Strange twists you've stumbled into with tabletop games.

[theevilgenius60]

Recently, some friends and I have been going through one of the pre made quest lines in D&D 5e, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, while my friend and I work on our dm chops. We've been, clunkily, swapping out dm duties, session by session, and the big joke every week was where either my bard or his paladin would be this time.
Session before last we decided we needed a vacation from all the dragon shit tied into the story so I had them(except my bard) sucked into a dream where they visited the dream city of Kadath, were plagued by lesser servitors like shoggoths and nightguants, and woke them up with a gift from Nyarlethotep, some of his masks. Kind of a little Lovecraftian vacation.
When they awoke, the session ended with my bard telling them what really happened, and that he'd put on one of the masks. He was unable to take it off and was seeing hallucinations.
This past session started with the paladin trying to remove it from me using some of his powers. It didn't work, and he was sucked into the mask. Now, he comes forth and manifests in my stead. This ties up the need to make excuses for where the other is that week, but it also hit me. My bard became a persona user. Not only that, but it was directly influenced by Nyarlethotep, and none of it was planned.
TL;DR: I've somehow turned my D&D5e bard into Tatsuya Suou, from Persona 2.
Anyway, main point of the thread, I want to hear your stories, getting a group of creative people together for tabletop gaming can lead to some strange places.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

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.

Damn, what did you do to deserve this fate?

I'm assuming it was the inevitable fate of an all-evil party, someone usually gets murdered in their sleep for various reasons, sometimes as simple as one less to divide the spoils amongst. I rarely allow a full evil party as a DM unless I know the players extremely well and feel they can play well enough to make the game fun. Otherwise its better to play Paranoia which encourages distrust, fear and justified (rightly or wrongly) murder of other party members.

 

[the-kitchen-slayer]

Oh... The stupidity I have seen in my days of DMing...

The one that stands out the most right about now is an encounter with a boss from Anima: Beyond Fantasy. The party was traveling by boat to their next destination, when I decided "Eh, it's about time this guy shows up to wreak some havoc, remind them that most of the party has Powerful Enemy (Insert faction here) and it has it's consequences."

So... After a little bit of fun with undead minions, a "Vampiric" necromancer goes and dominates the soul of one of the players with necromancy. Said player is, well, pretty bloody strong thanks to a very specific build with Ki abilities and martial arts. The necromancer orders him to, in round about ways, try to kill one of the other players. Cue the back of the boat getting punched out, aaand then the boat thrown (Yes, thrown) 3 miles towards the center of the inner sea, party off the ship, vampire on board.

Not one of my shining moments in DMing history.

Another entertaining disaster was the time my Dark Heresy team had more issues with (Aka, almost died to) a hole in the floor than the rest of the adventure (One player just had terrible, terrible roles)

 

[FalloutJack]

Oh boy! A thread to talk about nutty adventures!

*Cracks knuckles*

Spoiler: Call of Cthulhu

Let's start with something understandably wicked, but with a good reason. During a convention, a GM had created a one-shot campaign called "The Cenobite in the Cupboard". Uh-huh. Already, you're getting an idea of where this is going. Don't get ahead of me. The situation is that we were a group of supernatural investigators who debunk ghost stories and such. The latest greatest? A house with a 'magic cupboard' that supposedly brings whatever is inside to life. You know, like that movie. This is basically a world where the kid grew up insisting that this stuff was real and ended up committed to an asylum, leaving the weird tale of the cupboard behind.

So, we investigate and - after finding the REAL key and not the fake we had - manage to animate an indian who takes one look at us and dies of a heart attack. Point is: Holy shit, fucker's real. And then, we hear noises from upstairs. Discovering an attic that was sealed away, we find the original owner of the cupboard, looking ragged and unstable. But hey, he's the LEAST of our problems. It seems that Wesley - our NPC cameraman - has been going on and on lately about his favorite cult horror movies, the Hellraiser movies. And wouldn't you know it? He actually had a prop he'd gotten on Ebay from them. Guess which one. We hear...the most horrifying scream of pain and horror in the world...and go downstairs to find a hellish puzzlebox in the cupboard.

For those of you not in the know, Clive Barker's Hellraiser films involved a special kind of puzzlebox that unlocks a gateway to a hell dimension known as the Labyrinth. Within it lies its denizens - demons to some, angels to others - the Cenobites. Every single one of them is a walking testamont to pain and suffering, dedicated to the excitation of the senses to the most exquisite torture possible. Wesley was torn to bits. We didn't see how, but the evidence was all over the vicinity. And then...the room opened up...kind of like this:


Cenobites, all of them. Ready to play a nasty game of death, their gateway into this realm made real by the cupboard. Hell unleashed upon the world, and we're the appetizer. Ah, but they're giving us...sort of a sporting chance. They hunt, track, prod, jab, and prepare to rend asunder...we attempt to escape and close the box, which has been changed into a weird spike. Sanity checks are happening everywhere, especially when the puzzle shifts and we''re all starting to lose our mind. Some of us disappear and some of us are spoken to in our heads, and then I went insane enough to start killing for possession of the box.

The Cenobites pulled the last two of us into the Labyrinth, our cohorts now menacing Cenobites themselves preparing to dice the last guy because I'm technically working WITH them. I made the fatal mistake of going "Hey guys! Little help here!" because I was shooting frantically at this last guy and not hitting shit. They took that as helping me with their own brand of help. I was ripped apart. The last guy, though, shoved the still-unsolved puzzlebox into the cupboard in a sudden effort to make it not real. That...went poorly. Reality reversed itself. He and the house became as toys, hell was everywhere, and the last scene was of him staring up at a gigantic Pinhead.

Spoiler: Star Wars

Go to an anime convention in Pittsburgh and ask about Darth Dumbass. Wonderful story. However, that's somebody else's claim to fame.

My tale here involves a few instances in the campaign of the corellian freighter, No, Don't Put That There. There's plenty of these freighters in the biz and alot of them are used for - you guessed it - smuggling! Bit of background first. Our captain was a wiseass Kel Dor rebel fighter veteran who lived for 'the good times', so you can imagine some of our adventures being funny just because he was there to put his own angle on it. His ship was known as the No Don't Put That There as a mistake during the exact moment of filing its designation when somebody mishandled some cargo and distracted him. While souping up the ship, he stated that it was his dream to somehow mount a Turbolaser on it, though he would have to clear out nearly all of the cargo space and alter the ship dramatically to do it. (He didn't.)

Our crew consisted of him, the semi-drunk co-pilot, myself (the secretly-trained-through-mind-control assassin searching for the Inquisitor that manipulated him), a force-sensitive nobleman archaeologist, a four-armed combat droid who always has a pair of swords sticking in the air and thinks that he's GOD, our mechanic/slicer who's secretly a Jedi archivist who escaped Order 66, and probably the worst Mandolorian ever, but that was because his player was a dumbass. We had good times and bad on the NDPTT. The idiot Mando was a guy who kept harping on about PvP when the GM said no. When he originally wanted to join, he also wanted to be a force sensitive Ewok and the GM ruled no, but he kept talking about it and wasting our time for a while. When he was the Mando, he was so-so with areas of dumb. There had been a secret facility with a predatory beast put in there as a guardian and he wanted to tame it as a pet. This was not the same as our captain, who - with our efforts - had taken command of a LARGE prototype attack robot that proceeded to slaughter storm troopers for us...until someone cut in with priority codes and we had to put it down.

No, see, the strange and admittedly funny thing here was that as we grew to hate the Mando more and more, it became acceptable to DO things that would be considered PvP like he wanted. To wit, we killed him. It all started when I sabotaged his jetpack while we were on a rooftop. Results were kind of like this...


With his chharacter having barely survived and us arguing again, surprise #2 happened when the nobleman activated a light saber in the Mando's pocket that he couldn't get started...because it was a force sensitive trigger. Quite impaled by that one. We let him roll another character after a lecture and he behaved-ish. One of the better moments I'm actually leading up to here is in regards to a battle and a rule in the system that allows a Jedi to make use of powers he has not trained for - as a one-shot - in an emergency situation (i.e. Spend a force point). Okay, SO! My Master has appeared, along with his finest student (a deadly Zabrak), an Imperial General, and a Dark Jedi. There were also Storm Troopers to take care of, naturally. People go handle different fights. I got saddled with the Dark Jedi.

Now, this happened at least once before now, but this was a particularly surprising moment. You see, during the fight, I reached zero HP. No more, no less. I had NO clue what happened if you were down to zero and not past. Past means you're dying, bleeding out unless saved or recuperated before someone shreds you. Before, of course, means you're just in bad shape, but not down. Exactly zero was apparently just unconscious, which would allow me to attempt to wake and recuperate some HP aaand nothing else. Basically helpless. Well, not exactly. Dark Jedi attempted to slice me open when I came to and he missed. So, perfect a man who is hurt and looking like hell narrowly avoiding a light saber before - and without training - suddenly blasting his foe to death with force lightning! Apparently, that rule allowed for even Dark Side powers. You take a dark side point, but when you're at death's door and you need to survive...this is not bad. Actually, pretty epic. He was pinned against a forcefield while being volted to death.

 

[pookie101]

two spring to mind, the first was my first every table top session. my friends character was seriously injured on the ground and a bad guy went to finish him off, the player asked "what can i do?" to the GM who replied "all you can manage is to kick him in the shin".. player does.. scores a critical hit. breaks the guys leg.

the second was a game of paranoia. for those who dont know its a game where the plaers are encouraged to backstab and get the other players killed by any means as long as it isnt straight out gunning them down for no reason, each player gets 6 clones, and before each mission they are assigned a mysterious device to test. not to mention the entire thing is under the control of a psychotic computer

well this player caused the deaths of roughly 26 clones in one mission, got to the end debriefing and was the only survivor of the team. he was asked by the computer "why havent you tested your item (a robot that followed him but wouldnt do anything" the player told the computer "its faulty" and the computers response "lets see.. robot.. explode" it was a nuclear bomb bot

 

[Kajin]

I'm assuming it was the inevitable fate of an all-evil party, someone usually gets murdered in their sleep for various reasons, sometimes as simple as one less to divide the spoils amongst. I rarely allow a full evil party as a DM unless I know the players extremely well and feel they can play well enough to make the game fun.

Sounds like you need better players. Evil does not equate to petty thievery and the murder of useful assets. If it did then the goodly heroes would never have any evil empires to fight because the villains running it would have long since murdered each other.

I've always wanted to play in an evil campaign and I'm getting sick of hearing this same lame excuse trotted out every time I try to get someone to run one.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I'm assuming it was the inevitable fate of an all-evil party, someone usually gets murdered in their sleep for various reasons, sometimes as simple as one less to divide the spoils amongst. I rarely allow a full evil party as a DM unless I know the players extremely well and feel they can play well enough to make the game fun.

Sounds like you need better players. Evil does not equate to petty thievery and the murder of useful assets. If it did then the goodly heroes would never have any evil empires to fight because the villains running it would have long since murdered each other.

I've always wanted to play in an evil campaign and I'm getting sick of hearing this same lame excuse trotted out every time I try to get someone to run one.

Generally my experience has been to have players who mask their alignment during play, rather than out and out be evil. Like one or two evil players in the midst of an otherwise "good" group, who go as far as they can before their evil actions are outed. I've had varying degrees of success with this, depending on the party makeup and the skill of the roleplayers involved. Had one player successfully bluff a Paladin (another player) who messed up a detect evil roll into committing an evil act which lost him favor with his god, turned him down a path of ever darker sins all because the two were excellent players and rolled with the dice outcomes.
I've also played Vampire and various White-Wolf campaigns where Evil is a more common makeup. It all depends on the game type and the skill of the roleplayers. I never said I had poor success with Evil campaigns, just that there aren't as many roleplayers out there who can pull off an evil campaign without turning it into a backstabbing fest.
Like while playing Vampire I was also very testy on letting players choose a Malkavian because of the predilection to mistake "kooky" with "insane." Some people don't understand the nuances of evil and insanity and generally play a very immature version of those things which harms games more than it helps. But certainly there are also great players out there who can pull it off, I just don't immediately allow people I just started playing with to go that route until I'm sure they can handle it.

 

[Kajin]

I'm assuming it was the inevitable fate of an all-evil party, someone usually gets murdered in their sleep for various reasons, sometimes as simple as one less to divide the spoils amongst. I rarely allow a full evil party as a DM unless I know the players extremely well and feel they can play well enough to make the game fun.

Sounds like you need better players. Evil does not equate to petty thievery and the murder of useful assets. If it did then the goodly heroes would never have any evil empires to fight because the villains running it would have long since murdered each other.

I've always wanted to play in an evil campaign and I'm getting sick of hearing this same lame excuse trotted out every time I try to get someone to run one.

Generally my experience has been to have players who mask their alignment during play, rather than out and out be evil. Like one or two evil players in the midst of an otherwise "good" group, who go as far as they can before their evil actions are outed. I've had varying degrees of success with this, depending on the party makeup and the skill of the roleplayers involved. Had one player successfully bluff a Paladin (another player) who messed up a detect evil roll into committing an evil act which lost him favor with his god, turned him down a path of ever darker sins all because the two were excellent players and rolled with the dice outcomes.
I've also played Vampire and various White-Wolf campaigns where Evil is a more common makeup. It all depends on the game type and the skill of the roleplayers. I never said I had poor success with Evil campaigns, just that there aren't as many roleplayers out there who can pull off an evil campaign without turning it into a backstabbing fest.
Like while playing Vampire I was also very testy on letting players choose a Malkavian because of the predilection to mistake "kooky" with "insane." Some people don't understand the nuances of evil and insanity and generally play a very immature version of those things which harms games more than it helps. But certainly there are also great players out there who can pull it off, I just don't immediately allow people I just started playing with to go that route until I'm sure they can handle it.

Fair enough. I'm just sick of all the DM's I've run across more or less acting like us betraying and murdering each other is the end all be all of any evil campaign. I've been straight up told to my face that an all evil game would end five minutes after it started from all the players killing each other. It's really annoying.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I'm guessing random happenstance in 40k counts, 'cause its tabletop and always a right laugh.

I was playing a 30k match representing Istvaan III, and I was loyalist Death Guard vs no good whoreson Traitor Mechanicum.
And I was loosing fairly solidly. The Mechanicum had lost a bunch of units, sure, but there was a clear direction the game was going.

There was only 1 objective I could get to with a tactical squad and an Arch Magos with Myrmidons and Thallax support were coming in. The Thallax charged my tac squad while the Magos secured the objective, which had the mysterious objects rule. So he rolled 2d6 off the Istvaan chart and rolled an undetonated virus bomb. He rolled to see if it went off. It did.
All models within 6', which was everything in that area, had roll a d6. On a 2+, they were removed from play, no saves allowed.

By the end the only things left standing were 3 of my tacs. The Magos had survived with Look Out Sir roles, but had failed a leadership test and retreated 9" away. So there my mans were, securing the last objective.

Game ended up being a tie.

Pretty damn fun.

 

[Mahorfeus]

Not strictly "tabletop" since I play Pathfinder mainly through play-by-post format, but I don't think this twist would have been as well executed otherwise.

As part of her backstory, the elven rogue in the Wrath of the Righteous game I'm in had a sword that contained the soul of an azata, the result of two conflicting wishes - one to utterly destroy her, and one to bring her back.

Early on in the game, she got killed while trying to save a child from some cultists. Fortunately, we were able to acquire a scroll of reincarnate. My druid was not strong enough to cast the spell himself, but there was another druid there to give him some help. There was all of this anticipation about what kind of form the rogue would take on when she returned to life, but once the spell was completed, nothing seemed to happen. That is, until her sword shattered, and her original body was reanimated... now in possession of the azata. As it turned out, the rogue had actually rolled a new character well in advance (after she died, anyway), giving the GM an opportunity to tie it into the story. Much (in-character) drama ensued, and we all loved it.

As for the child... well, we learned shortly after the rogue's death that she had already been possessed by a shadow demon as part of the very ritual we thought we interrupted. In our character's grief, they failed to notice it in time.

 

[Erttheking]

Minor moment, but apparently if you go into the med bay to recover from a concussion in Rogue Trader, you can actually get killed by the doctor if you roll that badly.

Yeah we decided to say "You just get better" after that.

Other random moments.

Trying to disguise a ship for an ambush and we painted "DONUT STEEL" on it.

The time we accidentally caused a full blown Chaos incursion and had to Exterminatus a planet.

My friend tried to contact a planet and kept accidentally busting into the man of a guy on the toilet.

That time we came out of warp and rammed right into a heavily guarded pirate station, got stuck in it and then pulled out and warped out. My friend described it as a "one night stand."

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

From last week, long story short:
The group is trying to infiltrate a cult that has kidnapped the daughter of their employer. Everything goes well until one of the players balk at the initiation rite, thinking he'll be killed if he agrees to go through with it. The cultists suspects foul play and beats the character unconscious, but the rest of the group breaks cover and comes to the rescue. So they find themselves with two captured but wounded cultists and their unconscious and badly beaten friend. In an act that can best be described as not entirely thought through they ask the cultists if they know of any healers in the city, and the cultists tell them of one. They then agree to leave the two cultist and their friend unsupervised in the care of the healer that the cultists told them about. Next day, their (former) captives and friend are gone and the healer is nowhere to be found...

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Well I once managed to absorb the entire firepower of a Space Marine Centurion squad with a single Necron Warrior. I don't even know how to calculate those odds, but they must be goddamn astronomical. At another recent game I was with my Necrons (one of the most firepower-heavy armies in the game) vs. Orks (squishy, close combat focused horde army). All I had to do was sit on my ass and shoot them to bits as they came closer. But the Ork player had such ridiculous luck with his saving throws that by the end of the game I had 3 models on the table. And it wasn't even due to my tactical ineptitude, the guy was just so ludicrously lucky.

 

[WindKnight]

2nd ed 40k, My eldar vs some space marines. Opponent gets turn, spends it maneuvering for the most part, and switch out a guardian in base contact with my farseer for a callidus assassin. Shooting dose nothing, and in close combat, my farseer holds off the assassin.

We get to the psychic phase, and I use an Ultimate Force card to cast an attack on a terminator squad that ultimatly does nothing, apart from my opponent using it to cause a warp attack, meaning my seer has to roll 3+ or die.

I roll a 2

Now, because of my general dying, every friendly unit in range has to take panic test. We're looking at LD values of 9 or 10, with a couple at 8, so I'm confident.

All fail the test.

Due to the assassin being where he is, they all have to run towards the nearest table edge, which is a good 10" away for the closest unit.

Every unit runs off the table.

So, one turn, half my army lost, and technically only one sort of maybe being attributable to enemy action.

After me and my opponent stop laughing, we decide to go ahead and finish the game. I don't last long.

 

[Fractral]

Fair enough. I'm just sick of all the DM's I've run across more or less acting like us betraying and murdering each other is the end all be all of any evil campaign. I've been straight up told to my face that an all evil game would end five minutes after it started from all the players killing each other. It's really annoying.

That sounds more like a Paranoia game than anything else. It's fun, but not really what you want for a long series of sessions. I've never had a Paranoia game last more than a single session since there's never been more than half the players alive at the end. It doesn't help that as my group can meet up only once every few months we tend not to like leaving loose ends.
The one DnD game I played had an evil player alongside my Paladin. The evil player simply tried to get the group to make selfish, morally questionable decisions- he never attacked any of us, and while I argued with him a lot I never attacked him either.

OT: Paranoia games are made to be derailed. The first one I GM'd involved rather a lot of anal... investigations... as the players decided that their pills could only be taken rectally. It also ended in a huge shootout when the party split, which happened in such a stupid way:
Player A murdered Player B. Player C found out, and told Players D and E but not B (who had been revived in a new clone body). C then attacked A at the climax along with D and E, but since he'd not told B, B defended his murderer against someone trying to avenge his death. The only survivor was Player F, who spent the entire exchange taking potshots at both sides while hiding. He was then executed as I considered his actions cowardly.

 

[Weresquirrel]

I was playing a homebrewed game of my own design with my normal DnD group, it was only meant to be a short affair, mostly testing the mechanics and setting. Initially I had planned on introducing the big bad of the campaign early, having him escape on a ship and lead them on a merry goose chase around a couple of planets before getting himself cornered and captured.

The scallywags not only managed to hack the ship before it could take off, but they subdued the two mooks I had in place to try and slow them down. This meant they managed to bypass the chase part and I had to quickly mentally re-write the person on the ship into being a lackey (luckily I hadn't given them a formal description of the guy in the bounty office, so they didn't notice my miscalculation).

Then, in the enemy base where the bad guy was hiding out, I had planned a few ways for them to approach the guy. Either via the barracks, where there'd be a big ol' gunfight all neat and ready for me to test combat mechanics in a skirmish. Through the drug labs where there'd be a few spaced out patrolling guards where I could test small scale combat and stealth mechanics, or through the power core where they could bypass combat and test their mechanical skills.

Sod's law, the same guy who hacked the ship managed to get a critical success on a hacking check in the security office and gained root access to the facility's systems. He just locked the guards in their rooms and they strolled down the corridor to the bad guy's office unmolested.

So yeah, they managed to skip a chunk of the campaign through some lucky rolls.

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.