Strange twists you've stumbled into with tabletop games.

[FalloutJack]

Did someone say Rogue Trader? I have a tale from Rogue Trader.

Spoiler: Rogue Trader

So, the Rogue Trader - a rather vulnerable chap who was better known for 'the subtle dance' of manipulating people than heavy combat - was a chap that I jokingly called Lord Squishy. Lord Squishy was a smart guy, though. He had a tough group to do the killing for him and a large ship-crew of black-shirt interns (instead of red-shirt cannon-fodder) running a haunted ship through the cosmos. After the completion of a couple of important tasks, we were asked to go find and deal with a strange cult that has begun to use the Warp to their own advantage. We locate the cult, go over there with a small army, and are about to kick some ass when the whole lot of us are knocked out by a crazy old man with an organ grinder.

The old man was the cult's leader and he had utilized the grinder to pump out music that dulls the senses to the point of unconsciousness. We woke up...in a dream world. Actually, a VR simulation utilizing our unconscious minds and the Warp. It was a machine connected to the Warp that we would have to go through in order to escape because the unreality crushed our souls or somthing. The problem was that this simulation had enemies, minions of the Chaos Gods. The servants of Tzeentch, Nurgle, and Khorne were what you expect. Tzeench had a puzzle room with a group of badguys that would not move or be able to be affected until you started working the puzzle. Then, they would try to rip you apart so you couldn't escape. Khorne had a straight up bloody battle that ended in five minutes with us the victors. Nurgle had a swamp village full of decaying people who wanted us to join them that we successfully bullshitted up to the exit and then escaped.

The weird encounter there was the first, with the Slanneshi ones. When we got into this VR sim, our first encounter was with an orgy, about twenty times more involved than anything from Rome. Two of our people were getting their minds twisted into wanting to join. The other two - I among them - began to hack apart the people to make them stop. They were NOT people. Nothing in this sim were people. We all had a cognatively-dissonant moment of our 'victims' sighing with ecstacy as we cut some of them down, which precipitated the attack of the others while the first ones were beginning to reassemble. For the first time in the WHOLE GAME, killing it horribly wasn't going to work! We grabbed the other two and RAN! And fortunately, our encounters after that were much easier...

 

[Mechamorph]

I played in an RPoL campaign that had two parties, an Evil party and a Good party after the prize in an Ominous Tower of Doom. The good guys want to seal whatever is in the tower while the bad guys want to let it loose. The evil party worked well together as they understood enlightened self-interest. Heck, one pair of them was knocking boots shortly after they met due to good chemistry. The good party, not so much. Tended to act mostly on their own self-interest more than anything. When the good party encountered the evil party on the street (the villains were literally walking out to dinner), the heroes immediately attacked. Not only did they get slaughtered but the local law enforcement ruled that the villains acted in self-defense since "being evil" is not a criminal offense and none of the heroes were officers of the law. The campaign ended with "evil wins" by default since no one was allowed to resurrect the heroes since vigilante murder *was* a criminal offense and merited the death penalty. In a fantasy land this included the lawful resurrection of the offenders. The DM was lamenting that all the good roleplayers wanted to play villains and he had to make do with whoever he could for the heroes.

 

[Kotaro]

My group realized today that the FATE campaign we're playing is the plot of "Lunar: The Silver Star" mixed with elements of the "Doctor Who" episode "The Beast Below." Amusingly, the DM has neither played the former nor seen the latter.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

This is probably not the strangest thing ever if you're familiar with D&D and know how even lowbie dungeon setups can turn lethal if incorrectly dosed or assembled.

Long story short, my Level 4 wizard and a friend's Level 3 fighter were nearly torn apart by three goblins. Three.

As to how that happened, the dungeon's layout gave the bad guys an unfair drop on us, a hydra was trapped somewhere in the middle of the cave system, some Dark Elf lady with her spider pets guarded one of the exits, and the only way back to the entrance was through a goblin encampment, of which the inhabitants were described as being unusually well organized and equipped thanks to a trading deal with an old Dwarven settlement, several miles deeper.

So instead of goblins with pikes and bits of boiled leather for armor, a bunch of pint-sized horrors in full plate mail came at us. The DM had to bring in his main NPC and essentially nuke the attackers with a Chromatic Blast, then warp us back to the main surface settlement.

I guess what qualifies as strange is the rate at which our mood devolved from "We can handle this if we're careful" to "OH GOD NO, LET US OUT NOW!". By that, I mean that it was much too fast. Five minutes or two dice rolls, give or take.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Not so much a twist as just a really funny situation, but last session of D&D3.5 a group of 5th level PCs proved themselves incapable of taking down a single Kobold Zombie ... for 19 rounds.

And not some special zombie with additional HD or extra abilites or anything. A regular, bog-standard zombie. I have never seen such an amazing streak of low rolls before in my career as a DM. There was a grand total of 27 rolls to hit of a 1. And the PCs thmeselves all had high enough ACs that the zombie rarely ever got a hit in neither.

So it was 19 rounds of pointless flailing at each other, after which I got fed up with it and ruled that the zombie fell apart on its own due to decayal over time.

 

[Schadrach]

I was playing in an evil AD&D campaign with friends, and it my first evil campaign. I made this psychopathic, chaotic, piece of shit wizard with some demon issues, not really thinking about how impossible it would be to play with others in that way. After an in-game week, I was booted from the room for 5 minutes, then when I came back...

"Mornelithe, your body, flayed, decapitated, and violated in every way imaginable in found impaled in the morning. No one saw or heard anything."

So, I re-rolled a new character that played a little better with others, and had fun. It's still the only time I've ever been murdered though.

Last time I played an evil character, it was in a generally neutral-to-good party and I played it utterly pragmatic. I wasn't a big damn hero, I was more or less solely interested in my own profits to the exclusion of everything else, but I was spending an inordinate amount of effort trying to get the party to quit throwing away perfectly good profits for moral reasons.

For example, if a monster is attacking a child, killing the monster is probably good for PR and future work opportunities and it likely has some kind of lair and there's probably a reward out for it. The real question is if the most efficient way to monetize the child in the long run is to return it to it's parents for a reward, ransom it back to it's parents, sell it to slavers, or rip out it's soul and use it as a material component for item creation. the first is clearly the best PR, but the latter two are probably the highest immediate profit and we could probably get away with by "not finding the child"...

By the end of that campaign, I had ostensibly good aligned characters accepting the wisdom of taking enemies alive and doing the soul ripping thing on any that weren't of more obvious market value. After all, Mr. Druid, when you hunt you should use all the parts of the animal that you can, and all I'm suggesting is that we should use all the parts of the bandits that we can, in similar fashion. Waste not, want not, and so on. We had a sort of large breed trained pig as a pack animal, so that was how we typically disposed of corpses. Again, waste not, want not.

 

[09philj]

There's a fairly simple Steampunk-y RP called Lady Blackbird that me and my friends are currently working through. The initial campaign we did was the set story - the smuggler Cyrus Vance (played by me) and his crew have to deliver Lady Blackbird to her pirate lover Uriah Flynt. Things quickly got out of hand, and the party took a series of increasingly odd diversions ranging from the canteen of an imperial battleship, an underground bounty hunter rave, and to the home of some mute man eating aliens, one of whom we kidnapped and became a GM controlled party member. The other thing that happened was Snargle. At the beginning of the game, as a way to explain why Cyrus couldn't use a certain system on the Party's ship, the GM blamed one of the unused player characters, a goblin mechanic named Snargle. As the session wore on, Snargle gained an increasingly long list of crimes, including having all pork products removed from the ship because he was a vegetarian. As a result, after we finished the first campaign, we set out on another. The goal of this campaign was simple:

Spoiler: Get Snargle

.

This is ongoing.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Every time I DM I find it it hard to balance encounters so i've pulled some major shit to either give challenge or save them.

We are currently doing a campaign where we started at level 5, party of 3 including my one cheeselord minmaxing tryhard friend. Right it's a naval/oceanic camapign so first encounter will be.... Giant crabs! Probably gonna be easy so I can add some Shipwrecker crabs in once the first lot die, y'know... the Gargantuan size ones? The most horrifying crab in the world? Sounded good at the time, level 5 guys can beat crabs surely.

Yeah turns out that vanilla giant crabs are fuckin bullshit. Autograpple on hit with 3d6 damage each, actually could onehit our Kobold if they rolled high. They only won because my minmaxing friend had a Fear spell and they could not roll high enough for the Will save and our chaos knight had Cleave.

"DIE!"

"You kill it"

"CLEEEEEEEEEEAAAVVEEEEE!"

Tactfully decided not to bring in the Shipwreckers after...

Then the very first time I DM'd I broke the entire party after a few quests because that minmaxing fuckboy picked a Diminutive size character and had like 25 AC at level 1. I had an idea for an animated object haunted house quest, murderous tables and chairs included.

Nope Mr 25 AC is literally invincible, tables get gibbed and kited so I just fuckin' said "the tables all combine into a super table" and bullshitted up its stats. He finally takes a hit.

"I use a health potion"

"The super table steals your health potion"

I was beyond salty at this point. After the quest our CE guy murders the NPC who gave him the quest in an alley, Mr 25 AC drops alignment for letting it happen and the campaign was just dropped entirely.

10/10 would steal potions again.

 

[the December King]

A FATE campaign, converted from a customized d20 modern one, loosely based on the old TMNT role playing game, combined with a healthy dose of sandbox-style madness. We are calling it the 1986 game.

We're all playing mutants, but there are humans as well, and numerous ways that humans and mutants co-exist, from extreme prejudice to utopic inclusiveness- it reminds me a lot of BoJack Horseman. But more insane and with a GTA bent, as we are all playing criminals or sociopaths.

My character is a strange crow mutant (looks like an old native American man garbed in black) from New Brunswick, Canada who thinks he's the son of Glooscap. He believes he was a spirit of tradition and learning, made insane by the modern invention of radio waves and TV, and as a consequence he loves TV, and has a flock of disgruntled crows that follow him at all times, bad-mouthing him and calling him names. Anyways he saw Ocean's Eleven and couldn't shake the desire to rob a bank, so he started hitching/flying to Vegas...

But the nice thing is that we all started with awesome backstories that made all of us really unique. There's a shallow flamingo nightclub babe named Miami Vice. There's a former food chain mascot chicken man from Alabama with cannibalism issues. We have a former MMA champion grizzly bear from Australia. An extremely disgruntled Russian hedgehog mechanic. And of course, Brian Fellows as a time wizard.

Last game was very hard to describe- we have a penchant for trying to make the DM laugh at our antics, so it can go off the rails. But one of the players has been recording audio of the games since we started- he says it's hilarious. I can't wait to give it a listen!

 

[Kyrian007]

Some campaigns begin derailed. We wanted to start another game, so our host offers to GM D&D (I believe he had just picked up 3rd Ed.) So we all started rolling up characters. The gm started putting some things together. About 5 minutes later the GM asks the guy next to him, "what's your guy's class and name?" The guy replied "he's a thief named Bo." The gm went back to jotting down notes, but I noticed the guy on the other side of the gm had flipped his pencil around and erased something from the top of his character sheet. A few minutes later the gm asked that guy the same question. With a small grin he responded "another thief, his name is Luke." This time when the gm went back to jotting down notes EVERYONE at the table erased the name they had picked out. It pissed off the GM so badly when the party turned out to become.

Brother thieves named Bo and Luke
Female cleric named Daisy
Male fighter named Roscoe
Male fighter named Cooter
Male wizard named Jefferson Davis Hogg
Oh, and my male cleric Uncle Jessie Duke

On my end of the spectrum, I have a twist brewing for other members of my DnD group. My current character is actually a werebear. Only me and the DM know so far, and I'm trying to see how long I can keep them in the dark. A few sessions in and they're currently none the wiser.

That is always fun. It's happened to my group several times in Deadlands campaigns when one player or another draws the Joker and is Harrowed and has to play undead.

 

[RJ 17]

Not really a twist, but there was a DM in my group back in high school that came up with an NPC that was nothing more than a cute little baby seal...like this little bugger:

Now here's the thing about this cute little bastard: he's apparently a god. No one knows which god he is or what his realm of dominion is, but apparently the only thing it craves in life is tummy rubs. It just appears randomly at any location and starts rolling around and generally being cute.

If you're mean to it, it'll kill you in a horrifically creative way. Give it a bunch of lovies and cuddles and it will reward you by burping out a random item. These items can range from the silly and useless (such as a ring that grants permanent invisibility as long as no one is looking at you) to the hilariously overpowered (such as a staff that summons an indestructible dragon god to smite your enemies).

My favorite was the Dagger Of Infectious Rust. It was a simple throwing dagger that was absolutely consumed with rust. The moment it impacts with anything it'll shatter. The trick is that whatever item the dagger breaks against becomes a new (fill in the blank) Of Infectious Rust. So you break it on a shield and that shield becomes consumed by rust, ready to shatter at the next impact. Break the shield against a sword and that sword becomes consumed by rust, ready to shatter at the next impact. And so-on and so-forth.

The original owner was Snargoth the Troll who was tired of his troll-buddy always bragging about the magical armor he found on a dead adventurer, so in a fit of jealousy Snargoth crafted the Item of Infectious Rust (history has forgotten what item originally held this enchantment as it has been passed along for centuries) and used it to destroy his buddy's armor.

That's right, my friends: this particular weapon is a Troll Weapon...a weapon meant for Trolls...to use for trolling. :3

"Wow! That's some sweet loot you got there! Oops..."
-Flavor Text for the item.