What's the most you've seen a player outsmart a DM?

I was DMing Curse of Strahd, and Strahd was attacking the party in an old tower.
His tactic was simple - while the party was distracted by the vampire spawns, he would use spiderclimb to scale the walls and shower them with fireballs from above, while staying out of the area himself.
The players were already making their saving throws, when somebody asked: "Wait, how high is this tower? Also, how high is this floor? Shouldn't there be a ceiling in the way?"

Oh. Right. Ceilings. I felt pretty dumb.

>>52248214
I find it to be a better experience for everyone not to include such remarks.

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>>52248161
>party fighting drow assassins on an airship
>"The ship's moving, right?"
>Yeah, only very slowly though so it's probably around 10 feet per round
>"Okay, if I cast Banishment, when it ends they re-appear where they were before they were banished"
>...right

The worst part is that the Drow they banished was a mage - he came back and cast Fly to save himself but one of them shot him with a crossbow and he failed his save to keep concentration.

>>52249779
That's really smart actually.

>>52248214
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone have Strahd cast polymorph to turn himself into CR 15 adult bronze shadow dragon.

>>52249779
Clever. I'd reward that kind of thinking with a favorable little event or item. Positive reinforcement, you know?

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Anyone have that pasta wherein the DM invented a thorough bitch of a Wizard's tower, so the party alchemist fucking wired the base and blew the whole thing up, undoing some pretty intense plans said DM had set?

player used clearwater solution injected into a kraken to turn it's blood to water and kill it.

It was brilliant but then he tried to use it again and again as a one-hit kill and the DM eventually had to ban the item.

Same with the obsidian steed he would try to shove in people's mouths then summon to make their head explode. He ended up selling it after the DM pointed out it only worked once per week in 3.5, after he flew over two wizards' heads whiel invisible (well not invisible, chameleon power from psions which isn't affected by see invisibility because 3.5 rules for detection are FUCKING RETARDED) and one-shotting two level 13 wizards at level 8 becasue the DM didn't know how to run wizards for shit.

>>52249924
Polymorph turns you into a beast. Without third party, the highest CR beast that exists is T-rex, and it's only CR 8.
Also, a t-rex in Curse of Strahd kind of ruins the mood.

>>52250068
Strahd turning into a t-rex sounds like something that would happen if an 8 year old was GMing

>>52248161
I was a player in a Pathfinder game where the basic setup was that a bunch of orc tribes had invaded a valley and we were being sent in to clear them out, but unknown to us a cult was acting in the background to try and empower their god with blood sacrifice. However, one of the other players (playing a alchemist/gunslinger explosion happy mercenary) repeatedly uncovered the cult's activities early through the combination of an observant player and a violent character. By the time the campaign was over, the DM was totally flabbergasted and admitted we did the adventure in half the time he expected.

Is the DM having more or less fun when you come up with stuff to fuck him over?

>>52251323
More fun if it's a clever use of an item.

Less fun if it's an "ACKSTUHALLY" crack open errata of rules from 3 splatbooks is why I can do this.

>>52248161
>What's the most you've seen a player outsmart a DM?
Any illusionist worth his salt.

>>52251381
Such as?

>implying DMs don't punish you for doing this because they are crybabies

>>52251323
I don't mind it as long it seems like something the pc could do or know about but I can get annoyed pretty fast if they try to look for a work around for something pretty simple thus making something that would take 2 mins or less take 30 mins.

>>52249924
His polymorph is much more fun to use on a charmed PC. Won't save to resist as charmed, and then they get to be a cockroach or kitten or naked elf chick or whatever

>>52251323
Seems like a case by case thing. And like the other anon said, wether or not the PC in question would actually be able to accomplish/think up their plan is bound to make someone salty in the heat of it (at least for a few of the players I know).

Personally, I tend to look more at the intent of the player involved more than I probably should. If it's something quick witted to gain an edge in a fight, I'll likely roll with it, but full on nullifying a large section of a session or hyped up encounter is not likely to go thru.

>>52251345
The first time I played D&D I made sure to stock a lot of bottles of oil. It came in handy eventually when I solo infiltrated a bandit camp, but flubbed a stealth check and the whole camp came down on me, I climbed one of the guard towers and covered the ladder with oil so it was pretty much impossible for any of the bandits to make it up to me as I sniped them.

Also I ended up using another bottle to light a dwarf sorcerer's beard on fire.

It's not really outsmarting, but I like to think they were good uses of items.

>>52250016
That's not a pasta that's a gif from an anime

>>52251990
As a general guideline, PCs won't care about anything but saving their own hides and give no fucks about how much time was spent planning that section/how much it will drag out the game in the effort to save minimal resources/a planned encounter is almost always better than a winged one to fill time.

>>52252145
*Fucking rad

And autocorrect ruins everything for ever now I have to wait five hours to delete this post.

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>>52250230 #
>Strahd turning into a t-rex sounds like something FUCKING RAD

Fixed that for you

>>52249779
If banishment can keep them in place while the planet moves, it can keep them in place while the airship does.

>>52252203
It's only moving when the turtle it is on moves.

>>52252129
Yeah I just started gming about a year ago and I'm starting to pick up on that the player in question was new to the whole thing and I wanted them to do something with the skill set that they had that could had helped the rest of the party but as you say he was too scared to roll the dice and that leaded into 20 or so mins of him and a other player trying to do things they would not know IC.

At some point one of the other players wanted to replace the new guy skill roll (he wanted to carry the new player across a mine field so the new player would not have to roll) looking back on it it just might had been better just to let the other player just helped him but I did wanted the new guy do something for once.

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> mini-boss sort of villain intercepts the PCs on a dock
> paladin uses the shove action for the first time in a year to just boot him into the harbor
> encounter over

>>52252265
Didn't try to think of some kind of way for the guy to rope himself around or did that fuck up too?

One time I had a person of interest held at a KE precinct. The players had to get them out. So they got the person's mom to collect the person from holding, instead of doing anti-establishment things to the precinct.

>>52252295
what?

>>52252259
God speed to you anon. I too started gming "recently" (2yrs ago, only/still in that campaign due to college and flakes). While it's not a popular opinion nor wholly in your control, I like to have minor party splits happen to force action by certain members. It's gotten to the point where my PC's are doing it naturally now when it makes sense ("I got shit to do, meet y'all at base/next town over tomorrow"). Also lets you introduce plot in a 1on1 context to help test the in-character information spread.

>>52250016
My party has done something similar. It's why every one of us now carries at least one Adamantine weapon, some method on invisibility, and several pounds of explosives. We've take to calling it "architectural warfare" and have, on more than one occasion, settled for blasting pillars out of a building and dropping the roof on the enemy. Because setting a blasting charge isn't an attack, so it' doesn't pop the stealth spells.

>>52250016
I got through a nasty wizard's tower once as a bard just by spamming invisibility on myself and the rogue

>>52252293

The guy didn't expect (because I didn't expect) to be kicked off the dock. If a player blindsides me that cleanly I always let them have their moment.

An infamous stunt by the party wizard was to spend a couple days casting Shrink Item on boulders. Enough to make about a double handful of gravel. Then, while flying invisible over the stronghold of an order of antipaladins, cast antimagic field over the five foot area blow him and dumping the pouch through it. Then the rest of us moved into the leveled fortress to do a quick and messy mop up. The DM was pissed.

>>52252333
They were playing Shadowrun and the player characters had to break someone out of a private security precinct, and they decided to do so by getting their mother to collect them instead of, say, blasting a hole in a wall and nabbing him.

At least that's how I understood the post.

>>52252352
Thats a pretty good idea oddly enough one of the players is split from the party atm and I plan to do a solo session with them but that didn't work out. In the next few weeks I might think up something where I can have the new player alone and see how he does -- not that I want to stress him out but I do want him to be more active.

>>52250016
Been there, done that.

>>52252397
yeah that was my idea too just wasn't sure

>>52252392
>The DM was pissed.
That's amazing. I feel like players should give a heads up to the DM about stuff like this more often so he doesn't spend too much time planning an encounter that the players want to breeze over.

>>52252295
Amazing

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>>52248161
I managed to take away all a large dragons actions while it was in midair, forcing it to crash land in the middle of a hostile army (which promptly murdered it) through an egregious combination of cheese, timing, and inhuman luck. I was level one.

>>52252397
I've did something similar in the Shadowrun game I'm in. I'm the newest player, and while everyone else was arguing over the best way to knock over a whole Lonestar precinct, I simply looked up the posted charges and the bail fee. Having more than enough money to do so, I decided to tell the others I was going on a "supply run" which they agreed to to keep the newbie from suggesting dumb ideas. Stopped by a fence, sold some extra weapons off, the went and paid the fee.

Arrived back at the crash pad with friend in the passenger seat just in time to see the rest of the party loading assault rifles and at least one RPG into the back of a stolen van. They were stunned silent for a few moments, at which point the girl playing the party face wondered aloud why they hadn't thought of doing that.

>>52252392
Anti-magic field is centered on the caster.

>>52252387
Fair enough as long your having a good time and the players are having fun then great.
>>52252436
I think the biggest or the time I remember the most that where players did something I didn't plan for was during a shadowrun game they was asked to kill someone on a jet that was grounded with his two bodyguards. On the way over they came along a attack heli (There was a war going on in cuba long story) that they didn't have any keys for but knew that guy they had to kill also had the keys so once they got to the grounded jet or trying to enter and clear it they walked over to the fuel tank and popped a frag inside of it thus blowing the whole fucking thing up. I was more or less fine with it because they did kill the target but they didn't have the keys for the heli so I gave the teams rigger a test to "pop" the heli's lock before the army came around and check what was up. he failed and they ran off with no heli a few of them was kinda upset but didn't take it too hard as far as I can tell.

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>>52252487

>>52251323
As a DM who regularly got his plan blown up by players, it's insanely fun. Now I don't even make plans anymore, I set the stage and the actors and let the show begin.

>>52251323
I have to confess that I have, on a few ocasions, set up encounters with no intended solutions, just to see what my players will come up with.

Another shadowrun story.
Our group had to deal with a Yakuza group at the docks who had imported a tank.

We just called the police on them.

>>52252082
>but full on nullifying a large section of a session or hyped up encounter is not likely to go thru.

I bet you're a fun DM to play with.

As soon as any player or all your players get creative, you shut them down.

No one has referenced Old Man Henderson?
1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson

Wasn't there a thread some time ago all about a DM who tricked the party into releasing the ancient evil just because the couldn't count the number of the seals properly?

I should've screencapped that

>>52253972
Because That story is old and overused, and frankly just ain't funny.

Most of that could only work with a GM who was like a fucking doormat.

>>52254026
Something about the ancient evil being held captive by magical swords put in place by so many paladin orders. The PC made a deal that with each sword they pulled, the evil would answer one question. Except the last one was an illusion, so they freed it.
Nice story.

>>52252265
>>52252539
That's a pretty funny manuever for a paladin anyway, I would have kept it for that alone.

No on on expects the paladin to just Sparta you off a ledge

>>52254088
Henderson isn't really the same thing as op premise anyway, Henderson is taking over a bad game and making it good.

Kind of a rookie version but a game in highschool the DM gave a player an oak seed that would magically sprout into a full tree with a command word

They fed it to a dragon and split it's head open

Once had a player who had this odd, quiet demeanour. She would also be very silent, and never act much in the game. It makes this event all the more impressive.

It was Dark Heresy. Playing an Adept, she was never much in the front line, but had some knowledge of explosives, especially grenades, mostly acquired because of the shit they've been up against.

So they are tracking down a former inquisitorial agent, and are having a lot of issues with getting caught off guard, and generally being ran around like fools. Until they find his hideout.

Here, they approach a door, and can hear him on the other side. I say they hear a small clock as they approach the door.

At this moment, she immediately says "I step back away from the door, and throw a grenade down the hallway I came from."

I was not planning om letting them react. She cut me off. The whole event was supposed to be them walking into a rigged door, luring them in with a recording and a trap none of them noticed (rolled too poorly). And then he would come in from behind and capture one of the players after being knocked out by the explosion.

Except now she was not only stepping away from the trap, she was also throwing a grenade straight at the assassin.

He was also.ost killed instantly by the explosion, and a single shot from a laspistol took him out by the adept afterwards. The other players were knocked out or stunned by the explosion, so this event, where they weren't even supposed to fight him, ended up with them capturing him. Or rather, the ADEPT capturing him.

For the record, an Adept in Dark Heresy is a book monkey. They have all the intelligence skills, but practically no useful combat skills. The group's assassin was VERY pisses about not being the one who brought down the assassin they were hunting, and complained for hours after the game about not being given the chance.

>>52254694
This is why magic in D&D tends to have a caveat about not working inside living beings. I forget whether it's a rule or not but I've never heard of anyone who'll let it work because if you do Create Water becomes incredibly lethal.

>>52252203
I think that's up the DM, who could conclude that Banishment only anchors the banished subject to that geographic location, but not a moving platform.

>>52254724
Adepts are the strongest class in Dark Heresy. They got tons of knowledge skills in a setting where knowledge is dangerous and powerful.

>>52254205
>>52254026
6 orders of paladins, "ten" swords in the thing
The GM was very explicit about the SIX orders, all campaign
They asked stupid questions for a while and pulled six swords, and it was all KTHXBAI

Less Outsmarting and more like Horrible GM luck.
Bard in pathfinder cast "something Apathy something", which makes the target lose their actions if they fail a pretty easy will save, on a juvenile red dragon that would have slaughtered the party. We were 5 level 5's and, after checking it after the session, the thing was CR 11. The dragon failed all 5 will saves, never rolling above a 4 on the die (it had +10 to will saves). So we ended up just beating into the thing and it still nearly killed two party members when it acted on the last round before we killed it.

>>52255016
>>52255016
It was 9 and 12 respectively, IIRC. That's important because they asked lots of dumb questions that led them nowhere.

>>52250068
Couldn't you make a Dire T-Rex with a higher CR?

>>52255016
>>52254205
>>52254026
This thread right here, it's fucking golden:
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/50579499/

Some of the questions:
Well, there was some other extra suff worth asking.
And truthfully, I might have been a little dickish with how I phrased the answers
>what's wrong with me
>>you got your spells though an agent. A third entity that resides in your soul
>what for
>>he uses you as an anchor to this world, a beacon that maintains his avatar
>does this mean [partly irrelevant]
>>yes, but there's [a factor]
>what factor
and so on

also, the very first question that was asked was
are you the [big bad] himself?

I played in a game with an (admittedly shitty) homebrew ruleset. Gave my character the starting spell teleport item, and spent all my starting gold on poison.

Teleporting an item into an enemy does 5 damage, poison does 5 on contact and 2 more damage at the start of every turn. It was a low HP system where most enemies had 11-12 HP, so after I one-shotted the first boss the DM changed the rules to make my character useless and then buffed every future enemy.

I'm now running a game with that DM as a player and he's our groups /thatguy/

One adventure, my party is doing a cleanup on a gang of goblins (or kobolds, I can't remember which) with, in the boss gobbo's chamber, a magic mirror on the wall.

The mirror smokes over, and an evil voice comes out, asking about the progress of sacking this little village. I expect the louder players to brag.

They bluff, and roll well. The thing on the other end is fooled... for the moment.

I was a noob GM at the time, and still am, I'll admit.

>>52255316
Have him face an enemy that teleports poison into him.

>>52253924
Like I said, it's a context based thing. It's a two way street for those cheese solutions. If your argument for why you should do it boils down to "it just makes sense", why then are save or dies a taboo for GMs to use? Or better yet, no save, just dies like the shrunken boulders story from earlier in the thread?

>>52253924
I've never really had this issue, players jump the tracks all of the time. Its really a question of how far and how quickly they move, versus your ability as a gm to improv. The better you can make shit up on the fly the less of a worry it is, likewise if you can make some buffer to fill things in until the next session (and more planning) again no issue.

But here's the thing. The game is where the gm planned. You came here to play a game right? Why would you purposefully walk away from it?

>>52252450
Level one is the place where you have to cheeze it the most and use everything at your advantage

>>52254870
Yeah, I made the call based on what I'd decide to do if a player activated an immovable rod while the ship moved

A Shadowrun story of my own: I gave the players an extraction job where half of them had to go to a big party on top of a skyscraper because that's where the target was. I had intended that they'd cause a distraction and then make a break for a back elevator, designed for executive escapes. Instead they bought enough parachutes for themselves and the target, bought or rented a boat, caused a distraction and then went over the side of the building with the target. I had no idea how to react, but it was hilarious.

Whenever my players fight a mindless construct I try to encourage this. I just write a sort of AI for them in pseudocode, making it operate by very rigid rules. If they manage to find out the rules they can oftentimes exploit it.

>>52256930
That's just good planning.

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>>52250068

>GM running a Ravenloft campaign
>I'm playing the wizard
>decide not to do the dungeon crawl to battle Strahd
>set up a fake wedding to mock Strahd
>have party fighter dress up like Strahd's brother and the village girl who looks like Tatyana (or however you spell it) as the bride
>Strahd shows up pissed
>polymorph the best man/monk into a T-Rex and mockingly read from Strahd's diary between spell castings during the fight
>my face for the duration of the battle

I'm not sure if "outsmart" is the right word, but there's the time I defeated a shoggoth with a rubber ball.

We were playing Beyond the Mountains of Madness, a published CoC campaign based on (duh) the Mountains of Madness. The GM stressed over and over the importance of having our equipment sorted out before we left port to go to Antarctica, because it would be pretty hard to resupply when we got there. Whenever I play tabletop, there's always a point at which I kick myself because "oh, I thought of taking that but I didn't and now I need it", so I resolved to take along everything that popped into my head. This included sundry shit like magazines, jars of marmalade, loose change, and a red rubber bouncing ball, which I imagined I'd use to stave off boredom like that American POW in the Great Escape.

Anyway, we get to Antarctica and we have to pare down our equipment list to things we can take off of the ship. I left a lot of my crap behind, but I brought the ball, because hey, it's pretty light. Then we got to the base camp at the base of the titular mountains, but we needed to take a plane to a city among the peaks, and we had to pare down our inventory list again because the planes couldn't handle much weight. I had to leave some of my weapons behind, but again I figured the ball was pretty light, so I included it on the equipment list we handed into the GM.

We get to the mountaintop to find an ancient, Old Ones city. We go exploring, and the party manages to wander down some winding steps into some sort of large, subterranean room with dozens of doorways. While we're down there, we see an albino penguin waddling around. It sees us and starts bleating, and a few seconds later, a massive shoggoth slides out of a doorway and devours it.

The GM asks us all for fear checks, and those that fail, freeze in place. I think I passed, but my character was charged with protecting another PC, so leaving was not an option.

>>52258269

We've put out our lights, but the shoggoth knows there's something else up here and is sliding around in the dark looking for us. None of us are in any way equipped to take on a shoggoth, and the GM is telling us how we've fucked up, we've missed our chance to escape and now things are going to go very, very badly. He was probably despairing on the inside wondering how he could salvage this campaign for the surviving players, assuming there WERE any surviving players.

At that point, I tell the GM, "I reach into my pocket and pull out a red, rubber, bouncing ball."

One of the other players makes a quizzical face and looks up at the GM, but he tells her "He does, in fact, have a rubber bouncing ball." As silently as possible, I throw the ball down one of the doorways, with it making plenty of noise as it bounces down to where it went (probably down more stairs, in retrospect). That prompts to shoggoth to slurp (the GM actually made a slurping sound with his mouth) after it, at which point we all beat feet.

And that's how I saved the entire party from a shoggoth with a rubber bouncing ball.

>>52258275
Did you have a followup adventure to get your ball back?

>>52252203
That's entirely exploitable in the other direction though. Just banish someone on a platform and then wheel the thing off a cliff.

>>52250016
That's the plot of Fate/Zero

>>52249779
Hate to blow your mood but

>The target remains there until the spell ends, at which point the target reappears in the space it left or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied.

>>52258401
What part of that implies it wouldn't work as Anon says?

>>52258416

Cant you read?

>or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied.

>>52258570
But anon, empty air is unoccupied

>>52249779
>>52252203

You could make the argument that banishment should maintain the Newtonian reference frame for its targets, but that's an issue, too. Imagine banishment hitting someone right after they jumped upwards (going maybe 2 m/s). If the spell lasts for a minute, when it finishes they'll reappear a hundred meters up in the air.

You could also try ignoring physics (as you should) and arguing that it should work relative to whatever the target was standing on. But then it could be abusable: you could have a friend stand on board, banish them, then throw the board up onto some hard to reach balcony and have them reappear up there.
(And you also open yourself up to questions like "What happens if the airship gets disintegrated halfway through?")

>>52258570

>>52258603

Right, i thought the event was taking place inside the airship not on the deck. Which would have brought along the question of people getting stuck inside the ship parts when they return from banishment.

>DM has several homebrew items that are mostly one-off consumables
>Bard at one point acquired a pouch of dust that when thrown into the air sprinkled everyone in an area with the dust and caused them to get a buff that reflects the next spell cast on them back to the caster.
>Party also had several equipment pieces that could raise resistance to fire damage, and a few potions from something we did a while ago that granted 50% resistance to fire damage
>Get to a big fight with an ancient white dragon
>Wizard tells the bard to ward the party with the dust, bard had completely forgotten about it
>Wizard teleports up to the dragon's back and quickened casts a fireball back down at the party
>Spell strikes, reflects off of the other party members and their pets/familiars/etc
>several fireballs fly back up and explode on the wizard who's completely immune to the damage
>One-Shot the dragon
>Two people failed their reflex check and got crushed by the corpse though.

>>52258610
The answer is simple. The banishment retains the creature's position relative to the battle scene instead. Banishment was created not by a wizard, but rather by a bard who used it for theatrical purposes.

>>52258751
Haha holy shit I love this

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I once played a sorcerer that dabbled with necromancy.
Because of that campaing, we no longer have intact gargantuan dragon skeletons as background props.

>Party ventures deep underground, finds an ancient civilization where the machines that were originally mining equipment became self aware and killed their creators
>Machines have created their own underworld civilization
>Big sentinels have Tri-Lasers that were originally meant for superheating and liquefying stone, reformed to be used as hand-cannons instead
>Party beats one of the sentinels, Sorcerer has an idea
>Barbarian can carry it, Wizard can power it, and Rogue has enough knowledge in mechanical things that he can fire it every now and then
>Wizard studies the thing, learns that it operates similarly to a scorching ray spell
>Proceeds to start golemancy with scrapped bots, he and the DM work out something awesome
>Pooling money and resources together we cobble a makeshift dummy sentinel we can pilot
>It's complicated to use though and it requires multiple people to operate
>Build a fucking Jaeger with four people controlling the arms and legs, and the wizard in the middle who's gone mecha-lich mode sacrificing his arms to the machine by having himself hard-wired into the thing so he can channel his spellcasting through it
>Proceed to perform the greatest ass-kickings of all time with the whole party going full Hybrid Heaven with crazy punches, kicks, and wizard firing his blasty shooty spells through the machine's hands
>Get to the Core
>Get FUCKED by the giant Overlord in the core
>Jaeger is jacked up, only rogue and wizard in it so it can only look around and move an arm
>Party trying to recover, crawling out of machine
>Rogue tells wizard, "I'm going to move this thing, then I need you to fire with everything you got."
>Wizard and rogue proceed to shoot and miss, hitting the ceiling instead
>Wizard fires it again, Overlord ignoring them, monologuing about how it's pointless to continue etc.
>Wizard fires again, intentionally hitting the ceiling
>DM stops mid sentence, thinks about it and says "oh shit.
>Ceiling collapses, Overlord gets crushed by cave in

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>Playing a Geralt of Rivia clone
>Second to final battle of the adventure
>GM has us each fighting a phantasmal manifestation of the thing we hate the most.
>My phantom opponent was a copy of one of the other PCs, who killed my wife
>This was an evil group, except for me, and they were all significantly stronger than me, so I couldn't do much to oppose them. My character was basically coerced into joining them. This group was like a fucking cult.
>GM: "Anon, your turn, what do you do?"
>Me: "I forgive her"
>GM: "W-what?"
>Me: "I forgive her"
>GM: "Uhm....ok....roll Charisma, I guess?"
>Pass Charisma check, despite terrible Charisma stat.
>GM: "Fuck it, the phantom fades away, you win your duel".

Right after this fight, I betrayed my team and sided with the Final Boss, who was some hero trying to put a stop to the endless genocide this evil group was committing. I fought valiantly, but evil won that day and killed us both. We put a pin in that campaign so we can begin our current game of Black Crusade.

>>52258391
I know you meant that it's a scene in Fate, but now I wanna see an anime where the MC just uses common sense to cockblock everyone's keikakus, in a Captain Tylor kinda way.

>>52248161

>What's the most you've seen a player outsmart a DM?
At least the worst that's happened to me, (they're easier to remember than when I'm on the other end of the screen), is this one time my players talked an ultra-strong silver golem into clearing out a nest of vampires for them because it exploited a hole in his technical pacifism I hadn't thought about. They also quite logically pointed out that the punch of a silver golem should count as a silver weapon.
>What about the reverse?

GM dangled a bunch of clues in front of us that the bad guys were preparing this massive demon summoning ritual to defend what looked like a glaring weak point in their defenses.

It would have taken all of a few hours to divert over to the area and smash the crystals, kill the acolytes. Instead, they summoned a mega-demon that ate an entire army and wrecked a very delicate plan.

And the worst part was, there were all these clues that were obvious in hindsight that we never stitched together, like how we traced the movement of the (extremely rare, expensive, and of few uses) Crysx crystals to a stupid little podunk village right where there was an apparent gap in their lines.

>>52260248
I was in a campaign similar to that.

It resulted in a TPK because at just the right moment I siezed the day.

>>52249924
Behold my true form and DESPAIR!

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>>52260597
My team was awful (morally; as players, they're cool and fun). They committed murder, cannibalism, genocide, rape, arson, massive property damage, they awakened a zombie army when we played through Death Frost Doom, and ransacked more villages then I could count. They were monsters, but this wasn't made evident to my character until I was in too deep with them, and I realized they were more dangerous then I ever could be. I couldn't make a move until I was able to team up with this hero who came hunting them, who was pretty strong.

That psion killer story

>>52260716
The one where the player destroyed the entire Plane of Psionics or something, thus completely neutering the BBEG?

>>52260714
As someone who's thought of putting together an evil campaign of some variety, I'm curious. How did the GM get the evil characters to work together? Or how did they decide to work together on their own? I've talked it over with my usual group and we always come to the conclusion that most evil characters would, at best, dick each other over to achieve their own personal goals.

>>52260836
We either link the PCs by REVENGE, family and/or organisation ties or we go by "we steal and murder but decide not to fuck each other because we are best buds"

>yeah but what If someone pays you to fuck over PC2
>we work together to fuck over that guy instead. Because we're all best buds
>but It's easier to just-
>BEST. BUDS.

It's not like evil is not allowed to like stuff and/or some people

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>>52260836
There was no planning or thought put into it at all, I assure you. One player just started being evil 30 seconds into our first game session and the others joined in because they thought it seemed fun. The idea of backstabbing each other honestly never seemed to enter any of their minds. I, as the GM, was too preoccupied with damage control for all their shit to try to add nuance to the story, because I figured they'd just run roughshod over the whole thing by just murdering whatever plot hooks I introduced. Every town became a dungeon crawl, every encounter a fight. It's like their characters simply had no idea how to interact with other people besides violence.

I had them all begin teamed up as an adventuring group, so that's how they got together in the first place. Why'd they stay together? Fuck if I know, they just never did anything to dick each other over, and I never asked.

If you're looking to run an evil campaign, I suggest appealing to the evil characters' sense of self-interest; for most of the game, it should be more beneficial for them to stick together (maybe with some minor backstabbing/treachery, but nothing deal-breaking) than to flat out kill each other. Then, as end game content, after they've killed/conquered everything else and have acquired vast amounts of personal power, they turn on each other to see who runs the whole thing.

>>52251345
Both are shitty, actually.

Good tactics or a clever plan is fine.

Using a dumb-ass magic item and growing it inside a dragon to kill him instantly, is fun only once if that.

>>52250026
>Clearwater solution removes any poison or disease present in the liquid after 1 minute.
>Clearwater solution cannot remove poison or disease from water already in a creature’s system, and it has no adverse effect on creatures with the aquatic or water keyword.
>If it’s applied to a volume of liquid larger than the amount specified above, the clearwater solution has no effect.

>Chameleon gives +10 to hide
>It’s practically impossible (-20 penalty) to hide while attacking, running or charging.
>You needcoverorconcealmentin order to attempt a Hide check.
>If people are observing you, even casually, you can’t hide.

Your DM sucks at understanding the game

>>52260248
Nice.

>>52258751
Abusing Reflect is the best part of FF games.

>>52259906
This reminds me of the time that I killed the miniboss of a session.

This was a 3.5e campaign a long time ago when I was a very novice player, and I didn't pay as much attention to the story as I now wish I did, but I remember that we were going after some sorcerer that we thought was going to be a bit of a fight. We end up finding him in some sort of inn or headquarters or something. I don't remember much, except that it was made of wood.

So the sorcerer is giving us his "You cannot hope to defeat me!" speech, and I ask, "What does the ceiling look like?" The DM describes it, including the the big wooden rafters supporting it. I, playing a factotum that likes to throw stuff, happen to be carrying...I think it was called deforester? It was a potion that chewed up wood, that's what's important...

Anyway, I take a look at the roof, and look for a spot that seems particularly crucial. One stupid-high engineering check and one decent toss later, I collapse the roof entirely on the sorcerer, leaving our party unharmed. Bossfight over.

>DnD 5th edition
me and a few friends were running this campaign for a few months and over the course that course, we had run into the leader of some bullshit cult a few times who was intent on gaining the favor of some slumbering old god by slaughtering random villages and pillaging the coastal settlers and whatnot.

Our party consists of me, a Druid, R, my friend who was playing a Fighter, T, who was playing a Rogue, and J who was our Wizard. We finally catch up to them all in one little shit stain of a fishing village that was your typical scary movie coastal settlement. Scent of brine in the air, overcast most of the day, frequent storms, the whole nine.

Anyway, the cult is ransacking the town, so we decide to rush in and either save the day, or get as many people out as we can. For the most part, we were doing pretty well starting off. We ambushed a few cultists, created a nice secluded exit path, and were ushering anyone we saw through to freedom.

eventually though, we got caught, and by none other than the leader of the cult; she was an 8th level warlock (we were only level 5 at this point) and had her own entourage consisting of 2 5th level Fighters, a 6th level Sorcerer, and her apprentice, who was a 5th level Warlock.

She starts into a monologue, saying how she expected us, and that her master said we would interfere, and blah blah blah evil shit. After her rant, she says that she has no time to deal with us, and that her posse can take care of us by themselves. Honestly, it would have been a very even and challenging fight, which we probably would have come out on top of, but our fighter had a bit too much pride to take her dismissal like that, and decided to pick up a rock and chuck it at her after she turned to leave.

Cont.

>>52263984
Bullseye. The rock, while not very big so not a lot of damage (1 point) connected with the back of her head and that's when shit hit the fan. She immediately joins the fight in a rage and, despite us putting up a valiant and very hard fight, she wipes the floor with us. The only ones left alive are R, myself, the Warlock and her apprentice, who is at this time busy torturing R to death on the ground 20 feet away from me.

I'm just about dead with 2 HP left, and the warlock points her staff at me and asks if I have any last words. I take this time to go into a very heartfelt prayer to my deity, explaining that letting these people live would disrupt the balance of nature and that I can't let her win and blah blah blah.

Well, the GM was impressed with the role play that I went through during this prayer, and decides to throw me a bone. He takes his notes for the entire campaign we've been through so far, takes a couple minutes to go over them, and then tells me that my God granted me one final blessing, saying that I get one final shape shift into any animal I have ever seen in my life. The only stipulation was that I had to have actually seen it and been in close proximity to it at least once.

Now, before this, when we first started the campaign, our GM was kind of in a rush to start so he just gleamed over my backstory and accepted it without really reading it that much. His loss, because in my backstory my family and village where I used to live were slaughtered by a Kraken.

Cont.

>>52264020
The GM and the rest of the table went silent as I described my limbs elongating into tentacles, my skin turning dark grey and rubbery, and my size growing to that of gargantuan proportions. The GM held a deer in the headlights look for the entire duration of the scene that I described, as I wrapped a giant fleshy tentacle around the apprentice warlock and threw her out over the water and watched her body skip over the waves like a stone across a lake. The Cult leader immediately bolted after the GM got out of his haze of stupidity at not reading my backstory properly and giving me such a bullshit power like that. I was just barely able to grab onto her foot as she ran, and dragged her back, lifted her up into the air, and then slammed her body down onto the cold wet ground of the settlement she just raided. I did this until her corpse was just a slab of muddy, blood soaked meat that was barely held together by her clothes and skeletal structure.

After the spell ended, and I reverted back to my normal self, I crawled my way over to R and healed him up just enough to make sure he stayed alive, and looked him right in the eye, as stern as I could, and said "never throw another fucking rock again."

That ended the session right there. Since then, the GM now makes copies of everyone's backstory and reads them frequently during games.

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>>52248161
>Party playing Jade Regent Pathfinder Campaign, infiltrating Ravenscraeg
>Be playing recently lv 5 character, Tiefling Alchemist4/Druid1
>Big Bear Man Thing with a battleaxe appears, trying to kill party
>It one-hit our minmaxed to shit combat paladin last time
>I picked up a lot of poison (sedative) from some ninjas, along with a blowgun and 10 darts
>Prep it all as a backup (mostly thinking "we can just kill him if he falls asleep")
>Eventually the bearman finds us, gets into tussle with barbarian, who's now at remarkably low health
>Rogue and Ranger are getting arrows off on him, but nothing majorly damaging
>"Alright anon, what do you do?" Asks the DM, thinking I only have orisons and bombs, which I can't use due to Barbarian's low health
>"I pull out the blowgun and the darts"
>Bear has fuckhuge fortitude save, so DM laughs it off
>I pump three darts in, nothing happens
>Bear fumbles and gets shaken
>pump a 4th one in
>"Whew, barely made his fortitude save-"
>"Does the condition put any minuses on that?"
>DM checks
>"Barbarian, you feel a mass of muscle and fur fall on top of you"
>We all think this thing might wake up if we try to kill it and don't get enough damage in to do the job
>Remember that this fortress is in the side of a cliff, and that the room we fought him in leads to the entrance
>Remember how far up we are due to already having nearly died from the fall halfway up the way here
>Strip bear, cover him in lantern oil
>Drag him to the dropoff of the entrance
>Light him up, drop him down
>"Anon, you level up."
>mfw

>>52264036
Did he throw rocks again?

>>52252450
Storytime?

>>52258304
Asking the important questions.

Was playing a Hunter: The Vigil campaign and we finally located where the house of a supernatural serial killer lived. As we entered the house, a few traps nearly killed us so we left. Since it was in this small farmhouse in the middle of no where we had one party member go buy a bunch of propane and a hose, slipped the hose underneath the door, filled the entire farmhouse in gas and threw a grenade inside.

the GM was happy we thought around the problem, but also sad cuz he had made all these floor plans and maps of this guys farm.

>party comes upon the bbeg before we know who he is
>bard rolls init, gets first
>casts silence
>spellcaster bbeg can't cast spells, fights with a piddly little dagger
>gets destroyed and so do his henchmen

>>52264533
Actually, a few sessions after that, we're waiting at a dock on the edge of a rather large lake and R is skipping stones across it. None of us are really paying attention and the DM tells us that a very angry looking mermaid is throwing all sorts of rocks and lake debris at us cursing whoever hit her daughter in the forehead.

I promptly got up, cracked him across the back of his skull with my staff, and proceeded to profusely apologize to the angry mother.

Would have been an easy fight, no doubt, but I didn't want to kill some poor mermaid just protecting her daughter over some shit that my idiot friend started.

>>52261817
> b-but it's active camo like from halo!
> b-but the fluff says it's matching to change the background
> b-but I can totally use either the fluff or the rules, whichever is more convenient to me, and rules-lawyer the DM who doesn't know the edition well because we switched halfway through the campaign (which was mostly my fault for introducing them to 3.5)
> b-but the whole table yells "yes" at the DM until he gives in

Jokes on them, though, I've been secretly helping the DM with the final boss battle so if this guy tries anymore antics he will be rekt in one round.

>>52258304
>>52264843

No, sadly, that character survived the adventure but was pretty cracked by the end of it. Those characters were for that campaign and pretty much that campaign only.

>>52252487
That's not you outsmarting the DM, that's just everyone else being retarded.

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>>52260716
>>52260756
fucking FINALLY found it

>>52258797
I would just throw in a houserule at the end of it that said the subject of the banishment gets to make some kind of skill check or saving throw or contest roll to determine where they come back, it's not like they stop existing while banished, they're just in a different plane. There should be some method of controlling your return, especially if what you cast it on is a spellcaster or particularly strong willed individual, they should have at least a chance of controlling their return to a minor degree.

If they make the save they'd end up back where THEY think they should be, namely on the airship, relative to where they were banished. If they fail to take control of their return they end up EXACTLY where they were banished, even if it's open air outside the ship.

I'm not saying my reasoning is ironclad truth, but it rings to me as more playable that way. Like instead of just completely removing something with zero thought involved, it's more like you're throwing them up into the air. They're out of your hair for the moment, but it's entirely possible for them to land on their feet should they have the wherewithal.

>>52266396
That DM is literally never going to recover from that.

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>DMing Star Wars Force And Destiny
>Jedi PCs fail first mission spectacularly, causing a GR-75 transport to nosedive into a crowded urban district
>Paramilitary police force comprised of Clone Wars veterans adopt "Terminate or arrest on sight policy" for Jedi
>They are fully capable of this from their aforementioned Clone Wars experience
>Meet contact in cantina
>As a gag, I have a commercial playing of a Toydarian lawyer's response to the GR-75 crash
>Commercial is a carbon copy of Saul Goodman's "Wayfarer 515" commercial
>PCs get mission, part of which involves tracking down a Rodian Fence
>He hangs out in an alley across from a hardware store
>Party's Artisan slices into store's cams to see what Rodian has been doing
>Party Seeker is talking to Rodian
>Just to fuck with the players, those cops from before are on their way to arrest Rodian for their own purposes
>Seeker surrenders to them immediately, but is being a cunt
>They get annoyed and go LAPD on his ass before taking him and the Rodian away
>I smirk, wondering how they're going to get him out without attacking a police station
>Artisan reminds me where the cameras were that she sliced and asks for the number of that lawyer on TV

My players just Rodney King'd my ass.

>>52260609
>>52250068
>The ancient lich ascends to his true form of living flesh.
>It's a t-rex.

>>52258391
>>52260418
Kiritsugu knew how to deal with mages.

>>52248161
When the player walked out.

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>>52267548

That's golden man.

Nothing worse/better than when the PC's realize they have enough rope to hang you with .

>>52260836
Im running an evil-ish game right now built around the players all founding a new cult to an old god in a frontier village. I found having that common bond of evil to work really well.

>>52265570
In honour of your ball's sacrifice I'm gonna include it as an artefact in my next CoC campaign.

>>52267548
That's a good way to join him in the spice mines.

Imps don't give no fucks.

>>52258641
Anon, it lasts for a whole minute, and the airship is moving ten feet per round. It's have to be a really long airship for him to still be inside at the end of the duration

>>52267601
Skullgreymon?

>>52250016
Shit like that happens surprisingly often in a surprising variety of settings.

If there's one thing I've learned through years of DMing, it's that players fucking love explosives and if there's a reasonable (or less-than-reasonable) way to solve any given situations with a big explosion, they'll choose it over pretty much any other option.

>>52270021
Heavy explosives are basically the only way to make any progress in CoC.

>>52248161
It was my first game, DM had no idea who the heck he was dealing with. I got some simple magic to control fibers/rope. Few turns later I was magic carpeting across the world map skipping nearly every encounter. Why climb the tower of doom if I can just ride up and take the artifact without any trouble.

After getting frustrated he sent some dragon after me in the sky. I blinded it and mesothelioma that dragon down with a cloud of fibers I ripped out of the toxic forest's tree bark below. Manged to snag a few dragon scales to sell for top dollar. Bought better fibers made of a number of things and soaked some in potions to give them special powers.

DM finally gets feed up after trying to stop me and just hits me with a meteor strike breaking my bones instantly without recourse. Use new healing fibers to manipulate my body like a puppet as I heal and fight off an over powered street gang designed to kill me after the meteor strike weaken me and I refused to yeild, I may have leveled a bit faster then they planned.

Got magic to control chains and at that point me and the DM were just fighting with the party locked a indestructible vault for their protection, as the the small city-state was getting leveled at that point as we kept one upping each other. DM was just making up shit at that point. Like lighting strikes me, to which I wouldn't call BS, but explain why those new mithril micro chain silk I put on three turns ago acts as a Faraday cage, complete with supporting documentation.

I ended up "winning" if you can call it that when I pointed out that the team had suffocated in the vault the DM had sealed them in to keep them alive given the devastation going on outside, as it was declared air tight as earlier a huge poison gas cloud sweep over the region faster then I could fly. Also dense fibers can filter out most types of poison gas and dust.

So my character was the only living thing left in the game world and the DM stormed out.

>>52250016
A running joke on my old Shadowrun group was asking to the bruiser of the party how many grenades we had left in stock.

Ok I'm kinda sad now.

>>52259687
Wouldn't you need a ridiculous amount of power to animate something like that? You wouldn't think that's something a hobbyist would be able to pull off.

>>52272508
Thinking about a certain level of D&D spellcaster as a 'hobbyist', let alone one who's a Necromancer, totally just made my day.

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>>52271878
>It was my first game, DM had no idea who the heck he was dealing with
Wow you're so amazing.
>Hey everybody, watch me be so hella awesome!

>>52272714
Well, in his own words he just "dabbled" in it.

But then, I guess it wouldn't be D&D if casters couldn't do absolutely everything without having to invest in it.