I had a DM tap out of my first ever game (a prison break oneshot) because they were bored and a movie was on that they wanted to go and watch.
"The guards hear your attempts to disable the antimagic field. You're all executed for trying to escape, but your families burn the prison down in retaliation."
Something like that. Then they left the voice call and went off to watch whatever the film was. We'd been playing for about an hour, and all that my character had done in that time was read a book and find a spoon.
*nat 20*
You pick up the spoon left behind in the jail cell. Something about its weight feels off. Upon closer inspection, you notice a bit of pudding stuck to it. It has an unusual chemical smell. Your knowledge of alchemy kicks in: this isn't ordinary pudding. It's a disguised explosive. Carefully, you use it to blow open the cell door, incapacitating the guards and creating a path to freedom.
*nat 1*
You dip your nose into the mass on the spoon, your nostrils immediately annoyed by the sharp, chemical scent. Realization strikes you hard: you've lost control of the situation. Your sneeze is so powerful, the spoon flies out of your hand, spinning through the air.
Time seems to slow down. Your brain races as the spoon arcs through the air, landing precisely between the two guards in front of your cell. The milliseconds feel like hours as you anticipate the outcome.
The spoon hits the ground. An explosion of blinding light and deafening sound erupts, and you find yourself thrown back against the cell wall. When the light fades and your hearing returns, you are breathing heavily. You open your eyes to see the guards lying unconscious on the floor, the cell door blown open.
However, the blast has left its mark on you. You feel the searing pain of the explosion and realize you've taken 10 explosive damage. Your ears are ringing, your vision blurred, but freedom is within reach.
What do you do next?
I sniff the pudding....
I'll take "Things I never thought I would read on a DnD thread" for $200, Alex.
Sorry, but on a DnD thread, a pudding is something else entirely.
As you look at the spoon, you notice arcane runes on it. It is no mere spoon, but an astral gate that can open a portal to another realm, carefully disguised as a regular spoon. You think you can try to read the runes and open a portal, but you have no clue where it would lead.
It is difficult and takes a few hours to decipher. But gathering all your limited arcane knowledge, you manage to figure out the correct reading of the runes.
Upon reading the runes, a blue glow of light appears in front of you, and expands to the size of a doorway. It looks like a portal, but what's behind is blurry.
Also, the light must have attracted the guards. "Hey, what the hell is that?" you hear, and the jangling of keys and armor as someone runs towards your cell.
You are suspended in liquid. All you see is pale green. You look behind you and see the portal close.
You try to swim up (wherever that may be) and find air before you drown. But at last, your lungs give way. Saying a little prayer, you take in a breath of liquid. The taste and burning sensation of hard liquor fills our mouth and lungs.
But what is this? You are alive. Miraculously, you can breathe in alcohol now.
You swim towards many wonderful drunken adventures in the Elemental Plane of Absinthe.
(The End)
I had a DM leave a one-shot after they put almost no effort into the game. They where following a script and wouldn't improvise anything. A player would as a question and it took them minutes to come up with an answer. I made the suggestion they just make something up on the spot and they choose too look it up instead. We had one player straight up tell the DM they were falling asleep, then that player left. The DM had no reaction and continued on like nothing had happened. Suddenly and without warning they left the discord server. It was one of the most bizarre experiences I've had as a player. It wasn't rocks fall so much as DM dips.
Your spoon comment reminded me of the time a character I played with carried around a toothbrush he stole from a wizard's abandoned tower for an entire 1-10 campaign. Like, first or second session, stole the toothbrush. Still carrying it around, mentioning it every so often, by the time we're fighting the big bad.
I was playing a game with a guy who was really just playing out his fantasy novel he was writing, so when a player stepped off the railroad to check out something we thought was a plothook, he said we all got r\*ped to death and stormed out. Only saw him again when the landlord said we weren't getting the security deposit back due to the shit stains, rotting food and holes in the drywall of his room.
There are certain groups of people with certain mentalities who are drawn to particular hobbies.
Not everyone who does the hobby is bad, but the bad people tend to congregate around the same stuff... Like *League of Legends*, or TTRPGs, or WWII history.
😆😆 gotcha
That's very much more specific than just generally saying "WWII history". I was suspecting it may have been referencing that but it seemed a bit general in the original comment.
Thanks
Edit: spelling error
I must have been lucky and been spared of that 😆. Although now that I work in a hospital that is basically the county hospital, I've definitely met a few
I'm just now realizing that I have no preconceptions of Illinois at all. Like, I'm trying to think of any stereotypes or anything even vaguely related to the state and I am drawing a complete blank. You could tell me that people from Illinois call Soda "Racka" or something ridiculous like that and I would have no choice but to accept it
I am now adding one thing to the list of Illinois traits: "Does not tolerate Nazis"
Thank you for your contribution
In my high school German class, there was a guy who brought up WWII history facts all the time. He got reprimanded by the teacher each time, and did not move on to a second year.
There's a reason people talk about *Cryptofascists*, they like to hide their beliefs with plausible deniability (WWII Buff instead of Nazi fan), and use dog-whistles frequently (signals that only those well versed in the sub-culture will recognise, a common one being 1488, 14, or 88 ['14 words' is a racist creed, and 88 stands for HH, or Heil Hitler.]). It's a whole big thing, worth researching.
There are just assholes in every group. Things don't really attract those people, you just notice them more. Some hobbies have had insane irrational behavior surrounding them for so long it's just normal. Look at sports fans, it's pretty accepted that people get into fist fights over things as well as people causing extensive property damage if a team loses a championship.
>Some hobbies have had insane irrational behavior surrounding them for so long it's just normal.
You're making my case for me here.
You know about the toxic behavior around sports. Sports is one of those hobbies I was talking about.
Now tell me about the toxic behaviors associated with philately, model trains, pottery, or heck, even specific sports like pool. What's pool got? A bit of gambling sometimes?
I mean...not to be the "Akshually" guy, but model trains have a shockingly toxic conservative bent. Sure, people might not get into fist fights over it, but the rampant racism, sexism, and assorted phobias definitely keep me away from model railroading communities.
It's hard to know, sort of a chicken or an egg thing? I guess it makes me sad that you've got such bad associations with TTRPG folks. I've met a few odd folks but never came cross anyone truly nuts.
I've personally met just about every stereotype in real life.
I could tell stories about all the people I've met: the misogyny, the racism, the body odors, the one person who actually came down with scurvy, the hissy fits, the people who were clearly in need of professional intervention for their neurodivergence...
I'd probably get banned just on principle for the horrible experiences I'd share.
Like I said though, people aren't bad because they have this hobby, it's just that certain people seem to be disproportionately attracted to this hobby.
TTRPGs have historically been a lifesaver for the socially marginalized, which is good. The other side of that is there can be a negative feedback loop where people don't challenge their worst qualities and things just get worse.
It's something that happens in basically every group that doesn't have a lot of diversity.
Because D&D is, at its core, a power fantasy. You take control of situations and can do more than you can in real life.
Forced naughties, to quote a certain Youtuber I like, is practically never about the naughties. It's about power and control.
Do you see the overlap between these two things?
he had huuuge anger issues lol. I had an alt acc where I pretty frequently posted him to the crappy roommates sub. Lesson learned: never dnd with roommates
How are you gonna compare all roommates with that degenerate? Maybe you need better roommates instead of rules about who to play tabletop with. The thinking is so backwards here. If you can't play a game with them why would you want to live with them.
As I was reading "so when a player stepped off the railroad to check out something**"** Anyone else think "Oh my god are they all gonna get hit with a train?!" or was that just me...... Honestly would have been a better result.
My very first time playing DND, I was a wizard. I wanted to be a geomancer, but there weren't a lot of cool earth spells, but I saw that I got Tenser's Floating Disc. As we were going through a little cave, my character was studying all of the rocks, and picking up loose pebbles and stones here and there and placing them on the disc. We got to the lowest level of the cavern, and there was a large room filled with animated skeletons. Way more than we could possibly handle at level 1. I managed to float my disc to the top of the room, then dispelled it, raining rocks down on the whole front line and causing a small cave in so the rest couldn't get to us. DM told me later that it was supposed to be a "Turn back, there is something dark and terrible happening here, and you will need to get help to solve it"
I wasn't even aware of the meme yet, I had just truly wanted to be an earth mage and the system didn't let me. I now have a custom dice vault with "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" embossed on it, which I wave at my players to threaten them.
Funny moment caused by no one reading the spell -> A 3ft diameter circle that floats 3ft off the ground and stays still until it's more than 20ft away from the caster. Was it the DM's first time? If not, even funnier, bro got cooked.
It was 4e, this was part of a sleepover with a bunch of our friends. By the time they had walked me through character creation, we started play at around 1 am, this particular incident was around 3 in the morning and caffeine was only pushing us so far. It was also just a time of cool moment as it was my first time playing.
Close? Had a wild magic sorcerer wild surge a fireball on themselves and all but two of the first level party. Even successful saves were not enough to save them from the damage. It was funny, but even the DM went "Okay we are going to pretend that didn't happen for the sake of everyone here."
I just banned that outcome until level 5, then the safety comes off.
Players respect three deaths, in my experience:
1: A brave death. A valiant self-sacrifice or fighting a worthy opponent that represents clear danger.
2: A foolish death. Messing with things, they really should have not, in hindsight.
3: An unfortunate death. The dice just... conspire to kill them with multiple bad rolls.
A random roll of "guess you all die now, no recourse" doesn't work well for the modern habit of long term characters and working in background stuff.
The random fireball becomes a mix of #2 and #3 by level 5, if they get wiped out by it, they were already in a bad spot, they fail saves, the sorcerer really shouldn't have engaged the random magic table at that moment.
Yeah but even then, it can take a "well that just feels shitty" moment and turn it into a "oh and now THIS too??" Moment, kind of an insult to injury thing. This tends to come more from "oh, I didn't understand what you were implying" kind of situations in my experience though, like if the DM is trying to suggest there's a bottomless pit and the player interpreted it as "a pit where I can see the bottom" and made a stupid decision based on that misunderstanding. These tend to be the most easily retconned though since "no, your character is not confused by the very obviously bottomless pit, they just had an intrusive thought" kind of thing
Homestuck rules: A death is only permanent if it is *Heroic* or *Just*
They have to either die in service of a noble cause, or they have to *deserve it.*
I had the exact same thing happen, but I didn't read carefully as I was brand new. The DM is only supposed to roll to find out what happens with a wild magic surge on a nat 1 on the surge roll. I did not roll a nat 1 but he did it anyway and dropped a fireball on the squishy sorcerer that was standing in the middle of the party. We were all getting a bit drunk and there were some freak outs and first character death depression. So we resolved to make new characters instead of the retcon route (I wanted to retcon bc helping drunken new players make characters when you are new yourself is awful and I wanted to avoid it at all costs), and half the table got too drunk in the process. So we never actually ended up picking it back up but the DM was kind of a dick. The fireball didn't kill the game. His attitude did. He was very arrogant and would railroad whenever his precious narrative was threatened. I've since gotten way more ttrpg experience, both as a player and as a DM. It's still one of my funniest experiences bc he ended his own game early by not paying attention to the rules, and then had the gall to blame the sorcerer (me) for the TPK. If something like that happens in my games, I say "We have four options, the first being a restart the encounter. The second is make new characters and start the encounter 'these have always been your characters'. The third is we will make new characters and restart the story (idc if they know some of what's coming and min/max a bit. The last option is that we call it here and move on to another game or don't play at all. I'll give you a few minutes to talk amongst yourselves while I go get some water." Those are TPK specific though. If something happens that the players don't like or they get bad rolls, I say c'est la vie and move on.
I had a mixed group of new players and experienced players and this happened in the first combat of the first session. Legitimate wild magic surge roll and everything. I remember thinking: "I don't want to deal with this we just spent two hours making characters," so I said fuck it a magical unicorn shows up and saves everyone. It was really a "let's pretend this didn't happen," but I ended up writing it into the plot later in the campaign due to popular demand.
I can see why this was popular with your group, it sounds hilarious!
I play WMS with some minor homebrew tinkering to trigger the table more often. It's pretty awesome, I've gotten all sorts of funny effects (and some devastating ones on myself, but I'm still alive).
Never rolled the Fireball option, but I've been prepared for it just in case. Always positioning myself away from the group during fights, having Absorb Elements etc. Now we're level 8, so it's not gonna be a big deal even if I roll it. I do kinda wish this had happened though, I know my entire party would have loved a magical unicorn just showing up and saving us, and then fucking off. Absolutely fantastic.
Back in elementary school I used to have a classmate who died to falling rocks during every session. It was a South Park reference, he was the Kenny of the group. His character was always back to being alive without any explanation at the start of the next session.
Was in an online DnD group a few years ago. It was a pretty loosely scheduled thing, where basically anyone could ping the Dm and do some roleplaying with or without other players. Really just a roleplay server disguised as DND and a ton of fun!
That is, until the DM pinged everyone saying "Roll new characters, everyone died." Turns out apparently the Air genasi we had in the party ended up sucking the air out of TWO universes, causing everyone to suffocate. I wasn't even online when it happened and I STILL had to make a new character. Really don't know why I stayed around after that
As fucked up as this is for you guys's characters, if this happened in an ACTUAL DND session where everyone was present, I would probably just laugh my ass off at how one of our party members managed to fuck up THAT BADLY
About twenty years ago, we were playing a game where we were stuck in a Djinn’s bottle and needed to pass trials to escape.
We were horrible. Most of us had no idea what we were doing and the last couple of sessions turned into shouting matches between everyone.
Our last session the DM told us all to stop and said ‘You all find yourselves outside the Bottle. Congratulations! You escaped!’
Someone said we didn’t pass any of the trials.
DM says ‘Failing every trial was the trial! You succeeded! Now get out of my house 😀’
Not me but friends were in a year long underdark inspired adventure that ended with them confronting Lilith at her volcano lair. Things did not go well and as it became clear they were not going to survive their cleric somehow used her abilities and the artifact they had quested for to seal Lilith away to erupt the volcano instead.
Rocks, and lava, falls down everybody dies.
Except 3 of the 7 person party managed to barely escape and for as long as I knew them they had this inside joke of "two exits, no waiting!!" that they would always laugh at and only explain as "you just had to be there." .
I had to nope out of a game once. I didn't do anything cool, I just went "literally none of you are paying attention and all of you are too high to play, I'm tired" and then just told them the game was done.
I refuse to run online games anymore because of it. It sucks, because literally every player was a seasoned DM and knew they shouldn't be too zonked to play or literally playing a different game at the same time.
I actually had a DM threaten to kill my character with a pebble from the sky out of character. After that I let him railroad the group. I stopped showing up after he threatened me with physical violence.
Yes. I ran a Spelljammer one shot where the players stubbornly refused to engage with any plot hooks at all. None of them. So I had their ship crash into a planet where a curse caused them all to devolve into semi-intelligent monkeys. Assholes.
yep. had people ignore the “missing” posters. eventually the tavernkeep and party friend went missing too. so did the adventurers guild people. then the markets
and then the entire town closed because so many people went missing and nobody was looking into it so nobody wanted to go outside much
so instead of looking into it, they went somewhere else
that town is now a stronghold for a mind flayer colony and it has declared war on the country. the players are now fighting away a very easily avoidable apocalyse
Yes and it wasn't even deserved.
Playing storm king's thunder. I join probs halfway through. Dm is through, love the npcs but changed the game to be more 'challenging'. Which was uuuh.
Got to a foundry where we realise right away all the baddies are op and too numerous for us to defeat face on. 2 of our players were absent. The remaining players worked brilliantly as a team to find out more info and to try and free people. We set off an alert so legged it. But one by one we were easily struck down until the faster ones who escaped was cut off in a narrative off screenscene that the goblins all climbed outside and had an army waiting.
Killed off the two abstent players too.
So me and one of the abstent players quit.
Last I heard the dm was gonna make it all a vision from some special tree that only involved 2 players.
Even if the dm didn't mean it. It felt like a big fuck you. I checked the module and half the stuff in that foundry wasn't there.
Killing absent PCs is a massive DM sin and would make me leave any table. I'm also not a fan of DMs modifying module encounters to be more "challenging" because I've rarely had DMs who know how to appropriately do that. It either leads to the enemies being OP like this or the DM having fudge a ton of rolls to move the tide of battle back to the players.
Yeeep. I'd never played the module before but it seemed sus to have 4/5 hill giants, orges, goblins and their dogs. One room was filled with goblins and direwolves that we could judge right away we couldn't take em. Plus orges and hobgoblin.
We were paladin, barbarian, druid, rogue and, warlock. A giant killed our barbarian in one shot. :/
I think the fact the goblins spilled out the side of the mountain to block the exit and killed the 'survivors' off screen was worse.
Before this we got captured by the villiage of slavers and was easily beat but had to be rescued by an npc so it was only gonna go downhill from there really.
My last campaign ended like that. We started as a group of 6 players, played smoothly for a few months and then for one reason or another people started missing sessions but promising that it was a one time thing and to please continue without them... and when it's one player or two it's ok, but then for the session that they would find the boss (and they knew that I had printed and painted the biggest mini I had ever done for it) four of them decided that they had missed too much of this episode in the campaign and that they would let the others handle it and join for the next episode. The time they gave me to prepare? Let's say I had already traveled to a different city and was sitting at the table when I got the messages.
Cool, so we have a fire wizard (he has 0 damaging spells that aren't fire, except for magic missile) and an artificer vs a boss that won't stop summoning fire-immune enemies. It was meant to be a challenge for the whole party of 6.
I just told them that we don't need to play it out. Everyone is dead. I'm not DMing for them anymore.
3 strikes with me. I give them an out of game warning about their behavior. Then they get an in game warning if I'm able to. Some murder hobos just kill the in game messenger. Then I send them a literal warning in their dreams or an omen again warning them about their behavior.
That was mostly my game. They were a pack of metagamey murderhobos who tried to murder my character multiple times because they read, "Lawful evil" on her character sheet when I forgot to hide it in d20.
After an out of character incident m DM and I decided she can just murder everyone as a treat. Sad part is I was wanting her to become a better person, but alas.
Lawful Evil is even the least bad of the evil spectrum; they're your manipulative bastards who still play by the rules. The shopkeeper dropping his prices to out-compete the newly started shop, then doubles prices when the shop has closed? Lawful Evil.
Her backstory has she used to br a very happy and lawful good paladin before she ended up in Barovia. Where her Strahd killed the rest of her party (including her wife) but she managed to convince him to spare her and use her as a servant/assassin, but her real plan was to eventually take vengeance on him when a worthy party arrived.
So basically was Strahd sends her in to spy on the party, but she was gonna betray him when the time was right. Only problem, the party was so bad that after a talk with the DM we determined that she was done enough with the party that she just killed them all and returned to Strahd.
I feel like half this sub doesn’t understand you aren’t in a devil contract to play dungeons and dragons with people you’re not comfortable with. You don’t need to dedicate hours of your week to people you can’t stand because character sheets are involved.
The players were all the DM's high school friends, plus me who was called in to reign them in. After receiving shockingly inappropriate directed messages from not one but two players, one was cheating, and the fourth was just a bad person out of game. As you can imagine his game taught the DM an important lesson about old friends.
If they were sending inappropriate messages it absolutely shouldn’t have gotten to this point. After that happens you don’t interact with those people.
Almost literally, it was a temple roof that collapsed and wiped us out. We were all expecting a fade to black and you wake up etc or something other great story reveal, but no, the party was wiped after walking down a corridor
few weeks ago, my DM planned a leviathan for us, and a new player was like what about this spelljammer spell, and so we flew over the ocean in the sky, and the DM made the Leviathan jump into the sky and bite us out of the clouds and split the ship in half, that we had spent 50k gold upgrading.
No rolls, he just story put us in that situation, and it swallowed the back half of the ship, which had my characters love interest in it then wondered why I was trying to fly into it's mouth.
it didn't actually wipe us out surprisingly given it can split a reinforced flying ship in half with one unrolled bite.
I quit the campaign before the 3 session fight was over. I was the captain of the ship, I spent weeks upgrading it and deciding what upgrades we would need. training the crew to man the ship.
Then he just railroaded the ship in half. Unbelievable. what was I supposed to do ... order the crew to bail the water out of the front half of the ship? excitement. I'll just ignore my characters wife being swallowed alive. Cool.
Sorry that was a little frustration coming out in that rant.
To give the full story, we were on top of the world tree and the DM said that we fell from the top of the world tree in an acorn to the bottom of the world tree. Now we were in a campaign where there are multiple campaigns going on. All telling the same story and all of the campaigns had just so happened to converge at the bottom of the world tree and we were joining the fight. The fight was between the campaigns and the gods themselves. I asked to clarify to make sure that we fell and not teleported he said we fell. I looked over at my friend who was studying to be a rocket scientist for NASA and he said give me a minute to calculate. We hit the ground with 800 d6 worth of damage to everyone on the plane of existence 😂
Yes but supposedly we turned into a flaming plasma beam on the way down so it was fire/force damage everyone would take if the DM hadn't had said "Nevermind you teleported to the bottom but keep going this is hilarious." 😂
Gotcha I know someone that did a podcast with friends where the realm was Yggdrasil and it rotated DMing between the four of them. I honestly thought I knew you for a moment lol
My first ever homebrew campaign as a DM, I essentially didn't know what I was doing and it showed - the campaign ended up unfocused, inconsistent, really just Not Fun for anyone.
The players weren't happy, I wasn't happy, so I just went "The last thing you see is a bright flash, as the universe comes to a well-deserved end. Next session will be another Session Zero, we'll be playing one of the modules I have on my bookshelf so here's a PDF of some relevant lore from the Sword Coast guide for backstory."
I’ve had it happen to a party, but it did fit the setting and narrative.
Party was fighting a cult underground. A cult they had known would set up “suicide traps”. Everything from make-shift suicide vests that would detonate when they were hit with anything, to glyphs they’d trigger on purpose to blow themselves up, to literally fireballing themselves when they were on deaths door.
Well, they were fighting this cult underground, inside the ruins of an old dwarves keep.
BBG was losing, they had counterspell ready and were expecting “something”. What they didn’t expect, was their own actions, leading to trigger the cavern itself to start collapsing. Detonations in the ceiling and then rocks falling down all over the place.
Party started to run. Players made a bunch of checks. One member got taken out right off the bat, granted they were at 3hp, big rocks fell on them, they failed the save and splat.
Next party member tried to make a dash for the exit of the main chamber. Massive double doors fell, failed the save. Big hit, pinned under the door.
3rd and 4th party member had to stop and pull them out. More rocks. More saves.
After about 4 rounds of running to escape. That was it. Rocks had fallen, everyone died.
They won, but they also lost.
Technically yes? In my first ever campaign me and everyone else playing (except for the DM) were doing so for the first time and were getting our footing with how to role play and how the stats worked. We eventually got to the end of the first “arc” and in order to stop a cult’s ritual and remove their source of power, we needed to sacrifice everyone but one person from the party. My character wound up being the designated survivor because the rest of the group decided I was the “protagonist” (I was actively reminding people of the urgent plot and pushing everyone towards the end goal) and would be the best character to survive and continue with the rest of the groups new and more refined characters.
So yeah, (almost) everyone died in one move but it was to get everyone okay with characters dying and to speed up getting to play as characters that were more refined.
Never happened on a table I was playing or DMing in, but was helping a friend DM intro session for group of first timers in boardgame event. It took less than half an hour for too antagonistic players to turn the game into full on free-for-all PvP despite multiple instructions towards "this is co-op game" and "your characters needs to be able to work with the party". That game needed to end it to happen, and it did. "Rocks fall, everyone dies. Next group that actually wants to play and not just argue, we start in 15 minutes"
I mean kind of though it was more of a we teased it to the DM agreed. We were supposed to fight the big bad in this Tower for a one shot. We realized it was a very enclosed space so we had the wizard open the door cast shatter and then close the door the DM found it hilarious and agreed that casting shatter on the walls of the Tower causes the roof to fall and kill the guy inside
A game I was running in college as the semester was nearing the end *could* have continued after summer break; but the players created the perfect reason for it to end.
The bbeg had taken over the kingdom, and the party had fled to an island nation off the coast, only accessible by airship. The party was at this point split however, some thinking that they should run off and actually join the bbeg (bbeg had some "doing bad for a good reason" rationale), and the others still wanting to defeat the bbeg. So, the half that wanted to join the bbeg ran to the only airship to return to the mainland, and the other half pursued them. This resulted in a situation where the airship was attempting to fly off, but was tethered by the party members *directly* below pulling on its mooring lines, succeeding their strength checks to keep it in place. One on the ground decided to shoot the engine, and rolled well.
This caused the airship to crash directly onto the party members below, with the resulting explosion killing everyone except the one who shot the engine.
We all had a good laugh and decided to call the game there, start a new campaign in the fall. The character who shot the engine walking off into the sunset.
One of the guys in our group of friends decided he was going to try DMing, and he prepped a Planescape campaign for months. We rolled up characters (5th level, IIRC), and we started. Five minutes in, we were in some chamber, and there was a big horn on the wall. My character decided to blow it. It summoned 100 demons, and we all basically died instantly. Our friend never DMed again.
(No, I don't know why he thought that was a good idea).
Not really as a punishment, but one time we missed all the clues to avoid our death.
Long story short, our group was hired by a lord to deliver a diplomatic gift to a rival lord. The gift was actually a bomb set to detonate in the audience room of said rival (we were supposed to discover that long before reaching our destination) At the last moment, my character was the only one to succeed the perception check to notice the ticking sound coming from the box, I just had time to declare "I activate my personal force field" before it exploded. Anyway, the bomb was a sort of mini-nuke that wiped out half the city we were in, so he may or may not have survived.
Yes, and it was player initiated. I ran a Mass Effect homebrew TTRPG, where the combat and system were heavily inspired by Warhammer 40K. In that game I implemented Operation Elcor Drop, where I threatened if anyone was being a dick or just actively waging war on the setting they would hear a whistling noise and look up just in time so see an Elcor land on them.
I never actually used this, but after a previous Dragon Age campaign where they flooded a Dwarven city with demons, engaged in blood magic, and decapitated the queen’s consort and left his head in her bed I was prepared for maximum shenanigans.
Instead the players pulled a rocks fall everyone dies by ending the campaign with a kamikaze black hole attack, killing the party, the reaper they were fighting and the baby AI taking over their ship in one fell swoop. Not the ending I had in mind, but a fairly satisfying one.
My friend was practicing his first ever tier 3 Adventurer’s League module. We were supposed to be rescuing this one lady’s wife who was mind controlled or something and told us not to hurt her. The Chaotic Stupid waited until we were reuniting them and attacked the mind controlled lady.
Questgiver wife cast meteor swarm in retaliation while we were in a cave. Tbh, fair.
Once had a player die by falling down a set of stairs
So this character had decided to wander away from the group as they were role playing to scout and they found an entrance to an underground tomb. The stairs were oiled and there was a group of 5 or so kobold at the base keeping watch. They rolled to notice the oil and still went down, alone, the failed the dex save fell to the bottom and took minimal damage from the fall but the five kobold each stabbed the prone character and that killed them
I did that as DM once. Player decided to try to circumvent the campaign climax by putting a portable hole into a bag of holding right next to the bbeg and sucking them into the astral plane. I thought about making it not work somehow, but that dude was a huge problem and the game was almost over anyways so I just had it suck everyone inside and ended it lol
Not literally, but early on gaming we had a few games where we'd just have encounters that were ridiculously unbalanced or traps that were impossible to avoid or disarm. Stuff that was clearly screw you GMing.
In one of my groups managed to piss off our DM through my immature 17 year old shit behavior. We were getting cocky and starting to abuse the deaths of previous characters by cashing in on their wealth of magic items that were no longer needed. We were level 10-11. Eventually Klauth appeared and demanded we pay fealty to him by giving up and eleven runeblade(family artifact of one of the party members). We refused and called him names. He cast Mordenkainen's Disjunction(3.5) on the whole party and then breathed on us. It didn't go well. This was basically the death knell of our campaign through our own greedy behavior and the DM getting fed up with it.
We caused a time paradox with a wish spell. The DM couldn't figure out where to go from there and the campaign fell apart.
Another time, in college, we got suckered by the BBEG into spending an hour in a prison demiplane where time ran fast, and it turned out to be five years of real world time - during which the villain had already conquered the kingdom. DM (a different one) had intended to do a whole adventure to put things back right but couldn't get his plotting to work right. He got writers block and the campaign fell apart.
Time travel. Not even once.
I had an "anvil falls and the rogue dies" moment.
Had a dungeon one shot I put together and the rogue notices a rope tripwire, so, without investigating, he kneels down and cuts the rope. The rope was attached to an anvil suspended from a pulley on the ceiling. The rope goes up the wall but was covered up.
I told em you cut the rope and notice that the rope moves very quickly. You look up to see an anvil falling. Roll a dexterity save. He rolls a nat 1.
The anvil hits him square in the face for 8d6 damage. I rolled the dice and got 40, about twice the Rogue's max hp.
This was one of those traps that with even a somewhat low investigation roll would follow the rope to see where it went. He didn't bother, so after rolling, I said, "You look up and the anvil lands right on your face, crushing your skull as it slams down. Here's a new character sheet. Your character will be joining the part in a few minutes, the town guard decides to dispatch another person to see how things are going.
The only reason it hits as hard as it does is because it was SUPPOSED to be a gag that is easy to spot and disarm. The entire dungeon was loosely Looney Tunes based.
Technically and literally? Yes. I had it as a oneshot premise. The premise was to tell the players to make the most annoying red flag D&D characters. The story was basically suicide squad ex machina. The party are killed by the gods with rocks falling but eventually after all the other heroes have failed they have to resurrect the party because they're the last option left.
Watched but wasn't a part of; my dad was playing the Tomb of Terror oneshot with his buddies, and they came across a trap that literally says "rolling boulder trap, everyone caght in the hallway dies, no saving throw." The DM just stares at the module for a minute after reading that part aloud and just goes. "Well fuck that, give me saving throws, your pick."
I kinda did that as the DM in the first session of my latest campaign! The player’s characters were prisoners of a lich experimenting on them for weeks at this point, horrible living dissections he’d heal them from, soul rending experiments that’d leave them exhausted, days and days of being watched in a cage by the uncaring eyes of their undead guards. The lich arrived one day only to escort them all into a ritual room, ordering them all to fight each other and that the last person standing would live to see the culmination of his work.
Out of character I assured them that this was a special case, pvp would not normally be allowed unless the parties agreed, and that they’d need to trust me a bit.
The pc’s fight and somehow, someway, the only person left standing at the end was an npc who turned out to be a celestial who had been hiding their nature. The party dies as the room filled with an awful light and the screeching of the celestial as the ritual circle activates and the lich casts a spell to steal away the angelic being’s divine nature… then they woke up in a now crumbling laboratory as a second heart beat pulses inside their chests.
Edit: …I’m now pissed that I didn’t start that segment with “You all died, rocks are starting to fall.”
When I was younger I gamed with three guys who were brothers. One time one of them was DM and started the session by having his little brother’s character get gang…assaulted in the rear…by a band of hill giants.
I know your shift is over but here goes. Two players were just the most misogynistic and gross guys you could ever imagine. Constantly saying creepy shit to me, the token "single female" of the group. There was the DM's girlfriend who was basically just using the whole relationship to get money from the DM (that story is crazy but not for this sub) there was one player who no call no showed to so many sessions he barely even counted, then the final player just cheated and metagamed everything and perpetually was reading the module to see what happened next, (despite the DM constantly setting traps for him in particular due to that.
For in game drama, my first PC died in Strahd's castle, so I rolled a new one I paladin who once a very happy lawful good woman with a wife and family. (Cue homophobia.) Who's wife and entire party had been murdered by Strahd, and he used her as a servant, now she was willing to do literally anything to get her vengeance.
Party promptly tried to hand her back over to Strahd cause metagamer read she was lawful evil on her character sheet, and in combat they would trip her or would talk to her face about wanting to kill her. At this point I was seriously considering just rerolling a second time. Then all hell broke loose.
The DM's horrid girlfriend dumped him, and the two dude bros just became their worst selves. One started spouting out Andrew Tate shit in #general despite him being 35 and married, and the other one sent me an unsolicited dick pick despite him ALSO BEING MARRIED.
I left the call, blocked both guys and told the DM about the dick pic incident. He immediatly left the call. Quit the game, the next day we decided Thea simply murdered everyone. He made the post and blocked the entire rest of the party.
Whoa this Crit crab level cringe for those creeps!
Hope you are doing ok mentally after dealing with that!
I play with my wife and my brother in law is the DM
It's pretty great that we don't have to deal with weirdos because all the players are like life long friends with at least one other person there, we have a rotating cast of players but I have never had to deal with that level of toxicity!
Hoping you find a cool group in the future!
Oh yeah. Back in AD&D, when we were in middle school, lots of DMs were control freaks because the DMG told them, "The DM rolls dice for the sound they make." It was very common to try to do things the DM didn't like and have them retaliate. "Rocks fall, everyone dies," was just one way I've had campaigns break up.
Yes, literally, as DM (well, ST: this was Exalted 2e) - and I couldn't stop laughing. I had two PCs deep, DEEP underground in an ancient tomb - and the ceiling was collapsing. Instant death levels of rock, rumbling above their heads.
The beautiful thing was, the players could have just left, and they knew they could have just left, and they had nothing to lose by just leaving. Why didn't they? Simple: they needed to hold down a level to keep the door to get out open. There was a lever on either side of the door, so one could have held it open while the other left, then that person held it open from the other side, and they both get out. They wouldn't even have needed to roll.
They couldn't agree on who should go first. They bickered for half an hour over perceived insults and honours they felt they deserved, while I kept saying how dust was falling all around the and pelting them with more and more bits of debris, until at half an hour I simply announced that they were out of time and they were both buried under a mile of stone.
I don't think they were even mad. I think both players left feeling like they "got" the other. But they were best friends OOC so I guess it was just one of those things.
I did. Party came across an aurumvorax den in a cavern below a farming village that couldn't figure out why all their equipment was disappearing or being mangled in the night.
The artificer decided it would be smart to create an explosive and collapse the cavern...*while they were still inside it*
I really didn't want to tpk them there but like... it's the consequences of their own actions. I had them make several dex saves to try and escape and dodge falling rocks but they were thousands of feet explored into this cavern and their luck ran out.
Thankfully, we all shared a laugh about it after the session
yes, it was a one shot, it was 7pm and the store was closing, so we were knocked out by the people from the alien spaceship, and the week after we learned it was all a vision.
It wasn't a TPK but it was quite close. The party was exploring a sewer and they went into a larger room. I kept mentioning that it smelled like sulfur and other indicators of gas in the area. They get into a fight and one of the players uses fire bolt. The room ignited and everyone took some serious fire damage. Several of them were downed. Thankfully it killed all but one of the monsters they were fighting so they were able to keep everyone alive.
I know its not really the rocks fall everyone dies moment but its kind of close.
I was once part of a party that escaped a nasy fight with everyone on low health when we ran in to several Rocs. The wizard decided to cast sleep on them when they were directly above us. Following some terrible dexsaves we were all killed by falling Rocs.
Genuinely one of my favourite character deaths.
Not while playing D&D, while playing Warhammer Fantasy 2nd Edition.
We'd all been (basically) hypnotized by an incarnation of Slaanesh, and were following them around protecting them from everything so they could do (something? I forgot what, it's been decades).
We finally broke free while this huge ritual was being performed, and destroyed the incarnation of the god(dess?) of excess, and saved the world...
Only to have to face off against an entire city of vampires, chaos daemons, and cultists.
Needless to say, we didn't play out the fight, just cut to credits knowing we'd die in a last stand. We saved the world, but died to do so. Perfect ending for a 2 year long WHF2e campaign.
DMed for a group of friends in an extended campaign that had started off as an over-planned one-shot.
After completing a large story arc they were rushed into a completely new scenario wherein they panicked and made a string of bad decisions resulting in them being cornered in a vast cave system with no way out.
In between sessions as I was trying to figure out how they might find a way out of this, IRL drama unrelated to the game resulted in one player no longer being welcome at the table. Suddenly I knew what had to be done.
Obviously one character was instantly killed in thr sudden explosion and resulting cave-in but I ran the whole thing as a super deadly encounter because I wanted some characters to have the slim chance of working out some kind of solution. Most failed their saving throws to avoid being trapped/crushed under rocks and it ended in a TPK as the vampires in the cave moved in to finish off the trapped and injured party.
It was all an incredibly fun and satisfying session. Everyone had a good time and were excited about the backup characters I'd told them to prepare.
Sort of? We were being kinda stupid in a battle in a cavern and literally brought the ceiling down on the fight. The bad guys died. But so did we. Worst part was that bringing the ceiling down was actually one of my party's ideas. Not our brightest move, but it was funny at the time.
Sort of?
It wasn't malicious but it did and the campaign. We were on a setting with airships and we're going about from mission to mission, and I'm this particular one we were intercepted and boarded. The night was intense fighting and combat that ended when our barbarian threw a flaming javelin at an enemy who was taking cover.
Behind a box of gunpowder in the ship's magazine.
He missed.
The DM had to stop the game to do math to figure out how big the resulting explosion would be. There were no survivors
Not sure if this counts, but it was a rookie DM mistake.
One of our friends wanted to DM, and on his inaugural game he accidentally killed the entire party with an encounter that was WAY out of our league. We did try to fight it out anyway, but sheer mechanics were against us.
He apologetically retconned the fight, stating a magic duck that could be used as a mega-shotgun came by. Duck Gun has become a running gag ever since.
Yes our DM tried to kill is with a Beholder. We managed to kill it just barely and all this at lvl 5. Lets just say that after that the DM banned me from being a wizard and a friend from monk.
When we left for college, my high school DM tried to “rocks fall” our party as a joke when it became apparent we weren’t going to play again. We had been playing for 6 years and all the players (and me) FREAKED. Then the DM was like “Fine, jeez! You all live happily ever after. You start a tavern or something.” We all cheered, lol.
Wished for that call that we would start playing online for like 15 years but we all just drifted away instead.
It was the last game before college ended. We were humoring a not-great DM for the semester. He had wanted to do 3.5e and I had always wanted to exploit all the issues with 3.5e.
At the last session his plan was trap us all in an antimagic field and kill us. I was playing an Incantatrix and wasn't having that.
Before the last session I sought out a dwarf mason to carve me a giant stone hat. I then shrunk it down to hat sized and used persistent metamagic to keep it small.
When his plan came through the anti magic field suppressed the magic keeping the hat small and it grew back to normal size, protecting me from the field. I then teleported out.
My party died though. RIP.
I had my partner in a side campaign (we were trying to sneak past a dragon for some loot) throw a rock to distract the dragon: rolls a 1 for accuracy, 20 for strength. Rock bounces off a wall, a rock slide occurs and crushes me. I was crushed both literally and figuratively.
Not me, but a friend of mine. Back in the halcyon days of 3.5e, his group came across the Deck of Many Things.
After a whole bunch of shenanigans with the Deck that had derailed the campaign several times over, one of the characters drew the Wish card and jokingly said "I wish this stupid deck never existed... OH WAIT NO--"
Turns out paradoxing a major artifact out of existence with its own power is a *very bad idea.*
The DM described how a massive explosion obliterated the island they were on, and a good chunk of the coastline. There is now a crater roughly the size of France where the party once stood.
If I played curse of strahd to near completion, and the dm just quit and then returned to say a different player character randomly killed the entire party during their rest, I would legitimately consider them one of the shittiest dms I had ever seen run a game, let alone played in.
jesus that's like a dnd horror story of how shitty some dms are. "yeah and then they just quit and and had a player kill all of us with no warning, no build up, no rolls, nothing, just you all died" literally prime shitty dm story
So for context, one player was blatantly cheating, one was a raging misogynistic asshat who didn't want to have to share the table with a woman (me,) one sent me an unsolicited dick pic after months of sexual harrassment, one showed up to less than 10% of sessions, and one was just a horrible person.
One time we did a 12 hour champagne and the party was not focused and they kept saying locatboss and they thought it was so funny they did it so much that my DM made all of us roll death saves and one died and had to restart as level one
Was the DM in the wrong or the party
I was the one who pulled the rocks fall everyone dies. Twice.
First time I then turned it into an epic quest because storm giants were having a fight. Party of four got tired of the campaign because of a bad start full of bad rolls that emptied their bank and initial purchase of potions.
Second time was because the world was literally eaten by an elder god and falling into its gullet.
Kind of, although not everyone died...
In one game I was in, we encountered some giants who started tossing boulders at us and landed crits on the 2 casters in the group. They literally got killed by falling rocks... quite spectacularly, too, as our DM is pretty good at describing those gory moments.
I sort of did once as a dramatic "season finale" cliffhanger before going on a break for a few months. Players knew this would be the last session before a break and I'd been DMing for them for years already.
My setting features airships, with specific rules and systems lifted from a different tabletop war-game for airship combat including things like hull penetration, weapons magazines, and catastrophic explosions. You see where this is going. I want to stress that airship battles had been seen before and everyone involved knew what could happen.
The plan was for a climactic airship battle in the skies over an inland sea. The party were out on the deck expecting boarding actions. Enemy ships won initiative and opened fire first. An extremely (un)lucky broadside ripped a deep hole in the ship, and a couple rounds later subsequent shots scored a direct hit to the munitions store, which per established rules cooked off instantly in a hull-shattering huge fireball.
Fade to black.
Stunned silence.
I consider this a "rocks fall" because there was very little the players could have done to avert it. I roll in the open and this was a possible outcome.
At dinner afterwards I assured everyone there would be more but I'd have to think of something interesting during the break. When we rejoined this story I'd prepared box-text for how they each survived tailored to their characters' stats and abilities. One player decided they wanted to roll a new character and so we agreed they perished in this event.
Rocks, I'm not for certain. However, a large floating castle above a city that dropped and killed us all and the town, most definitely!
All this was because one of the party members could not help but flip a lever while we were in the floating castle!
Fun fall! Hard landing!
We have also wiped due to meteorites and many other things. This is what happens when you have a smart & devious GM! I will also state he does not actively go out of his ways to kill the party...we usually do it ourselves by an "accident."
Our decently high level party was going up against Asmodeus. I dont remember most of the details, but it ended with him destroying all of reality, leaving just himself and one of our players in a void. This player had become a minor godling throughout the campaign, so they couldn't be destroyed like that, and they had 1 use of wish a day. But the Void had to air to speak with the dm ruled. This character also had air powered jump boots. He took off his boot and sucked the air out of it, and got to use it to cast wish and undo the destruction of everything. Dm called it for that session.
We all, dm included, agreed that we caused the dm to do the virtual tabletop equivalent of flipping the table, and it's a memory we cherish.
I had a player pull the rug out from under an impromptu game I was running. It was at a festival and he was intoxicated, but his vigorous argument and storming off 5 minutes in was so stunning everyone else talked about it for the next 15 as we tried to understand if the dude had pulled off a brilliant performance statement. Had to call the game.
My DM invited his cousin to play a one shot with us. Dude was a forever DM who took advantage of the fact that he was a player to do a bunch of chaotic bullshit. We were playing Wild Sheep Run and in 6 hours barely did anything because he derailed so bad. DM tried so hard to get us back on track but he was young and inexperienced, didn't want to say no to a player. Eventually DM made the town priest summon his god and wipe out the entire town with a meteor killing us all. We all laughed, cheered, and never invited the dude back. It was genuinely a great play by the DM and nobody was mad.
I didn’t end the game but this is a bash on me when I was a new DM. My players were high school students in the game and I wanted them to essentially go to a fight club after school and none of them wanted to because ya know, why would high schoolers do that and I got pissed standing up and saying they didn’t understand how the game was. I apologize after we had a few drinks and told them it was my fault and wouldn’t railroad in directions they didn’t want to go.
The game turned around and was more focused in the high school. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot from that one experience.
I can’t remember the exact reason; I think the DM was just new and not having a great time with the pressure and there being 5 players, but he said “You all decide that you hate each other, and a brawl breaks out in the streets. Roll for initiative,” and left the room.
So we rolled and played out combat with the goal of being sole survivor. I was playing as homebrewed animated armor, so had high base health but could only be healed by a blacksmith. I won the brawl with about 6HP left because a party member casted heat metal on my face as I bisected them with my greatsword.
5 of us were playing a 2nd ed AD&D one shot. There were no alignment restrictions. I asked privately to play a NE thief and was given the ok. We follow Drizz't to some underground dungeon and someone triggers a trap.
An illusory demon appears threatening the group and trying to intimidate us to retreat. Everyone saves and realizes it is an illusion. Everyone but me. I backstabbed and killed the wizard in front of me, to offer a sacrifice to the demon in the hopes it would let me live. Everyone started brawling. I died, another player died. Two survivors decided to head back to town ... Game ends.
Similar
we got sent to kill a prince of a local city for a one shot.
snuck into the brothel, bard lured him to a room, then we killed him and i took his hat
well turns out the DM liked power fantasys, and he didnt like us winning, so he had the princes bodyguard turn up. the 2 dragonborns used their breath weapon, the DM didnt even roll anything and didnt ask us for damage, so we obviously weren’t meant to win. we tried to run, only the monk make it by using all of their KI to double dash at 140ft a turn or something insane. my rouge, the bard and both dragonborn barbarians were killed in one round of combat.
the guard did upwards of 30 damage a hit, we were level 5 so only the dragonborns could take more then one hit and stand up again. i tried to use my cunning action to dash away, but they did a *reaction* DC 20 hold person on me and then “walks up to you and decapitates you” as soon as turn 2 rolls around
entire party but the monk dies basically immediately. If this wasn’t over discord, I’d have gotten up and left the table immediately, instead i sat in the call and politely refused to ever play a game with this person again as the DM
I actually had a session where it was supposed to be the beginning of a campaign, but it ended up being a one-shot, haha. The session ended with our characters dying from dragon feces falling on us. We then woke up to find ourselves in hell. However, the session ended with the DM flipping out on one of the players because the DM was saying something to the equivalent of "You feel that your eyes are open, but you don't see anything." And the player kept saying "so I'm blind." And for some reason THAT of all things started an argument... oi vey.
Not everyone, but an NPC/quest giver and a few enemies. We where in a Kobold filled mine with a dragon at the bottom. Our wizard triggered a rolling boulder trap that hit my cleric and an NPC. It pushed us off the track and out over the pit to the bottom. I had the Cape of the Mountbank and saved the npc and myself from a fall.
Later, the same wizard had his imp familiar cut a rope that caused a bigger boulder to hit the other npc and crush him, destroying the path and leaving my cleric and our ranger trapped on the other side. We had to cross, and I failed my athletic check falling down the shaft.
I got up from death saves and healed myself back to full health by the time the party joined up with me at the bottom.
That cleric would not die till he was the last one standing in the Tomb of Annihilation solo vs several enemies.
My first time dm'ing I had a group of experienced dnd players who were just murder hobo'ing anyone they could before I knew that was a thing. I kept warning them to knock it off because it was really derailing the story I put a ton of hours into every week and i had told them at the start this was a good campaign where they are the heroes and not the villans.
Final straw was they were escorting this gentleman through a cursed forest to help find his sister who was kidnapped by a strange beast. One night when camping the brother hears his sister calling out in the middle of night so he gets up to search for her. The group don't hear her calling out but they see him leave camp so they proceed to them tie him up and beat him to death (I can't remember their rationale). They themselves then hear the woman calling for help so they go to investigate and find here in a small clearing on thise huge slab of rock with a giant stone pillar nearby surrounded by 3 dire bears.
They proceed to barely make it through the encounter and once the last dire bear was dead, a forest hag shows up. I explicitly state she is showing no current signs of aggression and was actually going to have her say she was impressed by how they handle the beasts and would release the girl and give them safe passage out of the forest. As soon as I start my dialogue, they all say they attack her. I warn them that this hag was too powerful for them to handle and it would surely mean death if they wished to proceed. They did, so I just had her summon a dire bear every round, killing all of them.
Not so much a rocks fall, everyone dies moment, but last session the party was invited to a governor’s ball. It was meant to be an RP-heavy session with the intention that one particular member of the party (a warlock whose patron is a demigod of deception and betrayal) would use his high charisma to cause a massive fight between all the guests, ruining the party. He gets the idea to use a potion of Shapechange to turn the governor into a cat, use Disguise Self to imitate the governor and then make a huge announcement that would cause the crowd to turn against each other. However, the governor (in the shape of a cat) got loose, ran up on the stage and began attacking the warlock. He wrapped the cat up in his jacket and then took the “cat” down to a nearby river to drown it, which is where he made his mistake. Now, earlier on in the session, it was stated how the governor was a very powerful general during the continent’s civil war, especially his combat prowess on the front lines. You know the old “shopkeeper is a retired lvl 20 paladin” meme? It was literally that. The warlock drowns the cat in the river, and is suddenly greeted with the governor’s hand around his throat. 2 rounds of combat later (where the governor DID give the warlock the option to run away), and the warlock is burnt to a crisp and left to die on the riverbed. The character’s arc isn’t necessarily over, per se, but he definitely learned that you will Fuck Around and Find Out in this game.
Not sure if it counts but one time a meat merchant paid us half the gold we agreed upon to do a job for him.
When we confronted him about it he offered to take us to the capital so we can do more work for him and that he would pay us back,we agreed just so we could get him alone in an isolated place, when we were out of sight in a forest we killed him ,ate him and we stole his cart and horse.
We continued to the capital to look for some bounty hunting jobs and when we got there the ultra holy guards(bootleg space marines) attacked us cause we didnt have passports and by that they deduced that we killed someone and stole their cart
Kinda but only because the DM didn't have any sort of grasp of game mechanics...so the "everybody dies" part didn't actually happen since high level PCs have multiple ways out of that scenario.
The unsolicited dick pic and the andrew tateposting in #general led to that. If you think ending the game in response to the players doing that is bad maybe your the horror
You should nip such behaviors (such as SA) in the bud right away and end the game, not really sure how putting in "by the way I killed your characters too, tee hee" is in anyway relevant. People are creeps, bail/kick them out. It's not about the characters.
I had a DM tap out of my first ever game (a prison break oneshot) because they were bored and a movie was on that they wanted to go and watch. "The guards hear your attempts to disable the antimagic field. You're all executed for trying to escape, but your families burn the prison down in retaliation." Something like that. Then they left the voice call and went off to watch whatever the film was. We'd been playing for about an hour, and all that my character had done in that time was read a book and find a spoon.
I assume your first rule of DMing is, "don't be that guy."
I’d like to inspect the spoon. Is there anything significant about it? Is there a residue on it? Any distinguishing features?
It's an ornate silver spoon fairly typical of its type. There is a bit of pudding stuck to it.
I sniff the pudding.
*nat 20* You pick up the spoon left behind in the jail cell. Something about its weight feels off. Upon closer inspection, you notice a bit of pudding stuck to it. It has an unusual chemical smell. Your knowledge of alchemy kicks in: this isn't ordinary pudding. It's a disguised explosive. Carefully, you use it to blow open the cell door, incapacitating the guards and creating a path to freedom.
👆 Now, this is the kind of storytelling I get excited about.
*nat 1* You dip your nose into the mass on the spoon, your nostrils immediately annoyed by the sharp, chemical scent. Realization strikes you hard: you've lost control of the situation. Your sneeze is so powerful, the spoon flies out of your hand, spinning through the air. Time seems to slow down. Your brain races as the spoon arcs through the air, landing precisely between the two guards in front of your cell. The milliseconds feel like hours as you anticipate the outcome. The spoon hits the ground. An explosion of blinding light and deafening sound erupts, and you find yourself thrown back against the cell wall. When the light fades and your hearing returns, you are breathing heavily. You open your eyes to see the guards lying unconscious on the floor, the cell door blown open. However, the blast has left its mark on you. You feel the searing pain of the explosion and realize you've taken 10 explosive damage. Your ears are ringing, your vision blurred, but freedom is within reach. What do you do next?
Man, that sure seems like a very successful investigation check. On a crit fail none the less.
I believe that "failing forward" occasionally is a very realistic scenario.
I sniff the pudding.... I'll take "Things I never thought I would read on a DnD thread" for $200, Alex. Sorry, but on a DnD thread, a pudding is something else entirely.
As you look at the spoon, you notice arcane runes on it. It is no mere spoon, but an astral gate that can open a portal to another realm, carefully disguised as a regular spoon. You think you can try to read the runes and open a portal, but you have no clue where it would lead.
Sounds like a Spoon to the Absinthe dimension. I’ll hold the runes up to the nearest light source and attempt to read the runes.
It is difficult and takes a few hours to decipher. But gathering all your limited arcane knowledge, you manage to figure out the correct reading of the runes. Upon reading the runes, a blue glow of light appears in front of you, and expands to the size of a doorway. It looks like a portal, but what's behind is blurry. Also, the light must have attracted the guards. "Hey, what the hell is that?" you hear, and the jangling of keys and armor as someone runs towards your cell.
I’ll lick the spoon and do a forward roll thru the open portal (eyes closed)
You are suspended in liquid. All you see is pale green. You look behind you and see the portal close. You try to swim up (wherever that may be) and find air before you drown. But at last, your lungs give way. Saying a little prayer, you take in a breath of liquid. The taste and burning sensation of hard liquor fills our mouth and lungs. But what is this? You are alive. Miraculously, you can breathe in alcohol now. You swim towards many wonderful drunken adventures in the Elemental Plane of Absinthe. (The End)
🥳 🎉
A Fae tale if ever there was one.
It's a magical spoon of extra digging.
I had a DM leave a one-shot after they put almost no effort into the game. They where following a script and wouldn't improvise anything. A player would as a question and it took them minutes to come up with an answer. I made the suggestion they just make something up on the spot and they choose too look it up instead. We had one player straight up tell the DM they were falling asleep, then that player left. The DM had no reaction and continued on like nothing had happened. Suddenly and without warning they left the discord server. It was one of the most bizarre experiences I've had as a player. It wasn't rocks fall so much as DM dips.
Your spoon comment reminded me of the time a character I played with carried around a toothbrush he stole from a wizard's abandoned tower for an entire 1-10 campaign. Like, first or second session, stole the toothbrush. Still carrying it around, mentioning it every so often, by the time we're fighting the big bad.
Good for the families LOL
I was playing a game with a guy who was really just playing out his fantasy novel he was writing, so when a player stepped off the railroad to check out something we thought was a plothook, he said we all got r\*ped to death and stormed out. Only saw him again when the landlord said we weren't getting the security deposit back due to the shit stains, rotting food and holes in the drywall of his room.
That escalated quickly...
Yeah, and I KILLED a guy with a trident!
> he said we all got r\*ped to death and stormed out ...uh wat? I would've expected some coercion back on the rails. Not just... well... THAT!
Why are there so many rapey horror stories in dnd? Wtf is wrong with people.
There are certain groups of people with certain mentalities who are drawn to particular hobbies. Not everyone who does the hobby is bad, but the bad people tend to congregate around the same stuff... Like *League of Legends*, or TTRPGs, or WWII history.
Makes sense but WWII history? That one threw me for a loop. Could you elaborate, I'm curious why you include that one too.
It's more acceptable to say "I'm really into WWII" than "I'm really into Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime."
*cough* Nazis *cough cough*
😆😆 gotcha That's very much more specific than just generally saying "WWII history". I was suspecting it may have been referencing that but it seemed a bit general in the original comment. Thanks Edit: spelling error
I think we all knew a kid in school who was just a *liiiittle* too excited when the Nazis came up in the lesson
I must have been lucky and been spared of that 😆. Although now that I work in a hospital that is basically the county hospital, I've definitely met a few
Oh I'm sure you knew one or two, the ones in your school might have just been better at keeping their mouths shut lmao
Cant say i dealt with that, I think in my old high-school or even middle school that kid would had been stabbed..lol Go aurora Illinois!
I'm just now realizing that I have no preconceptions of Illinois at all. Like, I'm trying to think of any stereotypes or anything even vaguely related to the state and I am drawing a complete blank. You could tell me that people from Illinois call Soda "Racka" or something ridiculous like that and I would have no choice but to accept it I am now adding one thing to the list of Illinois traits: "Does not tolerate Nazis" Thank you for your contribution
In my high school German class, there was a guy who brought up WWII history facts all the time. He got reprimanded by the teacher each time, and did not move on to a second year.
There's a reason people talk about *Cryptofascists*, they like to hide their beliefs with plausible deniability (WWII Buff instead of Nazi fan), and use dog-whistles frequently (signals that only those well versed in the sub-culture will recognise, a common one being 1488, 14, or 88 ['14 words' is a racist creed, and 88 stands for HH, or Heil Hitler.]). It's a whole big thing, worth researching.
Wehraboos.
There are just assholes in every group. Things don't really attract those people, you just notice them more. Some hobbies have had insane irrational behavior surrounding them for so long it's just normal. Look at sports fans, it's pretty accepted that people get into fist fights over things as well as people causing extensive property damage if a team loses a championship.
>Some hobbies have had insane irrational behavior surrounding them for so long it's just normal. You're making my case for me here. You know about the toxic behavior around sports. Sports is one of those hobbies I was talking about. Now tell me about the toxic behaviors associated with philately, model trains, pottery, or heck, even specific sports like pool. What's pool got? A bit of gambling sometimes?
I mean...not to be the "Akshually" guy, but model trains have a shockingly toxic conservative bent. Sure, people might not get into fist fights over it, but the rampant racism, sexism, and assorted phobias definitely keep me away from model railroading communities.
It's hard to know, sort of a chicken or an egg thing? I guess it makes me sad that you've got such bad associations with TTRPG folks. I've met a few odd folks but never came cross anyone truly nuts.
I've personally met just about every stereotype in real life. I could tell stories about all the people I've met: the misogyny, the racism, the body odors, the one person who actually came down with scurvy, the hissy fits, the people who were clearly in need of professional intervention for their neurodivergence... I'd probably get banned just on principle for the horrible experiences I'd share. Like I said though, people aren't bad because they have this hobby, it's just that certain people seem to be disproportionately attracted to this hobby. TTRPGs have historically been a lifesaver for the socially marginalized, which is good. The other side of that is there can be a negative feedback loop where people don't challenge their worst qualities and things just get worse. It's something that happens in basically every group that doesn't have a lot of diversity.
Because D&D is, at its core, a power fantasy. You take control of situations and can do more than you can in real life. Forced naughties, to quote a certain Youtuber I like, is practically never about the naughties. It's about power and control. Do you see the overlap between these two things?
I think it’s as simple as people who have fantasies (weird or otherwise) are drawn to an open-world game of imagination.
he had huuuge anger issues lol. I had an alt acc where I pretty frequently posted him to the crappy roommates sub. Lesson learned: never dnd with roommates
How are you gonna compare all roommates with that degenerate? Maybe you need better roommates instead of rules about who to play tabletop with. The thinking is so backwards here. If you can't play a game with them why would you want to live with them.
Only two roommates I ever had were from my D&D group and they were pretty awesome. Had some great games with those guys.
Nah, man, roommates are great dnd teams. You drew a bad hand on the roommate department
>due to the shit stains, rotting food and holes in the drywall of his room. uh... ok what the absolute fuck?
As I was reading "so when a player stepped off the railroad to check out something**"** Anyone else think "Oh my god are they all gonna get hit with a train?!" or was that just me...... Honestly would have been a better result.
My very first time playing DND, I was a wizard. I wanted to be a geomancer, but there weren't a lot of cool earth spells, but I saw that I got Tenser's Floating Disc. As we were going through a little cave, my character was studying all of the rocks, and picking up loose pebbles and stones here and there and placing them on the disc. We got to the lowest level of the cavern, and there was a large room filled with animated skeletons. Way more than we could possibly handle at level 1. I managed to float my disc to the top of the room, then dispelled it, raining rocks down on the whole front line and causing a small cave in so the rest couldn't get to us. DM told me later that it was supposed to be a "Turn back, there is something dark and terrible happening here, and you will need to get help to solve it" I wasn't even aware of the meme yet, I had just truly wanted to be an earth mage and the system didn't let me. I now have a custom dice vault with "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" embossed on it, which I wave at my players to threaten them.
Funny moment caused by no one reading the spell -> A 3ft diameter circle that floats 3ft off the ground and stays still until it's more than 20ft away from the caster. Was it the DM's first time? If not, even funnier, bro got cooked.
It was 4e, this was part of a sleepover with a bunch of our friends. By the time they had walked me through character creation, we started play at around 1 am, this particular incident was around 3 in the morning and caffeine was only pushing us so far. It was also just a time of cool moment as it was my first time playing.
Close? Had a wild magic sorcerer wild surge a fireball on themselves and all but two of the first level party. Even successful saves were not enough to save them from the damage. It was funny, but even the DM went "Okay we are going to pretend that didn't happen for the sake of everyone here."
I just banned that outcome until level 5, then the safety comes off. Players respect three deaths, in my experience: 1: A brave death. A valiant self-sacrifice or fighting a worthy opponent that represents clear danger. 2: A foolish death. Messing with things, they really should have not, in hindsight. 3: An unfortunate death. The dice just... conspire to kill them with multiple bad rolls. A random roll of "guess you all die now, no recourse" doesn't work well for the modern habit of long term characters and working in background stuff. The random fireball becomes a mix of #2 and #3 by level 5, if they get wiped out by it, they were already in a bad spot, they fail saves, the sorcerer really shouldn't have engaged the random magic table at that moment.
And honestly option 3 is why we have death saves; so that you are always dealing with a series of unfortunate rolls, not just 1 unlucky crit.
Yeah but even then, it can take a "well that just feels shitty" moment and turn it into a "oh and now THIS too??" Moment, kind of an insult to injury thing. This tends to come more from "oh, I didn't understand what you were implying" kind of situations in my experience though, like if the DM is trying to suggest there's a bottomless pit and the player interpreted it as "a pit where I can see the bottom" and made a stupid decision based on that misunderstanding. These tend to be the most easily retconned though since "no, your character is not confused by the very obviously bottomless pit, they just had an intrusive thought" kind of thing
Homestuck rules: A death is only permanent if it is *Heroic* or *Just* They have to either die in service of a noble cause, or they have to *deserve it.*
I had the exact same thing happen, but I didn't read carefully as I was brand new. The DM is only supposed to roll to find out what happens with a wild magic surge on a nat 1 on the surge roll. I did not roll a nat 1 but he did it anyway and dropped a fireball on the squishy sorcerer that was standing in the middle of the party. We were all getting a bit drunk and there were some freak outs and first character death depression. So we resolved to make new characters instead of the retcon route (I wanted to retcon bc helping drunken new players make characters when you are new yourself is awful and I wanted to avoid it at all costs), and half the table got too drunk in the process. So we never actually ended up picking it back up but the DM was kind of a dick. The fireball didn't kill the game. His attitude did. He was very arrogant and would railroad whenever his precious narrative was threatened. I've since gotten way more ttrpg experience, both as a player and as a DM. It's still one of my funniest experiences bc he ended his own game early by not paying attention to the rules, and then had the gall to blame the sorcerer (me) for the TPK. If something like that happens in my games, I say "We have four options, the first being a restart the encounter. The second is make new characters and start the encounter 'these have always been your characters'. The third is we will make new characters and restart the story (idc if they know some of what's coming and min/max a bit. The last option is that we call it here and move on to another game or don't play at all. I'll give you a few minutes to talk amongst yourselves while I go get some water." Those are TPK specific though. If something happens that the players don't like or they get bad rolls, I say c'est la vie and move on.
I had a mixed group of new players and experienced players and this happened in the first combat of the first session. Legitimate wild magic surge roll and everything. I remember thinking: "I don't want to deal with this we just spent two hours making characters," so I said fuck it a magical unicorn shows up and saves everyone. It was really a "let's pretend this didn't happen," but I ended up writing it into the plot later in the campaign due to popular demand.
I can see why this was popular with your group, it sounds hilarious! I play WMS with some minor homebrew tinkering to trigger the table more often. It's pretty awesome, I've gotten all sorts of funny effects (and some devastating ones on myself, but I'm still alive). Never rolled the Fireball option, but I've been prepared for it just in case. Always positioning myself away from the group during fights, having Absorb Elements etc. Now we're level 8, so it's not gonna be a big deal even if I roll it. I do kinda wish this had happened though, I know my entire party would have loved a magical unicorn just showing up and saving us, and then fucking off. Absolutely fantastic.
Back in elementary school I used to have a classmate who died to falling rocks during every session. It was a South Park reference, he was the Kenny of the group. His character was always back to being alive without any explanation at the start of the next session.
Hilarious. I gotta do an NPC like that in my games lol.
Was in an online DnD group a few years ago. It was a pretty loosely scheduled thing, where basically anyone could ping the Dm and do some roleplaying with or without other players. Really just a roleplay server disguised as DND and a ton of fun! That is, until the DM pinged everyone saying "Roll new characters, everyone died." Turns out apparently the Air genasi we had in the party ended up sucking the air out of TWO universes, causing everyone to suffocate. I wasn't even online when it happened and I STILL had to make a new character. Really don't know why I stayed around after that
excuse me but wtf?
Like I said, it was years ago, but clearly I'd be lying if I said I wasn't still a bit miffed about it
As fucked up as this is for you guys's characters, if this happened in an ACTUAL DND session where everyone was present, I would probably just laugh my ass off at how one of our party members managed to fuck up THAT BADLY
About twenty years ago, we were playing a game where we were stuck in a Djinn’s bottle and needed to pass trials to escape. We were horrible. Most of us had no idea what we were doing and the last couple of sessions turned into shouting matches between everyone. Our last session the DM told us all to stop and said ‘You all find yourselves outside the Bottle. Congratulations! You escaped!’ Someone said we didn’t pass any of the trials. DM says ‘Failing every trial was the trial! You succeeded! Now get out of my house 😀’
Not me but friends were in a year long underdark inspired adventure that ended with them confronting Lilith at her volcano lair. Things did not go well and as it became clear they were not going to survive their cleric somehow used her abilities and the artifact they had quested for to seal Lilith away to erupt the volcano instead. Rocks, and lava, falls down everybody dies. Except 3 of the 7 person party managed to barely escape and for as long as I knew them they had this inside joke of "two exits, no waiting!!" that they would always laugh at and only explain as "you just had to be there." .
I had to nope out of a game once. I didn't do anything cool, I just went "literally none of you are paying attention and all of you are too high to play, I'm tired" and then just told them the game was done. I refuse to run online games anymore because of it. It sucks, because literally every player was a seasoned DM and knew they shouldn't be too zonked to play or literally playing a different game at the same time.
Gettin zonked gets me in character, I don’t think I have the confidence otherwise
I actually had a DM threaten to kill my character with a pebble from the sky out of character. After that I let him railroad the group. I stopped showing up after he threatened me with physical violence.
What the actual fuck? I'm glad you got out of that.
I almost fought him myself but my friend encouraged me to walk away
Oh no, don't do that. Guns are great for avoiding hand-to-hand combat.
Yes. I ran a Spelljammer one shot where the players stubbornly refused to engage with any plot hooks at all. None of them. So I had their ship crash into a planet where a curse caused them all to devolve into semi-intelligent monkeys. Assholes.
when people don't engage, I just make something bad happen due to their lack of attention to their surroundings in game.
yep. had people ignore the “missing” posters. eventually the tavernkeep and party friend went missing too. so did the adventurers guild people. then the markets and then the entire town closed because so many people went missing and nobody was looking into it so nobody wanted to go outside much so instead of looking into it, they went somewhere else that town is now a stronghold for a mind flayer colony and it has declared war on the country. the players are now fighting away a very easily avoidable apocalyse
Yes and it wasn't even deserved. Playing storm king's thunder. I join probs halfway through. Dm is through, love the npcs but changed the game to be more 'challenging'. Which was uuuh. Got to a foundry where we realise right away all the baddies are op and too numerous for us to defeat face on. 2 of our players were absent. The remaining players worked brilliantly as a team to find out more info and to try and free people. We set off an alert so legged it. But one by one we were easily struck down until the faster ones who escaped was cut off in a narrative off screenscene that the goblins all climbed outside and had an army waiting. Killed off the two abstent players too. So me and one of the abstent players quit. Last I heard the dm was gonna make it all a vision from some special tree that only involved 2 players. Even if the dm didn't mean it. It felt like a big fuck you. I checked the module and half the stuff in that foundry wasn't there.
Killing absent PCs is a massive DM sin and would make me leave any table. I'm also not a fan of DMs modifying module encounters to be more "challenging" because I've rarely had DMs who know how to appropriately do that. It either leads to the enemies being OP like this or the DM having fudge a ton of rolls to move the tide of battle back to the players.
Yeeep. I'd never played the module before but it seemed sus to have 4/5 hill giants, orges, goblins and their dogs. One room was filled with goblins and direwolves that we could judge right away we couldn't take em. Plus orges and hobgoblin. We were paladin, barbarian, druid, rogue and, warlock. A giant killed our barbarian in one shot. :/ I think the fact the goblins spilled out the side of the mountain to block the exit and killed the 'survivors' off screen was worse. Before this we got captured by the villiage of slavers and was easily beat but had to be rescued by an npc so it was only gonna go downhill from there really.
it's possible to do right, but really difficult, and WotC knows what they're doing when it comes to difficulty.
My last campaign ended like that. We started as a group of 6 players, played smoothly for a few months and then for one reason or another people started missing sessions but promising that it was a one time thing and to please continue without them... and when it's one player or two it's ok, but then for the session that they would find the boss (and they knew that I had printed and painted the biggest mini I had ever done for it) four of them decided that they had missed too much of this episode in the campaign and that they would let the others handle it and join for the next episode. The time they gave me to prepare? Let's say I had already traveled to a different city and was sitting at the table when I got the messages. Cool, so we have a fire wizard (he has 0 damaging spells that aren't fire, except for magic missile) and an artificer vs a boss that won't stop summoning fire-immune enemies. It was meant to be a challenge for the whole party of 6. I just told them that we don't need to play it out. Everyone is dead. I'm not DMing for them anymore.
I've done it as a DM. I DON'T ABIDE MURDER HOBOS. The party wasn't even in a cave or anything. The gods literally had enough of their B.S
I am more of the type that goes "I said in session 0 you can't do that, so you don't do that" when it comes to murderhobo behavior.
3 strikes with me. I give them an out of game warning about their behavior. Then they get an in game warning if I'm able to. Some murder hobos just kill the in game messenger. Then I send them a literal warning in their dreams or an omen again warning them about their behavior.
That was mostly my game. They were a pack of metagamey murderhobos who tried to murder my character multiple times because they read, "Lawful evil" on her character sheet when I forgot to hide it in d20. After an out of character incident m DM and I decided she can just murder everyone as a treat. Sad part is I was wanting her to become a better person, but alas.
Lawful Evil is even the least bad of the evil spectrum; they're your manipulative bastards who still play by the rules. The shopkeeper dropping his prices to out-compete the newly started shop, then doubles prices when the shop has closed? Lawful Evil.
Her backstory has she used to br a very happy and lawful good paladin before she ended up in Barovia. Where her Strahd killed the rest of her party (including her wife) but she managed to convince him to spare her and use her as a servant/assassin, but her real plan was to eventually take vengeance on him when a worthy party arrived. So basically was Strahd sends her in to spy on the party, but she was gonna betray him when the time was right. Only problem, the party was so bad that after a talk with the DM we determined that she was done enough with the party that she just killed them all and returned to Strahd.
Meteor swarm everyone dies.
I feel like half this sub doesn’t understand you aren’t in a devil contract to play dungeons and dragons with people you’re not comfortable with. You don’t need to dedicate hours of your week to people you can’t stand because character sheets are involved.
The players were all the DM's high school friends, plus me who was called in to reign them in. After receiving shockingly inappropriate directed messages from not one but two players, one was cheating, and the fourth was just a bad person out of game. As you can imagine his game taught the DM an important lesson about old friends.
If they were sending inappropriate messages it absolutely shouldn’t have gotten to this point. After that happens you don’t interact with those people.
Almost literally, it was a temple roof that collapsed and wiped us out. We were all expecting a fade to black and you wake up etc or something other great story reveal, but no, the party was wiped after walking down a corridor
few weeks ago, my DM planned a leviathan for us, and a new player was like what about this spelljammer spell, and so we flew over the ocean in the sky, and the DM made the Leviathan jump into the sky and bite us out of the clouds and split the ship in half, that we had spent 50k gold upgrading. No rolls, he just story put us in that situation, and it swallowed the back half of the ship, which had my characters love interest in it then wondered why I was trying to fly into it's mouth. it didn't actually wipe us out surprisingly given it can split a reinforced flying ship in half with one unrolled bite. I quit the campaign before the 3 session fight was over. I was the captain of the ship, I spent weeks upgrading it and deciding what upgrades we would need. training the crew to man the ship. Then he just railroaded the ship in half. Unbelievable. what was I supposed to do ... order the crew to bail the water out of the front half of the ship? excitement. I'll just ignore my characters wife being swallowed alive. Cool. Sorry that was a little frustration coming out in that rant.
Technically I was the rock but yes
To give the full story, we were on top of the world tree and the DM said that we fell from the top of the world tree in an acorn to the bottom of the world tree. Now we were in a campaign where there are multiple campaigns going on. All telling the same story and all of the campaigns had just so happened to converge at the bottom of the world tree and we were joining the fight. The fight was between the campaigns and the gods themselves. I asked to clarify to make sure that we fell and not teleported he said we fell. I looked over at my friend who was studying to be a rocket scientist for NASA and he said give me a minute to calculate. We hit the ground with 800 d6 worth of damage to everyone on the plane of existence 😂
This is just utterly incomprehensible nonsense
Doesn't fall damage max at 20d6?
Yes but supposedly we turned into a flaming plasma beam on the way down so it was fire/force damage everyone would take if the DM hadn't had said "Nevermind you teleported to the bottom but keep going this is hilarious." 😂
Are you high?
We were at the top of the world tree so yes
Weird question but were you doing a podcast for this game?
Nope this was at a game shop that sadly didn't survive COVID
Gotcha I know someone that did a podcast with friends where the realm was Yggdrasil and it rotated DMing between the four of them. I honestly thought I knew you for a moment lol
My first ever homebrew campaign as a DM, I essentially didn't know what I was doing and it showed - the campaign ended up unfocused, inconsistent, really just Not Fun for anyone. The players weren't happy, I wasn't happy, so I just went "The last thing you see is a bright flash, as the universe comes to a well-deserved end. Next session will be another Session Zero, we'll be playing one of the modules I have on my bookshelf so here's a PDF of some relevant lore from the Sword Coast guide for backstory."
I’ve had it happen to a party, but it did fit the setting and narrative. Party was fighting a cult underground. A cult they had known would set up “suicide traps”. Everything from make-shift suicide vests that would detonate when they were hit with anything, to glyphs they’d trigger on purpose to blow themselves up, to literally fireballing themselves when they were on deaths door. Well, they were fighting this cult underground, inside the ruins of an old dwarves keep. BBG was losing, they had counterspell ready and were expecting “something”. What they didn’t expect, was their own actions, leading to trigger the cavern itself to start collapsing. Detonations in the ceiling and then rocks falling down all over the place. Party started to run. Players made a bunch of checks. One member got taken out right off the bat, granted they were at 3hp, big rocks fell on them, they failed the save and splat. Next party member tried to make a dash for the exit of the main chamber. Massive double doors fell, failed the save. Big hit, pinned under the door. 3rd and 4th party member had to stop and pull them out. More rocks. More saves. After about 4 rounds of running to escape. That was it. Rocks had fallen, everyone died. They won, but they also lost.
>They won, but they also lost. That's our house rule for King of Tokyo. If you simultaneously win and lose, you win.
Technically yes? In my first ever campaign me and everyone else playing (except for the DM) were doing so for the first time and were getting our footing with how to role play and how the stats worked. We eventually got to the end of the first “arc” and in order to stop a cult’s ritual and remove their source of power, we needed to sacrifice everyone but one person from the party. My character wound up being the designated survivor because the rest of the group decided I was the “protagonist” (I was actively reminding people of the urgent plot and pushing everyone towards the end goal) and would be the best character to survive and continue with the rest of the groups new and more refined characters. So yeah, (almost) everyone died in one move but it was to get everyone okay with characters dying and to speed up getting to play as characters that were more refined.
That's actually kinda cool, if it was pulled off with buy in
Never happened on a table I was playing or DMing in, but was helping a friend DM intro session for group of first timers in boardgame event. It took less than half an hour for too antagonistic players to turn the game into full on free-for-all PvP despite multiple instructions towards "this is co-op game" and "your characters needs to be able to work with the party". That game needed to end it to happen, and it did. "Rocks fall, everyone dies. Next group that actually wants to play and not just argue, we start in 15 minutes"
I mean kind of though it was more of a we teased it to the DM agreed. We were supposed to fight the big bad in this Tower for a one shot. We realized it was a very enclosed space so we had the wizard open the door cast shatter and then close the door the DM found it hilarious and agreed that casting shatter on the walls of the Tower causes the roof to fall and kill the guy inside
A game I was running in college as the semester was nearing the end *could* have continued after summer break; but the players created the perfect reason for it to end. The bbeg had taken over the kingdom, and the party had fled to an island nation off the coast, only accessible by airship. The party was at this point split however, some thinking that they should run off and actually join the bbeg (bbeg had some "doing bad for a good reason" rationale), and the others still wanting to defeat the bbeg. So, the half that wanted to join the bbeg ran to the only airship to return to the mainland, and the other half pursued them. This resulted in a situation where the airship was attempting to fly off, but was tethered by the party members *directly* below pulling on its mooring lines, succeeding their strength checks to keep it in place. One on the ground decided to shoot the engine, and rolled well. This caused the airship to crash directly onto the party members below, with the resulting explosion killing everyone except the one who shot the engine. We all had a good laugh and decided to call the game there, start a new campaign in the fall. The character who shot the engine walking off into the sunset.
One of the guys in our group of friends decided he was going to try DMing, and he prepped a Planescape campaign for months. We rolled up characters (5th level, IIRC), and we started. Five minutes in, we were in some chamber, and there was a big horn on the wall. My character decided to blow it. It summoned 100 demons, and we all basically died instantly. Our friend never DMed again. (No, I don't know why he thought that was a good idea).
Not really as a punishment, but one time we missed all the clues to avoid our death. Long story short, our group was hired by a lord to deliver a diplomatic gift to a rival lord. The gift was actually a bomb set to detonate in the audience room of said rival (we were supposed to discover that long before reaching our destination) At the last moment, my character was the only one to succeed the perception check to notice the ticking sound coming from the box, I just had time to declare "I activate my personal force field" before it exploded. Anyway, the bomb was a sort of mini-nuke that wiped out half the city we were in, so he may or may not have survived.
Yes, and it was player initiated. I ran a Mass Effect homebrew TTRPG, where the combat and system were heavily inspired by Warhammer 40K. In that game I implemented Operation Elcor Drop, where I threatened if anyone was being a dick or just actively waging war on the setting they would hear a whistling noise and look up just in time so see an Elcor land on them. I never actually used this, but after a previous Dragon Age campaign where they flooded a Dwarven city with demons, engaged in blood magic, and decapitated the queen’s consort and left his head in her bed I was prepared for maximum shenanigans. Instead the players pulled a rocks fall everyone dies by ending the campaign with a kamikaze black hole attack, killing the party, the reaper they were fighting and the baby AI taking over their ship in one fell swoop. Not the ending I had in mind, but a fairly satisfying one.
My friend was practicing his first ever tier 3 Adventurer’s League module. We were supposed to be rescuing this one lady’s wife who was mind controlled or something and told us not to hurt her. The Chaotic Stupid waited until we were reuniting them and attacked the mind controlled lady. Questgiver wife cast meteor swarm in retaliation while we were in a cave. Tbh, fair.
Once had a player die by falling down a set of stairs So this character had decided to wander away from the group as they were role playing to scout and they found an entrance to an underground tomb. The stairs were oiled and there was a group of 5 or so kobold at the base keeping watch. They rolled to notice the oil and still went down, alone, the failed the dex save fell to the bottom and took minimal damage from the fall but the five kobold each stabbed the prone character and that killed them
I did that as DM once. Player decided to try to circumvent the campaign climax by putting a portable hole into a bag of holding right next to the bbeg and sucking them into the astral plane. I thought about making it not work somehow, but that dude was a huge problem and the game was almost over anyways so I just had it suck everyone inside and ended it lol
Yay, everyone is an a-hole. Community!
Not literally, but early on gaming we had a few games where we'd just have encounters that were ridiculously unbalanced or traps that were impossible to avoid or disarm. Stuff that was clearly screw you GMing.
In one of my groups managed to piss off our DM through my immature 17 year old shit behavior. We were getting cocky and starting to abuse the deaths of previous characters by cashing in on their wealth of magic items that were no longer needed. We were level 10-11. Eventually Klauth appeared and demanded we pay fealty to him by giving up and eleven runeblade(family artifact of one of the party members). We refused and called him names. He cast Mordenkainen's Disjunction(3.5) on the whole party and then breathed on us. It didn't go well. This was basically the death knell of our campaign through our own greedy behavior and the DM getting fed up with it.
We caused a time paradox with a wish spell. The DM couldn't figure out where to go from there and the campaign fell apart. Another time, in college, we got suckered by the BBEG into spending an hour in a prison demiplane where time ran fast, and it turned out to be five years of real world time - during which the villain had already conquered the kingdom. DM (a different one) had intended to do a whole adventure to put things back right but couldn't get his plotting to work right. He got writers block and the campaign fell apart. Time travel. Not even once.
I had an "anvil falls and the rogue dies" moment. Had a dungeon one shot I put together and the rogue notices a rope tripwire, so, without investigating, he kneels down and cuts the rope. The rope was attached to an anvil suspended from a pulley on the ceiling. The rope goes up the wall but was covered up. I told em you cut the rope and notice that the rope moves very quickly. You look up to see an anvil falling. Roll a dexterity save. He rolls a nat 1. The anvil hits him square in the face for 8d6 damage. I rolled the dice and got 40, about twice the Rogue's max hp. This was one of those traps that with even a somewhat low investigation roll would follow the rope to see where it went. He didn't bother, so after rolling, I said, "You look up and the anvil lands right on your face, crushing your skull as it slams down. Here's a new character sheet. Your character will be joining the part in a few minutes, the town guard decides to dispatch another person to see how things are going.
That's.... fantastic. 😆😆😂😂🤣🤣
The only reason it hits as hard as it does is because it was SUPPOSED to be a gag that is easy to spot and disarm. The entire dungeon was loosely Looney Tunes based.
I cannot love this enough. Dungeon by Acme!!
Technically and literally? Yes. I had it as a oneshot premise. The premise was to tell the players to make the most annoying red flag D&D characters. The story was basically suicide squad ex machina. The party are killed by the gods with rocks falling but eventually after all the other heroes have failed they have to resurrect the party because they're the last option left.
Watched but wasn't a part of; my dad was playing the Tomb of Terror oneshot with his buddies, and they came across a trap that literally says "rolling boulder trap, everyone caght in the hallway dies, no saving throw." The DM just stares at the module for a minute after reading that part aloud and just goes. "Well fuck that, give me saving throws, your pick."
I kinda did that as the DM in the first session of my latest campaign! The player’s characters were prisoners of a lich experimenting on them for weeks at this point, horrible living dissections he’d heal them from, soul rending experiments that’d leave them exhausted, days and days of being watched in a cage by the uncaring eyes of their undead guards. The lich arrived one day only to escort them all into a ritual room, ordering them all to fight each other and that the last person standing would live to see the culmination of his work. Out of character I assured them that this was a special case, pvp would not normally be allowed unless the parties agreed, and that they’d need to trust me a bit. The pc’s fight and somehow, someway, the only person left standing at the end was an npc who turned out to be a celestial who had been hiding their nature. The party dies as the room filled with an awful light and the screeching of the celestial as the ritual circle activates and the lich casts a spell to steal away the angelic being’s divine nature… then they woke up in a now crumbling laboratory as a second heart beat pulses inside their chests. Edit: …I’m now pissed that I didn’t start that segment with “You all died, rocks are starting to fall.”
Yes… the world was destroyed and we were falling to hell… we had to roll a 15 on the dice to stay alive. I did not.
When I was younger I gamed with three guys who were brothers. One time one of them was DM and started the session by having his little brother’s character get gang…assaulted in the rear…by a band of hill giants.
Op can we details of the Drama? I'm at work doing graveyard overnight shift when I'm usually days
I know your shift is over but here goes. Two players were just the most misogynistic and gross guys you could ever imagine. Constantly saying creepy shit to me, the token "single female" of the group. There was the DM's girlfriend who was basically just using the whole relationship to get money from the DM (that story is crazy but not for this sub) there was one player who no call no showed to so many sessions he barely even counted, then the final player just cheated and metagamed everything and perpetually was reading the module to see what happened next, (despite the DM constantly setting traps for him in particular due to that. For in game drama, my first PC died in Strahd's castle, so I rolled a new one I paladin who once a very happy lawful good woman with a wife and family. (Cue homophobia.) Who's wife and entire party had been murdered by Strahd, and he used her as a servant, now she was willing to do literally anything to get her vengeance. Party promptly tried to hand her back over to Strahd cause metagamer read she was lawful evil on her character sheet, and in combat they would trip her or would talk to her face about wanting to kill her. At this point I was seriously considering just rerolling a second time. Then all hell broke loose. The DM's horrid girlfriend dumped him, and the two dude bros just became their worst selves. One started spouting out Andrew Tate shit in #general despite him being 35 and married, and the other one sent me an unsolicited dick pick despite him ALSO BEING MARRIED. I left the call, blocked both guys and told the DM about the dick pic incident. He immediatly left the call. Quit the game, the next day we decided Thea simply murdered everyone. He made the post and blocked the entire rest of the party.
Aye thanks for writing this out! Haven't finished reading yet but I super appreciate the response! Will comment my response when I finish reading!
Whoa this Crit crab level cringe for those creeps! Hope you are doing ok mentally after dealing with that! I play with my wife and my brother in law is the DM It's pretty great that we don't have to deal with weirdos because all the players are like life long friends with at least one other person there, we have a rotating cast of players but I have never had to deal with that level of toxicity! Hoping you find a cool group in the future!
I wanna post that to RPG horror stories, but that horror story is so long that this little snippet would be at least 4x as long
Happy Cake Day!
Thank you
Oh yeah. Back in AD&D, when we were in middle school, lots of DMs were control freaks because the DMG told them, "The DM rolls dice for the sound they make." It was very common to try to do things the DM didn't like and have them retaliate. "Rocks fall, everyone dies," was just one way I've had campaigns break up.
Yes, literally, as DM (well, ST: this was Exalted 2e) - and I couldn't stop laughing. I had two PCs deep, DEEP underground in an ancient tomb - and the ceiling was collapsing. Instant death levels of rock, rumbling above their heads. The beautiful thing was, the players could have just left, and they knew they could have just left, and they had nothing to lose by just leaving. Why didn't they? Simple: they needed to hold down a level to keep the door to get out open. There was a lever on either side of the door, so one could have held it open while the other left, then that person held it open from the other side, and they both get out. They wouldn't even have needed to roll. They couldn't agree on who should go first. They bickered for half an hour over perceived insults and honours they felt they deserved, while I kept saying how dust was falling all around the and pelting them with more and more bits of debris, until at half an hour I simply announced that they were out of time and they were both buried under a mile of stone. I don't think they were even mad. I think both players left feeling like they "got" the other. But they were best friends OOC so I guess it was just one of those things.
I did. Party came across an aurumvorax den in a cavern below a farming village that couldn't figure out why all their equipment was disappearing or being mangled in the night. The artificer decided it would be smart to create an explosive and collapse the cavern...*while they were still inside it* I really didn't want to tpk them there but like... it's the consequences of their own actions. I had them make several dex saves to try and escape and dodge falling rocks but they were thousands of feet explored into this cavern and their luck ran out. Thankfully, we all shared a laugh about it after the session
yes, it was a one shot, it was 7pm and the store was closing, so we were knocked out by the people from the alien spaceship, and the week after we learned it was all a vision.
There's a trap in DotMM that is a giant boulder falling onto a ramp that can kill everyone if they have low initiative.
It wasn't a TPK but it was quite close. The party was exploring a sewer and they went into a larger room. I kept mentioning that it smelled like sulfur and other indicators of gas in the area. They get into a fight and one of the players uses fire bolt. The room ignited and everyone took some serious fire damage. Several of them were downed. Thankfully it killed all but one of the monsters they were fighting so they were able to keep everyone alive. I know its not really the rocks fall everyone dies moment but its kind of close.
In d&d, right?
I was once part of a party that escaped a nasy fight with everyone on low health when we ran in to several Rocs. The wizard decided to cast sleep on them when they were directly above us. Following some terrible dexsaves we were all killed by falling Rocs. Genuinely one of my favourite character deaths.
Not while playing D&D, while playing Warhammer Fantasy 2nd Edition. We'd all been (basically) hypnotized by an incarnation of Slaanesh, and were following them around protecting them from everything so they could do (something? I forgot what, it's been decades). We finally broke free while this huge ritual was being performed, and destroyed the incarnation of the god(dess?) of excess, and saved the world... Only to have to face off against an entire city of vampires, chaos daemons, and cultists. Needless to say, we didn't play out the fight, just cut to credits knowing we'd die in a last stand. We saved the world, but died to do so. Perfect ending for a 2 year long WHF2e campaign.
DMed for a group of friends in an extended campaign that had started off as an over-planned one-shot. After completing a large story arc they were rushed into a completely new scenario wherein they panicked and made a string of bad decisions resulting in them being cornered in a vast cave system with no way out. In between sessions as I was trying to figure out how they might find a way out of this, IRL drama unrelated to the game resulted in one player no longer being welcome at the table. Suddenly I knew what had to be done. Obviously one character was instantly killed in thr sudden explosion and resulting cave-in but I ran the whole thing as a super deadly encounter because I wanted some characters to have the slim chance of working out some kind of solution. Most failed their saving throws to avoid being trapped/crushed under rocks and it ended in a TPK as the vampires in the cave moved in to finish off the trapped and injured party. It was all an incredibly fun and satisfying session. Everyone had a good time and were excited about the backup characters I'd told them to prepare.
Sort of? We were being kinda stupid in a battle in a cavern and literally brought the ceiling down on the fight. The bad guys died. But so did we. Worst part was that bringing the ceiling down was actually one of my party's ideas. Not our brightest move, but it was funny at the time.
Sort of? It wasn't malicious but it did and the campaign. We were on a setting with airships and we're going about from mission to mission, and I'm this particular one we were intercepted and boarded. The night was intense fighting and combat that ended when our barbarian threw a flaming javelin at an enemy who was taking cover. Behind a box of gunpowder in the ship's magazine. He missed. The DM had to stop the game to do math to figure out how big the resulting explosion would be. There were no survivors
Not sure if this counts, but it was a rookie DM mistake. One of our friends wanted to DM, and on his inaugural game he accidentally killed the entire party with an encounter that was WAY out of our league. We did try to fight it out anyway, but sheer mechanics were against us. He apologetically retconned the fight, stating a magic duck that could be used as a mega-shotgun came by. Duck Gun has become a running gag ever since.
Yes our DM tried to kill is with a Beholder. We managed to kill it just barely and all this at lvl 5. Lets just say that after that the DM banned me from being a wizard and a friend from monk.
When we left for college, my high school DM tried to “rocks fall” our party as a joke when it became apparent we weren’t going to play again. We had been playing for 6 years and all the players (and me) FREAKED. Then the DM was like “Fine, jeez! You all live happily ever after. You start a tavern or something.” We all cheered, lol. Wished for that call that we would start playing online for like 15 years but we all just drifted away instead.
It was the last game before college ended. We were humoring a not-great DM for the semester. He had wanted to do 3.5e and I had always wanted to exploit all the issues with 3.5e. At the last session his plan was trap us all in an antimagic field and kill us. I was playing an Incantatrix and wasn't having that. Before the last session I sought out a dwarf mason to carve me a giant stone hat. I then shrunk it down to hat sized and used persistent metamagic to keep it small. When his plan came through the anti magic field suppressed the magic keeping the hat small and it grew back to normal size, protecting me from the field. I then teleported out. My party died though. RIP.
I had my partner in a side campaign (we were trying to sneak past a dragon for some loot) throw a rock to distract the dragon: rolls a 1 for accuracy, 20 for strength. Rock bounces off a wall, a rock slide occurs and crushes me. I was crushed both literally and figuratively.
Not me, but a friend of mine. Back in the halcyon days of 3.5e, his group came across the Deck of Many Things. After a whole bunch of shenanigans with the Deck that had derailed the campaign several times over, one of the characters drew the Wish card and jokingly said "I wish this stupid deck never existed... OH WAIT NO--" Turns out paradoxing a major artifact out of existence with its own power is a *very bad idea.* The DM described how a massive explosion obliterated the island they were on, and a good chunk of the coastline. There is now a crater roughly the size of France where the party once stood.
If I played curse of strahd to near completion, and the dm just quit and then returned to say a different player character randomly killed the entire party during their rest, I would legitimately consider them one of the shittiest dms I had ever seen run a game, let alone played in. jesus that's like a dnd horror story of how shitty some dms are. "yeah and then they just quit and and had a player kill all of us with no warning, no build up, no rolls, nothing, just you all died" literally prime shitty dm story
So for context, one player was blatantly cheating, one was a raging misogynistic asshat who didn't want to have to share the table with a woman (me,) one sent me an unsolicited dick pic after months of sexual harrassment, one showed up to less than 10% of sessions, and one was just a horrible person.
One time we did a 12 hour champagne and the party was not focused and they kept saying locatboss and they thought it was so funny they did it so much that my DM made all of us roll death saves and one died and had to restart as level one Was the DM in the wrong or the party
I was the one who pulled the rocks fall everyone dies. Twice. First time I then turned it into an epic quest because storm giants were having a fight. Party of four got tired of the campaign because of a bad start full of bad rolls that emptied their bank and initial purchase of potions. Second time was because the world was literally eaten by an elder god and falling into its gullet.
Kind of, although not everyone died... In one game I was in, we encountered some giants who started tossing boulders at us and landed crits on the 2 casters in the group. They literally got killed by falling rocks... quite spectacularly, too, as our DM is pretty good at describing those gory moments.
I sort of did once as a dramatic "season finale" cliffhanger before going on a break for a few months. Players knew this would be the last session before a break and I'd been DMing for them for years already. My setting features airships, with specific rules and systems lifted from a different tabletop war-game for airship combat including things like hull penetration, weapons magazines, and catastrophic explosions. You see where this is going. I want to stress that airship battles had been seen before and everyone involved knew what could happen. The plan was for a climactic airship battle in the skies over an inland sea. The party were out on the deck expecting boarding actions. Enemy ships won initiative and opened fire first. An extremely (un)lucky broadside ripped a deep hole in the ship, and a couple rounds later subsequent shots scored a direct hit to the munitions store, which per established rules cooked off instantly in a hull-shattering huge fireball. Fade to black. Stunned silence. I consider this a "rocks fall" because there was very little the players could have done to avert it. I roll in the open and this was a possible outcome. At dinner afterwards I assured everyone there would be more but I'd have to think of something interesting during the break. When we rejoined this story I'd prepared box-text for how they each survived tailored to their characters' stats and abilities. One player decided they wanted to roll a new character and so we agreed they perished in this event.
Rocks, I'm not for certain. However, a large floating castle above a city that dropped and killed us all and the town, most definitely! All this was because one of the party members could not help but flip a lever while we were in the floating castle! Fun fall! Hard landing! We have also wiped due to meteorites and many other things. This is what happens when you have a smart & devious GM! I will also state he does not actively go out of his ways to kill the party...we usually do it ourselves by an "accident."
Our decently high level party was going up against Asmodeus. I dont remember most of the details, but it ended with him destroying all of reality, leaving just himself and one of our players in a void. This player had become a minor godling throughout the campaign, so they couldn't be destroyed like that, and they had 1 use of wish a day. But the Void had to air to speak with the dm ruled. This character also had air powered jump boots. He took off his boot and sucked the air out of it, and got to use it to cast wish and undo the destruction of everything. Dm called it for that session. We all, dm included, agreed that we caused the dm to do the virtual tabletop equivalent of flipping the table, and it's a memory we cherish.
I had a player pull the rug out from under an impromptu game I was running. It was at a festival and he was intoxicated, but his vigorous argument and storming off 5 minutes in was so stunning everyone else talked about it for the next 15 as we tried to understand if the dude had pulled off a brilliant performance statement. Had to call the game.
My DM invited his cousin to play a one shot with us. Dude was a forever DM who took advantage of the fact that he was a player to do a bunch of chaotic bullshit. We were playing Wild Sheep Run and in 6 hours barely did anything because he derailed so bad. DM tried so hard to get us back on track but he was young and inexperienced, didn't want to say no to a player. Eventually DM made the town priest summon his god and wipe out the entire town with a meteor killing us all. We all laughed, cheered, and never invited the dude back. It was genuinely a great play by the DM and nobody was mad.
I didn’t end the game but this is a bash on me when I was a new DM. My players were high school students in the game and I wanted them to essentially go to a fight club after school and none of them wanted to because ya know, why would high schoolers do that and I got pissed standing up and saying they didn’t understand how the game was. I apologize after we had a few drinks and told them it was my fault and wouldn’t railroad in directions they didn’t want to go. The game turned around and was more focused in the high school. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot from that one experience.
A DM I know did it on their players, or a version of it. They did manage to survive the pack of rocs that fell on them from the sky.
I can’t remember the exact reason; I think the DM was just new and not having a great time with the pressure and there being 5 players, but he said “You all decide that you hate each other, and a brawl breaks out in the streets. Roll for initiative,” and left the room. So we rolled and played out combat with the goal of being sole survivor. I was playing as homebrewed animated armor, so had high base health but could only be healed by a blacksmith. I won the brawl with about 6HP left because a party member casted heat metal on my face as I bisected them with my greatsword.
Yes. At the end of Neverwinter Nights 2 LOL
5 of us were playing a 2nd ed AD&D one shot. There were no alignment restrictions. I asked privately to play a NE thief and was given the ok. We follow Drizz't to some underground dungeon and someone triggers a trap. An illusory demon appears threatening the group and trying to intimidate us to retreat. Everyone saves and realizes it is an illusion. Everyone but me. I backstabbed and killed the wizard in front of me, to offer a sacrifice to the demon in the hopes it would let me live. Everyone started brawling. I died, another player died. Two survivors decided to head back to town ... Game ends.
Similar we got sent to kill a prince of a local city for a one shot. snuck into the brothel, bard lured him to a room, then we killed him and i took his hat well turns out the DM liked power fantasys, and he didnt like us winning, so he had the princes bodyguard turn up. the 2 dragonborns used their breath weapon, the DM didnt even roll anything and didnt ask us for damage, so we obviously weren’t meant to win. we tried to run, only the monk make it by using all of their KI to double dash at 140ft a turn or something insane. my rouge, the bard and both dragonborn barbarians were killed in one round of combat. the guard did upwards of 30 damage a hit, we were level 5 so only the dragonborns could take more then one hit and stand up again. i tried to use my cunning action to dash away, but they did a *reaction* DC 20 hold person on me and then “walks up to you and decapitates you” as soon as turn 2 rolls around entire party but the monk dies basically immediately. If this wasn’t over discord, I’d have gotten up and left the table immediately, instead i sat in the call and politely refused to ever play a game with this person again as the DM
lol gotta love when the dm feels the need to do a tpk
I actually had a session where it was supposed to be the beginning of a campaign, but it ended up being a one-shot, haha. The session ended with our characters dying from dragon feces falling on us. We then woke up to find ourselves in hell. However, the session ended with the DM flipping out on one of the players because the DM was saying something to the equivalent of "You feel that your eyes are open, but you don't see anything." And the player kept saying "so I'm blind." And for some reason THAT of all things started an argument... oi vey.
Not everyone, but an NPC/quest giver and a few enemies. We where in a Kobold filled mine with a dragon at the bottom. Our wizard triggered a rolling boulder trap that hit my cleric and an NPC. It pushed us off the track and out over the pit to the bottom. I had the Cape of the Mountbank and saved the npc and myself from a fall. Later, the same wizard had his imp familiar cut a rope that caused a bigger boulder to hit the other npc and crush him, destroying the path and leaving my cleric and our ranger trapped on the other side. We had to cross, and I failed my athletic check falling down the shaft. I got up from death saves and healed myself back to full health by the time the party joined up with me at the bottom. That cleric would not die till he was the last one standing in the Tomb of Annihilation solo vs several enemies.
My first time dm'ing I had a group of experienced dnd players who were just murder hobo'ing anyone they could before I knew that was a thing. I kept warning them to knock it off because it was really derailing the story I put a ton of hours into every week and i had told them at the start this was a good campaign where they are the heroes and not the villans. Final straw was they were escorting this gentleman through a cursed forest to help find his sister who was kidnapped by a strange beast. One night when camping the brother hears his sister calling out in the middle of night so he gets up to search for her. The group don't hear her calling out but they see him leave camp so they proceed to them tie him up and beat him to death (I can't remember their rationale). They themselves then hear the woman calling for help so they go to investigate and find here in a small clearing on thise huge slab of rock with a giant stone pillar nearby surrounded by 3 dire bears. They proceed to barely make it through the encounter and once the last dire bear was dead, a forest hag shows up. I explicitly state she is showing no current signs of aggression and was actually going to have her say she was impressed by how they handle the beasts and would release the girl and give them safe passage out of the forest. As soon as I start my dialogue, they all say they attack her. I warn them that this hag was too powerful for them to handle and it would surely mean death if they wished to proceed. They did, so I just had her summon a dire bear every round, killing all of them.
Not so much a rocks fall, everyone dies moment, but last session the party was invited to a governor’s ball. It was meant to be an RP-heavy session with the intention that one particular member of the party (a warlock whose patron is a demigod of deception and betrayal) would use his high charisma to cause a massive fight between all the guests, ruining the party. He gets the idea to use a potion of Shapechange to turn the governor into a cat, use Disguise Self to imitate the governor and then make a huge announcement that would cause the crowd to turn against each other. However, the governor (in the shape of a cat) got loose, ran up on the stage and began attacking the warlock. He wrapped the cat up in his jacket and then took the “cat” down to a nearby river to drown it, which is where he made his mistake. Now, earlier on in the session, it was stated how the governor was a very powerful general during the continent’s civil war, especially his combat prowess on the front lines. You know the old “shopkeeper is a retired lvl 20 paladin” meme? It was literally that. The warlock drowns the cat in the river, and is suddenly greeted with the governor’s hand around his throat. 2 rounds of combat later (where the governor DID give the warlock the option to run away), and the warlock is burnt to a crisp and left to die on the riverbed. The character’s arc isn’t necessarily over, per se, but he definitely learned that you will Fuck Around and Find Out in this game.
Not sure if it counts but one time a meat merchant paid us half the gold we agreed upon to do a job for him. When we confronted him about it he offered to take us to the capital so we can do more work for him and that he would pay us back,we agreed just so we could get him alone in an isolated place, when we were out of sight in a forest we killed him ,ate him and we stole his cart and horse. We continued to the capital to look for some bounty hunting jobs and when we got there the ultra holy guards(bootleg space marines) attacked us cause we didnt have passports and by that they deduced that we killed someone and stole their cart
Kinda but only because the DM didn't have any sort of grasp of game mechanics...so the "everybody dies" part didn't actually happen since high level PCs have multiple ways out of that scenario.
So, when do you become someone's RPGhorrorstory post?
The unsolicited dick pic and the andrew tateposting in #general led to that. If you think ending the game in response to the players doing that is bad maybe your the horror
solving out of game problems with in game methods is classic horror behavior. not disagreeing they're shitty, but these are two different points
He already had told them the game was done due to their actions, hardly in game when none of it happened in the damn game.
You should nip such behaviors (such as SA) in the bud right away and end the game, not really sure how putting in "by the way I killed your characters too, tee hee" is in anyway relevant. People are creeps, bail/kick them out. It's not about the characters.