar gate to Ahriman's realm, directly underneath the capital city of the world's largest empire. Ladies and gentlemen, civilization as you know it has ended."

 

 

When we announced an outline of our plans to the DM, it was too late for him to stop us without using so much blatant ret-conning or blue-bolting from the sky as to make his already obvious cheating so blatantly obvious that *everybody* would have quit. So instead, he dissolved the game.

 

*heh*

 

Cheating SOB. He deserved it, really.

 

Four weeks. Only four weeks.

[Blue]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Well, we definitely come from different schools. I'd have just told the GM why I was leaving then let the baby have his bottle and just left the game.

[Chuckg]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Which is what I usually do as well.

 

But you don't know the power of the Dark Side...

[Elbandit]

Re: Games gone awry

 

I agree with Blue, I would have just walked out. Course I would not play in a game that allowed Chaotic Evil characters to begin with.

[Magmarock]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Myself and my friend Bob (who has posted here infrequently) once conspired to massively derail -- indeed' date=' to [b']destroy[/b] -- a D&D game.

 

SNIP

 

*heh*

 

Cheating SOB. He deserved it, really.

 

Four weeks. Only four weeks.

 

I don't find this funny or clever. Players shouldn't play against the GM and neither should the GM play against the Players. Roleplay is not competative. It was never meant to be that type of game.

 

Better to just talk to the GM and let him (or her) know that you have a problem with how the game is running and that you'd like to see some changes. If the problem is the GM, then politely bowing out is the classy thing to do.

 

If I were this GM, I'd have dropped you and your friend like a hot potato (and that means fast)!

 

Mags

[Chuckg]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Better to just talk to the GM and let him (or her) know that you have a problem with how the game is running and that you'd like to see some changes. If the problem is the GM' date=' then politely bowing out is the classy thing to do.[/quote']

 

We had let him know politely that we had a problem... in the previous game he'd run (and had crash) because of favoring his friend and blue-bolting excessively.

 

This was his second chance. When he blew it -- again -- well, we were going to leave. Then we figured, hell with it, let's blow up his world and *then* leave.

 

We never did play with him again after that.

[SCUBA Hero]

Re: Games gone awry

 

"Several hundred is a manageable number' date=' if we fight like evil backstabbing bastards and not like paladins."[/quote']New sig! :