GM's Corner: For those eternal moments

[FinalMax]

Well, I figured we needed a thread here to just talk about those moments in GMing that were utterly horrible or utterly awesome. I've mostly had bad experiences with running games, even the one I'm currently co-running.

To start off, I'll talk about my first GM experience. It was a few years back, and I was trying to make a 4th Edition D&D game with a Norse theme. First time running a game, and with a newly formed group. I plan out the initial meeting place as the oft used tavern. I put it in a port town. There I had the players describe themselves as total strangers, since much of this group really didn't know one another. The barkeep pointed out 3 individuals who might have work for the group, making sure to point out that these people have asked. The individuals were a Bard, a Swordmage, and a 4th edition Avenger. Each one I had a very rough outline of where they'd lead the party. The Avenger would have lead them out to sea, the Swordmage would have lead them to the northwest, and the Bard to the northeast.

So what does the party decide to do? Head out the door without talking to anybody but the barkeep! Quickly scrambling to salvage this initial clusterfuck, I rolled my d6 to determine which of the 3 would stop the group from completely walking off of the adventures. I rolled the Bard, who needed help delivering a package for someone. So we head off, fighting wolves, bandits, and more bandits. I wanted to keep the typical D&D races out of it because I was using a Nordic setting. Don't remember Kobolds there myself.

Now the composition of the party was the horrors of legend. Proof of my inexperience as a GM, we had a wizard who modeled his character after his actual WoW character and was more or less from Azeroth. I know I should not have let this happen, as putting him in was just as bad as a previous game I had played in where someone convinced a GM to put a Jedi in Eberron. We also had a fighter named Hawkfeather, but whose player said it so fast we all heard "Cockfeather." There were many jokes on that fighter's expense. The wife of Hawkfeather's player was a rookie player who chose a changeling rogue. She tried playing it as if she were a ranger, or hid all day. The last player was my own sister, who I believe was a Warlord healer.

Anyway, each session tended to be "shoot the shit, recap, wait for others to stop shooting the shit, one encounter, queue a player headache, wrapup." In the end, I just made shit up for it to wrap up. I couldn't enjoy the game I was effectively forced into running. Needed a year to build the world just so it had proper geography and a breakdown of what to expect heading out into the wilderness.

 

[akun50]

Hmmm... almost sounds like you might need to talk to your players about what sort of adventure they'd like to go on rather than letting them fly by the seat of their pants. If the same group is to play again, I'd start the session at the interview of a job, or better yet, post-interview and at the start of the adventure.

I had a similar thing happen when I DM'd for the first time. There weren't many kids my age in my neighborhood, so I ended up DMing for a few 5th graders and a few middle schoolers.

Two of the middle schoolers were the sort to power game and, at the time, I was too naive to simply make characters for the group. One of them wanted to play a Tiefling Paladin that I wasn't smart enough to shut down; and the other wanted to play some half-dragon warrior that I was at least smart enough to nix. I basically told the half-dragon wannabe that he could use the character (the stats weren't stellar), but it was going to be a standard human with none of the breath-weapon BS he was going to try and sneak in.

Ironically, the rest had made fairly decent 4th level characters, despite being younger. Hell, they even had decent backstories too.

I was initially going to start the adventure at the start of the cave they were going to explore, but the two power-gaming chucklheads were insistent that they get supplies first, since their characters "were already in a campaign". (queue me wondering why they would risk losing campaign-critical characters for a one-off dungeon)

I was stupid enough to let them. I figured they'd actually go to a supply store and do their purchasing, but no, they went to the nearest temple, asked if they were of some religion (I think it was Tyr) and immediately started trashing the place when it was actually that of a Lawful Evil god (I forget who). Since the Tiefling needed +1 weapons or better to be hit, I had the clerics cast Spiritual Hammer and start beating on the two twits.

The others, who'd been left out of the action while these two dimwits were trying to ruin the session, complained that it was boring listening to the two do their dance of the stupidity bund, so they relented. I reset the campaign, pretending nothing had happened (which was a good thing for the two twits, since there were more than twenty clerics in the temple and they'd been botching rolls pretty badly), and started them into the dungeon.

Wherein the twits immediately ran off down a corridor, abandoning the others to an attack by three orcs and a troll. I think I had a cave-in kill the two briefly before resetting them YET AGAIN so they were with the rest of the party, who'd managed to kill the orcs.

Sadly, the troll pretty much savaged the entire group (save the tiefling, of course), as none of them were using fire or acid (or could hit worth a damn, even when I dropped the troll's AC to 10 behind the scenes), the mage only had magic missile and stinking cloud (or "the fart spell" as he called it) and they ended up using the not-a-half-dragon's lantern to make sure the troll died. At that point, most of them needed to be home, so I just called the session there.

 

[TheKinginRed]

I'm not the gm for my group but I still have some awesome moments to share.

So me and my group were running a pathfinder campaign, we had an elven sorcerer, an elven ninja, dwarf barbarian, human bard, human ranger, and a half-orc monk.

During the early parts of the campaign we encountered a group of goblins in a glassworks. Most of them were easily dispatched.....except for one.

This one goblin was a fucking commando special ops or something because he not only managed to dexterously jump from table to table, he managed to crit a rusty iron throwing knife into our barbarian's shoulder, through the armor.

He then backflipped off the table and proceeded to attack and seriously maim our barbarian. We instantly decided to catch and tame him.

That done in a later encounter, this same goblin npc who we'd bribed with food and beer fought a sinspawn mostly by himself and scored two criticals on it as well as managing a reflex save high enough to avoid being crit'd by said sinspawn.

Currently he has now acquired an enchanted cold iron dagger with a returning enchantment.....badass.

 

[FinalMax]

Ok, that's an admittedly fun turn of events in the Rise of the Runelords AP.

My current GMing gig has me putting players through the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition AP. We have had a hell of a problem with our Player 4 situation. Either they were too stoned for a while to be of use (that's been resolved), or a bunch of legal issues pop up for them. Current Player 4 necessitates me heading over to my family's industrial park to have the game most times, much to my own dismay. His problems so far consist of custody battles for his son, more because his most recent ex decided to sabotage his child custody hearings.

Anyway, recently I managed to kill off two player characters in a single session. Only one was actually planned. We were going through the Skinsaw Murders, and the group was going to make plans to hit the Shadow Clock. Between us keeping track of the effective calendar of Golarion and my own reading of the final boss of that module, I realized I could stealthily kill off one of the player characters and replace him temporarily with a doppelganger of some sort. The day they were about to hit the clock, it turned out to be the celebration of the god of booze's ascendancy. Our fighter (Player 4) actually is a follower of that deity, so he went out to get drunk and wench away. Player 1, also my assistant for this, had rolled who the first woman our fighter was going to wench. She was a Tiefling sculptor who happened to be a hermaphrodite. Percentiles were rolled to see who was on the receiving end, and the fighter lost the first couple rounds. He was thankfully too drunk to care. After that, I had my trap spring on that fighter. The boss of the last part of that module was a Lamia matriarch who occasionally would head out in a human disguise to find someone to take to bed. So I rolled discretely to see if he survived the encounter. He didn't.

We also had a female Alchemist who was going to go the Jekyll/Hyde route. When we got to the tower, the Alchemist and the Wizard (player 1) climbed up the side of the tower thanks to Spider Climb. The replaced fighter and a cleric went in to deal with things from there, primarily a flesh golem with a big ass scythe. Wizard was using a scroll of See Invisibility in case Xanesha (the boss) was invisible in the room, but he didn't find her. So he went down a floor to where a bunch of bells were rigged to be dropped to the floors below and actually dropped one on the golem. This made a group of faceless stalkers come up to investigate, so of course the wizard took to the ceiling. They go up a floor intent on poking the wizard's feet from the other side of that floor, and they run into the Alchemist in Feral Dexterity Mutagen. Queue Xanesha slithering in from the absolute top floor to shank the Alchemist with her enchanted spear. So Alchemist is now debuffed heavily and sickened for a round, leading to her taking more damage. Eventually, the Wizard does most of the damage to Xanesha with a pack of summoned Celestial Wolverines. Oh, and the Wizard used a two spell combo to flat out steal Xanesha's magic spear from her hands. So the boss has lost her only melee option other than Wisdom drain, she's surrounded by smiting/raging wolverines, and damage is quickly wracking up. She leaps onto the roof of the tower and begins to slither away. Wizard then summons a celestial pterodon, and the Alchemist throws a bomb. Xanesha is hurting, but then decides to fall off the tower. Wizard, Alchemist, and summoned dinosaur take pursuit after Wizard casts Haste. Xanesha fries a bit of the Alchemist with a Scorching Ray, then tries to put the pterodon to sleep with Deep Slumber. Summon needed a natural 20 to avoid it, so of course it rolled it. As the ground approaches, the Alchemist decides to throw a bomb at the falling boss. She ends up killing herself because she moves faster than the bomb and missed the boss. Back to Xanesha. Wizard leapt onto the pterodon, possibly to counterspell the boss. Boss decides fuck it and goes to grapple one of the two descending foes, and she grabs the summon. That knocks the wizard off the scaled turkey, but he then casts feather fall on himself. So Xanesha and the summon hit the ground with a resounding splat, followed shortly by the Alchemist's corpse landing on Xanesha.

Meanwhile, back with the pod person and the cleric. After the bell assisted them in killing the golem, they tried to rush to the top floor to help with Xanesha. They got to the top after Xanesha went splat, and that's when I had the pod person attack the cleric. It ended with the pod person being killed by the cleric. That roughly marked the end of my group's take on the Skinsaw Murders.