Tell us the best ways you derailed an adventure /tg/

Depends on the adventure. Each situation presents unique opportunities for derails.

>>44115599
OP is asking how you have derailed one, not how you can derail one.

As a DM, I made the mistake of giving my players a sneak peak of their reward at the end of the current campaign.

So then they naturally spent the next few sessions doing their absolute best to get it without going through the current campaign.

They succeeded.

I was mixing explosive potions when I made an accident and blew up the entire party.
My next character was a fighter.

My brother wanted to buy a house in the village the party had saved

He goes to the town moneylender

He and the gm whilst role-playing this began arguing financing and interest rates for the next 40 minutes

With no survivors

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Starving villages had to pay taxes
Petrified the King
No more taxes

Unfortunately, his death also left a power vacuum that allowed foreign invaders to take over the kingdom.

I magic'd my way out of that mess, so it wasn't a total loss.

>>44115585
Shadowrun. Our job was to secure a shipment of magically enriched uranium from a megacorp rail line. The security on the train was top-notch; nearly a hundred security guards with high-end gear, air escort, armored to stand up to tank fire, state-of-the-art security system, several summoned spirits, heavy gun turrets on an isolated network housing a highly illegal AI (they reasoned that going full Skynet wouldn't be a problem since all their personnel are inside the train). We had the full plans and schematics of the train thanks to our Johnson's contact in the company, and the GM swore in character and out that it was accurate.

I drove to the tracks fifteen minutes before it was due to pass, clipped the fence, and moved the rails a foot apart with a jack. GM spent so much time designing the ultimate impregnable train that he completely forgot to account for securing the tracks.

Then we drove our van right up to the wreck, pulled an industrial plasma cutter out of the back, cut a hole in the bottom of the car, tossed in a dozen flash and smoke grenades to put anyone who'd gotten to their feet back on their ass, grabbed the case, and drove off. Whole thing took less than a half-hour.

>>44115585
>there's an underground city under the city we're in
>they are preparing an invasion
>go down to check it out
>infiltrate the city as they're starting some ritual
>being a typical RPG party, shenanigans ensue
>the dragonrider summons his dragon and starts attacking from the sky
>the ranger starts sniping from afar
>the rogue uses his hat of disguise to pretend he's multiple guards from the surface in different locations.
>complete chaos
>DM has his hands in his hair about how nothing is going the way he expected it to go
>tell him he's literally God, and could invoke Rule 0 at any time
>finally does so
>saves we can't succeed at
>railroads us back into the most entertaining puzzle session we ever had

Sometimes, the railroad ain't so bad.

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>>44115585
>>Be 5th level Fighter in AD&D 2e
>>Be Drinking at a tavern with crew the blowing our loot on an epic party
>>Faggoty Wizard shows asks us to retrieve some stupid doodad of doom.
>>Ask the Faggoty Wizard if he can teleport and scry
>>Faggoty Wizard says "Of course."
>>Tell Faggoty Wizard fuck off and go get his Doodad of Doom himself, he could do it easier, quicker, and less riskier than we could.
>>The group spends the rest of the session masterminding the ongoing epic party which culminates in a fire that burns half the town down.
>>The group is hailed as heroes as we saved most of the townfolk during the blaze.
>>The next ten or so sessions are us rebuilding the town and making it into the premier party destination of the kingdom.
>>mfw when I become the Mayor of Partytown

>>44115585
>group was playing an evil campaign
>I was a living suit of armour, made by an evil wizard to serve as a body guard
>wizard died, i was found by other players, thus joining party
>game starts, GM throws all players things to show how evil we are
>puts an orphan girl in front of me, expecting me to kill her
>I have other ideas
>give girl a flower, become her friend.
>have her follow me around, protecting her from monsters, adventuring heros, and the other party members.
>after a while the party gets used to the girl and all help me protect her.
> we reach epic levels and she grows up, getting an interesting view of the world.
>GM didn't get the evil campaign he wanted, but it was still a ton of fun for all members.

>>44116078
>not securing the route of your highly valuable transport
>no capability to pursue a van

Seems like quite the oversight indeed.

We got word that an assassin was going to make a move on a local lord during an upcoming ball. We didn't know who the killer was, or even who the target was. We also didn't have invitations or a very good reputation.

GM was expecting us to infiltrate, have a bunch of social checks, identify the killer and/or target, then interfere during the attempt.

We instead blocked all but the main entrance and set fire to the building. We told everyone to run and watched for anyone not acting like a panicked noble. Sure enough one of those fruitcakes was chasing after another in a very determined manner. A few rounds later he was ours.

We stopped the assassination ans had evidence we werent making it all up, but our reputation only got worse.

>>44116311
Well, I only said we drove off, not that we drove off causally or comfortably.
We did have to deal with a couple scrambled helis during the getaway, before we managed to get out of sight long enough to ditch the ride and switch vehicles, but that sort of thing happens on pretty much every run.
Our GM's a sport, though. After he had his head-slap "Fuck, I should have thought of that" moment, an NPC in the corp had exactly the same moment and was very thoroughly fired. When news got out of the screwup their public stock dropped 8% overnight, and we even got a bonus for putting egg on their face in such a spectacular fashion.

>>44116526
Pretty cool.

So, did the corp send hitsquads after you because you humiliated them like that?

We played Pathfinder. We started at level 1. The GM expected us to be hired by some merchant to retrieve the mcguffin.

We ransacked every single goblin camp, stripped a local dungeon clear of literally everything, sold everything, hired an entire mercenary company and started a war, which devastated the entire continent and eventually led to the end of the world.

We didn't participate in it personally.

We never got above level 7.

>>44115585
I don't, because i'm not a dick.

This is a That Guy thread.

>>44115585
We have derailed a campaign just once.

We ditched most of the Emerald Spire module in order to find some weird elf we met in the tavern and force her to admit that our mule was the cutest mule she had seen in her really long life.

This ended up becoming a pretty good idea, because we got tired of the dungeon pretty quicly and the entire thing made the sessions more enjoyable, and our DM actually managed to improve his improvisation, the lack of which made us play the module in the first place.

>>44116678
Oh, you know it. We had to rebase at one point, somebody on the board took it personal.
Eventually we managed to shake them off through a combination of bribery, blackmail, misdirection, and leveraging a completely separate workplace coup in order to "retire" the guy with a bug in his bonnet over the whole thing.

I had this whole plan ready where we could fake our deaths and get a ride to Africa as extras on a Runner-themed reality show, but I guess showbiz isn't for everyone.

Punch it harder creates almost as many problems as it solves

I made my character Snake

My old man paladin adopted an 800 year old dragon

I accidentally derailed my own campaign by letting the players buy a bar. The only way I managed to get them to leave was by collapsing the floor of the bar into a crazy House of Leaves style madhouse. They still try to buy every fucking bar they go to.

>>44116078
>using trains to transport valuable cargo in 2050

Your GM really flubbed that one up.

>>44116271
I'm glad you had fun, but it was still a shitty thing to do.

>GM asks for an evil campaign
>join the campaign with the understanding that I'd be evil
>but then I wasn't. That'll show that railroading GM heheheheeh

I wasn't running the game and it wasn't my character that did it, but I was at the table when, in a Shadowrun 3rd edition game the team demolition expert set off 1,956 kg of C12 (yes, that exact number I still remember it to this day) in the middle of down town Seattle to cover his escape from a police cordon. The game stopped being about corporate espionage after that and became us being the most wanted people in the developed world.

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Learned how to make a new strain of an addictive drug. Combined it with sugar, liquor, and sap. Called it "Soft Liquor". Made the drug very weak, but spent a week making a shit ton of it. Went around from location to location, selling it and claiming I was just a merchant to a bigwig somewhere who had much more, and they were ready to sign thanks to high alchemy checks.

Eventually we needed money and supplies, fast. So I managed to get three towns to combine their efforts and make a fair ground that was more or less a ye olde amusement park, and the main beverage? Soft Liquor.

We ended up retiring the campaign, as it was meant to be a murder mystery with a shadowy organization, and instead we ended up becoming tycoons and owning a majority of the land, creating the very concept of corporations and the start of the industrial revolution.

We ended up buying the enemy organization out and turned its don into our lapdog. It was a strange, fun turn of events.

>>44115585
Two stories, both of which I think I've told here before.

The first one takes place in the GM's sci-fi homebrew.
>Play ex-military space trucker who misses shooting people
>Big guy, strong guy
>Gets recruited along with a gallery of colorful psychopaths and down-on-their-lucks to figure out some bullshit about suicide bomber drones
>During an undercover investigation, for flavor describe character lightly brushing hand over gun he has in waistband.
>Nearby security guard is all like "hands on the wall mofo"
>Cooperate
>Wall grows a set of goddamn manacles
>Remember I confiscated space meth earlier for evidence
>Fugg
>Call in others for help while trying to break out of manacles
>Not!Eddie Murphy and the war criminal back alley surgeon stage a 'fight' to draw attention to themselves
>Doesn't work
>Crazy doc decides to shove the space meth up my nose to give me the edge I need
>Manage to break out of manacles
>Break hand
>Tweak
>Beat up the doc, then chase him and beat him some more
>SWAT arrive
>Me and doc get put in separate vans
>Party goes to stage daring rescue
>I try to just stay calm. Gonna accept whatever ticket I would get
>Doc starts vomiting and tricking the guards
>Long story short, the SWAT vans are assaulted
>We kill the SWAT guys, but not before they call for reinforcements
>Try to run away
>GM crits 6 times in a row
>We bonnie and clyde now

Next one is about as long, so [CONT]

>>44119992

Second story was a Hackmaster game with a first-time GM doing the Not!Wicker Man module they put out.

>Play one of those Ranger Clerics
>Chaotic good and autistically good at bow-related things
>Have pet Grel (savage elf) assassin due to backstory shenanigans (justification for evil character in party)
>Other guys in party is PTSD farmer turned fighter and halfling thief with no fighting skills whatsoever
>Get told to investigate freaky farm
>See people acting real fucking weird
>They don't react, just stand around a giant wicker man
>Check out farmhouse
>Fight mimic bed
>Fighter gets pulled in under another bed
>We do our best to save him, even though it's basically supposed to be a cutscene
>Eventually get to where the cutscene would've led us anyway
>Basement
>Creepy old lady offers us pie
>Suddenly remember I prepared "Detect Poison" just to prove I wasn't a min-maxing fuckstick
>Detect poison in the pie
>Party still goes down
>Except thief
>I was figuring we just kill the fucking lady and get it over with
>Assassin has same thought
>Old lady exposits
>Clearly mentally deficient/evil/possessed
>Assassin asks for permission to kill her
>Reluctantly give yes
>Assassin shanks demented old lady
>Surprise surprise, turns out she's some sort of fucked up ghoul thing
>Said ghoul thing fucks up entire party with paralysis shriek
>Fucking hackmaster opposed rolls
>GM has to contrive that we're captured
>Manage to fight our way out
>Suddenly see the fuckers around the wicker man again, putting the sacrifices into the wicker man
>Priest starts chanting
>Fail religion roll, don't recognize dis shit
>Fuggit
>Snipe him between the eyes
>Mass combat with 20+ characters to keep track of
>With HM's seconds system
>Poor GM
>Eventually manage to slaughter all 20-something peasants
>Still have good time before ritual is supposed to be done
>Suddenly BBEG appears as PTSD fighter says his name
>I broke a man by invoking his PTSD, letting him succumb to temptation

Me and some folks derailed a LARP before. Zombie LARP, we were sent by some group to go collect some intel or something. The boss person we fight is taking a lot of hits, and finally we get them to drop the item... and instead of continuing on, we backtrack the ENTIRE course instead of finishing them off for the proper ride out, speedrun so fast that the people playing zombies don't even realize what is going on after being told to spring into action, and end up getting away.

Turns out we were ment to be caught in a trap due to the 'ride' back, but because we went back on foot, and so fast, we actually won an unsurvivable scenario.

I DMed a fantasy homebrew session set in haunted woods a while ago where the party was supposed to fix up a village, kill the nearby evil baroness and become monster hunters/heroes but the warrior ended up seducing the Baroness who was supposed to be the BBEG. Then used her influence to force a war with a nearby kingdom bringing the land to ruin. They never even got to the village they we're meant to save.

My party once blew up half a dwarven city and converted my warforged blackguard into a fighter jet.

And that came out of the DM trying to make a hardboiled detective story in Eberron.

Ever made a BBEG that actually made players angry as fuck?

Let's just put it simple, don't make something that steals the players loot or stats (i.e. making the wizard somehow forget his spells). They will chase whoever who stolen their shit until the world dies.

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>>44115585
>be a magical girl
>friend gets eaten by a monster
>police are asking about her disappearance
>tell them the whole truth
>"wait seriously a monster ate her girl are you messing with-"
>transform

The GM never did quite figure out how to integrate them well, but the goal was to get a line to emergency services for faster response to Weird Bullshit.

And, you know.

Justice.

>>44115585

Yes. In a game where the point was a PC's romance, I fucked his love interest instead. It turned out that the DM didn't really like the way he was interacting with her anyway, so it was more interesting. We had a big duel and so on.

Not me specifically, but one of the characters was basically the Hulk. The early BBEG captured us and locked us up and was going to perform experiments on us and make us compete in wacky death sports. Well they thought her character was just a smart chemist and were going to torture her for information, when during torture she Hulked out, lost control of her character and by sheer chance or bad luck for the DM (that we all witnessed, I might add), she ended up catching the BBEG and literally breaking him in half. The DM was obviously pissed but it was pretty much his fault for not checking or remembering that detail about her character. We had to go through a couple of games with villain or threat of the week, before he was able to work up a new campaign idea.

Either way I thought it was pretty hilarious because past a certain point, with her losing control of her character, we were no longer involved in any way. The DM ended up playing against himself, and by bad rolls, fucking himself over.

>>44115585

My female PC let a supernatural assassin (a kind of bone crawler) go, after it ambushed her in the dark of the night. This was after she had sex with it.

Because of that, we just skipped right to whoever had sent it, but we left the cult that worshipped it to flourish.

>>44115661

Eyes on the prize, that is. Gotta admire focus and determination.

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>>44115585
I've done it personally only once.

After school ended, it started to become common for me to have to miss sessions because of work for a while until I could work out a day off that coincided with our meetings. In the meantime, my DM decided to have my character ride around on a dog for a mount. I was a gnome. When I came back regularly, she announced that the dog disappeared.

Not really satisfied, I decided to make it my mission to find my canine companion. It started as a joke, but it eventually took over the campaign as the DM's original plan was abandoned for our search for my dog.

We never did find him.

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My mage pissed off a lich and started a war.

I'm half asleep so I'm going to just greentext it.

>campaign is mostly political intrigue
>working for noble
>noble sends us to foreign land to help cure a plague to solidify relations, as a part of his master plan to help the local nations get along
>magic plague
>talk to cleric
>she needs a certain grimoire to dispell it
>cleric directs us towards some ruins where a powerful mage once kept his library
>find library
>find book
>my mage has a tendency to do incredibly stupid things because of scientific curiosity, nosenseofrightandwrong.png
>see cube
>roll to identify
>GM basically describes it as a sort of magical hard drive with a ton of ancient spells stored in it
>want
>know its a bad idea
>flip a coin ooc
>coin says dispel security enchantments
>take the cube
>alarm goes off
>shit shit fuck what did you do
>statues, paintings, the carpet all wake up and attack us
>fight our way out
>booming voice screaming incoherently at us
>gm tells us ooc that the cube is the dead mage's most prized possession and his soul was simply sleeping in a phylactery, taking the cube woke him up
>mage doesnt even consider dropping the cube
>make it out and think we're in the clear
>get to our flying ship
>the ruins TAKE OFF
>its a fucking flying citadel
>fly away, it's chasing us, still screaming at us
>spend the next session luring it into the territory of a flock/herd/tribe of frost drakes which destroy the citadel
>highfive.gif
>lich survives and creates an army to come after us
>we have no idea, and bring the grimoire to the cleric
>cleric cleanses plague
>as we're hanging in the capital celebrating, lich begins invading the nation
>nation has no time to recover from the plague, thrown into war with the lich
>dickass countries take the opportunity to attack nation
>spend a session doing damage control
>fail
>white knight countries step in to help
>lich allies with some dickass countries
>whole continent goes to hell
>mages fw

Four Words

Deck of Many Things

A Call of Cthulhu game that started in a post office and ended with them taking a seaplane to Russia

>>44123366
This is an appropriate moment for the story of Shane the Shy. Too bad I don't have it.

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While I've never derailed an entire adventure, I did once derail a session by accident

>be playing warhammer but with DnD rules because my friends are a bunch of plebs who don't play anything else
>adventuring arround
>we come across some orcs
>mention that they should be talking in a cockney accent
>everyone wuts
>explain that the orcs are based on english football hooligans so they talk with a cockney accent and love fighting
>looks of confusion all around
>you know like "u wot m8" and stuff
>everyone finds this HILARIOUS
>Everyone starts saying "u wot m8" and "ill smakc u in the gabber swer on me mum" over and over again
>someone gets the genius idea to teach the orcs this new "language"
>uh did you all forget that the orcs already talk like this... well actualy the orcs sound a lot smarter than you guys
>they don't listen
>too busy shouting "u wot m8" and laughing at how funny it is that we're teaching the orcs our new "language"
>this continues for the rest of the session
>mfw

>>44116717
That GM detected.

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>>44115585

>party tasked with eliminating a host of lords and ladies on the payroll of a criminal organisation
>sneaking through the sewers to reach the lords hall
>bard had posed as a foreigner and singled out the corrupt and herded them into a room
>rest of party reached where they thought was beneath the room in question
>they planted black powder explosives and the mage detonated them
>the smoke clears and the party witness a Kings ransom in gold and now dented valuables pouring through the gap
>they blew a hole in the treasury
>dead guards with gold and jewels embedded in their skulls
>after frantic discussion they forget about the Bard and start shovelling their helmets, pockets, bags, shoes and pouches with dosh and trinkets

We quit the session there and I made a system for randomising discovery of their actions for the next session.

>they were about twenty minutes in when the door was nearly vaporised by a spell
>Royal Guard at the door
>LEG IT
>just got away, I mean JUST
>I decided their employer reveals that this was his plan all along but obviously couldn't get the more pious amongst the party to agree
>agrees not to dob them in for a portion of the loot
>decide this is a better option than to try and silence him

They managed to smuggle out a large amount of loot and now they are pretty ignorant of the lands troubles.

>>44128559
sounds like you play with some cancerous meme-parroting plebs desu senpai