Author Topic: Dumbest group you've GMed for  (Read 38313 times)

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Dumbest group you've GMed for
« on: 26 April 2015, 17:48:33 »
RPG players come in many types.  Some like min-maxing, some like randomly generating their stats.  Some like creating elaborate backstories, some like just dropping straight into combat and stabbing everything in sight without worrying about that thing known as "plot."

Some players are geniuses who figure out all the puzzles and formulate elaborate plans during combat.

And some are just plain thick.

It's not that they lose due to bad dice rolls, these lads and lasses seem to have the tactical sensibilities of a suicidal gopher.  They're the ones who try using Bluff on every NPC they encounter dispite having a -7 penalty on the roll.  When it comes to figuring out puzzles, they couldn't (to quote Weird Al Yankovic) pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel.

If you've GMed for any length of time, odds are good that you've had a few of these.  I started this thread as a way to share some of the stories.

Here's one of mine:

Game- Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition

This group had an allergy to reading the rules and a near total inability to use any sort of tactics or even common sense.  I started out by running them through the pre-printed module that was included with the GM's screen.  The basic plot was that the Darkseid/Thanos expy of the setting had set off 4 reality destroying bombs in four alternate realities and they needed to go back in time to before the bombs went off in order to disarm them.

First reality- that old classic: Nazis won WW2.  They arrive to see the usual- ruined city, people in camps with intimidating guards, Nazi flags everywhere, etc.  After a brief fight (which I was very surprised that they readily won), they encountered a member of the Resistance.  Now, no one in the party had actually bothered to put any points in social skills.  And they immediately try to bluff her for information (by claiming that they've been "out of town" even though I'd explicitly described the city as very obviously having been abandoned and left to decay for years or decades).  They tried to keep the bluff up for several turns even though I made it very clear that the person they were talking to didn't believe them at all and was becoming visibly angry and annoyed.  After some less-than-subtle hints, I got them steered back on track to finding the bomb.  Then they had to fight the Nazi supervillains, who included one character who could become intangible, like Kitty Pryde of the X-Men.  The one character in the party who lacked the correct power to damage her took a single swing, and upon seeing that it was ineffective the whole party stopped trying to attack her even after they'd disabled the other villains.  She was on her way to a TPK even after I explicitly stated that "no, that character's punch passed through her without effect, but she might still be vulnerable to (other character's) super-dense metal weapons or (third character's) energy beams."  I ended up needing to pull a blatant Deus Ex Machina (something I hate) in order to save them from simply being wiped out by her.  I did end up letting them be wiped out in the final battle due to them never getting their act together.

So, what have you got?
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

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solmanian

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #1 on: 26 April 2015, 18:26:25 »
Well, I wasn't the GM, but I have a story. So we were acting out a siege battle. Defending a heavily fortified castle against a force ten times our forces, which also had a giant freaking dragon on their side to top things off. We weren't suppose to win. And we didn't. But how badly we lost bares mention. Most of the players thought sitting inside the castle and weathering the siege, wasn't "pro-active" enough. So they took 90% of our forces and sallied forth to engage the enemy. They got creamed, obviously.

On the bright side, guess who got bonus XP for being the maverick who insisted on taking all our archers, and manning the walls?  8)
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Have you met the clans? Words like "Naïve" and "misguided" are not enough to describe the notion that a conquest of the IS by the clans would result in a Utopian pacifistic society.

solmanian

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #2 on: 26 April 2015, 18:32:30 »
The one character in the party who lacked the correct power to damage her took a single swing, and upon seeing that it was ineffective the whole party stopped trying to attack her even after they'd disabled the other villains.  She was on her way to a TPK even after I explicitly stated that "no, that character's punch passed through her without effect, but she might still be vulnerable to (other character's) super-dense metal weapons or (third character's) energy beams."  I ended up needing to pull a blatant Deus Ex Machina (something I hate) in order to save them from simply being wiped out by her. 
Wait, if they didn't fight her, despite being attacked and already eliminating the other enemies, than what were they doing?
Making the dark age a little brighter, one explosion at a time.
Have you met the clans? Words like "Naïve" and "misguided" are not enough to describe the notion that a conquest of the IS by the clans would result in a Utopian pacifistic society.

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #3 on: 26 April 2015, 18:43:49 »
Everything but trying to attack her.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

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Caedis Animus

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #4 on: 19 May 2015, 12:04:38 »
I've never DM'd myself, but... There was a person in one D&D group we had that, after successfully rolling to seduce a Succubus, decided he was 'TRAVIS ****ING RENOLDS' (His random character name was Travis Renolds), and rolled to seduce everything. Even castles. EDIT: What's scarier is, almost every time he rolled to seduce something, he rolled a natural 20.

He got his genitals mutilated by a randomly falling greatsword enchanted with lightning in about an hour. Our DM hated it when people did stupid stuff like that.

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #5 on: 19 May 2015, 12:26:26 »
Oh, one of those.  Never had a player like that while I was GMing, but did have someone pull something like that in a group I was playing in.  Personally, if I'd been the GM I probably would have put a stop to it via having the succubus show up a couple months later sporting a baby-bump, along with her very annoyed Balor father and a shotgun wedding.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

"When in doubt, C4." Jamie Hyneman

noisenerd

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #6 on: 19 May 2015, 13:04:10 »
The dumbest guy I ever had to deal with isn't that interesting of a story, I would describe him as a lump on a log. Just stared off into space, not paying attention. Others of us would say "you don't have to play if you don't want to", to which he always replied "no, I really want to!".

"Well, pay attention then."

This finally did end up with one kinda humorous, kinda irritating exchange, where I said the above phrase about paying attention.

"I AM paying attention!"

"Ok, what are you doing?"

"Wait, how'd I get over there?"

 [metalhealth]

Davout73

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #7 on: 19 May 2015, 19:44:12 »
I wasn't the GM, but I once was part of a group where one of the other players argued that the skeleton we were fighting should have the dexterity and strength they did because they didn't have any muscles/ligaments etc...

I didn't participate that many more sessions after that 40 minute argument.
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Caedis Animus

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #8 on: 21 May 2015, 12:20:09 »
I wasn't the GM, but I once was part of a group where one of the other players argued that the skeleton we were fighting should have the dexterity and strength they did because they didn't have any muscles/ligaments etc...

I didn't participate that many more sessions after that 40 minute argument.
Nobody thought to explain to him the most obvious answer?

A necromancer did it.

Terminax

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #9 on: 21 May 2015, 17:06:41 »
I've probably shared this before, but back in Grade 9 I was the GM for our group. Deciding to start up a new Champions game, I invited a bunch of new people including a recent immigrant from Iran named Fareed. Nice kid, but not too bright nor well versed in English. So anyways, we had our superhero game going and Fareed played a robot named Jett who basically flew around and was super strong. In our second game together we were battling an evil super and I ask... so Fareed... what does Jett do?.

His answer: I call the police.

And he wouldn't budge from that decision. We all laughed but he was serious. He wouldn't budge. Said that vigilantism couldn't be tolerated... and went on a long spiel about the kind of things that went on in his homeland and basically buzz killed the session. For whatever reason, even after trying to bring him back for other games, he never quite clicked into the roleplaying stuff and eventually he stopped coming.

Much later, we had a younger player (a couple grades behind us) named Joe join us and he played in a VtM game. His character ended up dying after we faced off someone opening a gate to hell. Joe's character named Budd fell literally into hell because he was stupid and instead of running away from opening pit, he jumped in so he could say he'd gone to hell and back. So over the years, we'd laugh about it and have "Budd Updates" where we'd wave our hands in the air screaming as if we were in hell.

Ah good times.

massey

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #10 on: 24 May 2015, 13:24:01 »
I didn't GM the game, but I played in it.  We had this guy, Jerry.  Jerry's total experience with rpgs came from video games.  So in a way, it isn't his fault.

We were playing RIFTS, and our characters had traveled down to Mexico.  Now RIFTS is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi/magic/psychic/monsters type game, with power armor and lasers and dragons.  And all of Mexico is controlled by societies of vampires.  It's basically one big From Dusk til Dawn civilization, only the vampires are tougher than they were in that movie.

So we know this, we've gone down there specifically to hunt vampires.  Jerry knows this, because we've told him.  So we go across the border, and in the border towns there are crosses EVERYWHERE.  Every building has crosses on the roof, they have crosses painted on the walls, they have crosses at every street corner and on every door.  There are churches all over the place.  Then we go a little farther, and we hit a town with no crosses anywhere.  No churches anywhere.  We decide that this is the place.  We start scouting the area, looking for likely hiding places for the vamps.  Jerry decides to go in a bar at 10 in the morning and try to get information.

Jerry walks up to a guy in the bar.  "I talk to him."

GM:  Okay, what do you say?
Jerry:  I talk to him.
GM:  The guy looks at you funny, and tries to go back to drinking his beer.
Jerry:  I ask him if he knows anything.

This went on for a while.  Jerry was waiting for random people in the bar to tell him key information, like he was playing an old 8 bit video game.



So after like 15 minutes of this, the GM decides to actually let something happen.  So Jerry walks up to these two women who are in the bar.  And he sits down to talk to them.  They look at each other, and invite him back to their house.  This is important.  They are saying something out of the ordinary.  This must be a clue.  So Jerry goes home with them.  He doesn't radio anyone in the party where he is going.  He just goes home with these two women he doesn't know.  He follows them into a house that has no windows.  In Vampire Town.  He goes inside.  They lock the door.  Jerry stands there.  The women say something like "The Master will be pleased."  Jerry stands there.  He thinks he's going to get laid.  The GM tells him that he hears an ominous voice coming up the stairs from the basement.  Jerry starts to look worried.  "What?"  The vampire walks up the steps into the main room.  Jerry freaks out and opens fire with his gun -- which does nothing against vampires.  Jerry tries to blast his way out.  The house is reinforced mega-damage -- it isn't hurt by his gun.  Jerry shoots and kills the two women, then starts running around the room shooting randomly at the wall.  The vampire attacks and starts tearing away at Jerry's armor.

Finally the GM reminds Jerry that he might want to use his radio.  He calls the rest of the party.  Of course Jerry doesn't know what street he's on, or how to get to the house, but the GM is nice and lets us somehow figure out where he is.  We bust in the door just as the vampire has ripped Jerry's armor to pieces, and we blast the vamp with holy weapons or something.

solmanian

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #11 on: 24 May 2015, 17:26:10 »
So, what's the moral of the story? Aside from everyone were a noob sometime?

I remember this one pick up party I went to in college, where pretty much everything was a continuous Charlie foxtrot, and I take full responsibility for my part in it.

We started out fresh, a bunch of level one characters, low on ability but big on potential. There was the party leader, who despite nudging from the GM was hell bent on making a cavalier type character, and spend all his skill points on mounted combat, riding lance specialization, and spent all his money on a war horse and the best gear money can buy for a horse. The horse had better armor than him. Since we spent most of the adventure in doors, that meant that for 99% of the time he was almost useless for anything other a human mine-sweeper (which, since we had no rogue, was exactly what we used him for; more on that later).

Being hardly objective, I'll say little on myself. I'll just say that I envisioned my ranger as an elven Jack Bauer, complete with PTSD and fondness for torture "to get the job done, at any cost". In hindsight, labeling my self as neutral "good", was an oversight which created unrealistic expectations with the rest of the party. I did openly laid it out to the party, that my character has a paranoid streak, and is highly suspicious of people he doesn't have a history with.

The starter for the adventure was for me and the leader to be to war buddies, recently retired and looking for work. We came to a village, which for some reason didn't feel like it needed adventurers. It took my character serious pressuring the local sheriff to admit that a small orc tribe has taken residence in an abandoned castle a day's ride away, but it didn't really bother them. It took even more effort to convince him that we should get paid for clearing said castle.

That's brings us to the next member of our party. I never really found out what his backstory was (best guess: he made some dark deal with the GM to let him create a shape shifting half-dragon sorcerer), but he was posing (badly) as a mysterious elf sorcerer. We encountered him on the way to the castle of doom, and he just walked up to us, and said he wants to join us an the quest to kill those orcs. Now, that's pretty generic a way to get the party together, but as a roleplayer I decided that since we just talked to the sheriff and immediately set out toward the castle, and we encountered him coming from the opposite direction from the village, that my character would him knowing about our quest, would be very suspicious to my paranoid character. So I question this guy on the matter. He refuses to answer; in fact he refuses to say anything about his background, except for some cryptic remarks and flimsy details that my skill checks (I mentioned I built my character as a master interrogator?) say are lies: he was an elf that didn't speak elven, and knew less about his supposed homeland than my character. So I tell the party leader that the dude is an obvious liar, and we can't trust strangers in the woods offering to join us and kill some people; the leader (who was buddies with the sorcerer IRL) dismisses my suspicions and allowed him to come along.

For my character it was obvious what happened: my lawful-good knight friend crossed into "lawful-stupid" territory, and allowed himself to naively bring a viper to our midst. My course was clear: for the good of the party, I had to kidnap the deceiver away from friend, and torture him for information.

To my shame what followed was me repeatedly being caught trying to do just that, like Gargamel, and trying to explain what was I doing with that rope. I soon realized the sorcerer had a familiar watching over him while he slept; trying (and failing) to neutralize his pet in a covert manner didn't do my in-party reputation any good.

Luckily, my suffering didn't last long. Upon arriving to the castle, we were dismayed to discover that every single room contained either an extremely deadly trap or ogre-magi. It became very easy for us to sense traps "no ogres? than this must be a trap". It didn't take long for the ogres to take our lvl.1 group out of our misery by the time we finished our first pizza. We never met again. Literally, they even stopped coming to college.

I'd like to think we were all the equally dumb in the matter. Or maybe it was simply the perfect storm of characters who would've been simply "quirky" in another party, but turned deadly when combined together. 
Making the dark age a little brighter, one explosion at a time.
Have you met the clans? Words like "Naïve" and "misguided" are not enough to describe the notion that a conquest of the IS by the clans would result in a Utopian pacifistic society.

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #12 on: 24 May 2015, 17:51:15 »
Given that the GM was throwing Ogre Magis at a level 1 party, I'm guessing that he was either completely inexperienced in the game or actively trying to kill the party?
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

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solmanian

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #13 on: 24 May 2015, 18:21:44 »
Given that the GM was throwing Ogre Magis at a level 1 party, I'm guessing that he was either completely inexperienced in the game or actively trying to kill the party?
Maybe it was his version "rock falls, everybody die", dealing with this DOA party? The first one was a challenge, I was sure we stumbled onto the boss fight early; they came in pairs after that. Luckily, the very confined space prevented liberal use of AOEs, but they were still freaking Ogres, and could punt us to death.

As for inexperienced, it reminds me of the first time I GMd as 12 year old, a couple of decades back. I realized having an Ogre-Magi as a boss was a bad idea, when incapacitated the entire party before they got in 30 meters from his tower. Had to use some deus-ex-machine crap to explain why he stayed in his tower, and didn't finish them off while they literally crawled away. IIRC they ended up building a catapult, and taking him out with an artillery barrage. I think my real problem back than that I was overconfident in my party's abilities (who were also beginners). I tended gravitated toward round numbers: kill 100 orcs, 500 ogres, 50 vampires (those were REALLY unpopular). To compensate, I was extremely generous with rewards of money, xp, fame, and of course gear; I'd go through the GM handbook, see all those cool magic items, and just wanted my party to have them.
Making the dark age a little brighter, one explosion at a time.
Have you met the clans? Words like "Naïve" and "misguided" are not enough to describe the notion that a conquest of the IS by the clans would result in a Utopian pacifistic society.

monbvol

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #14 on: 13 June 2015, 15:45:46 »
My group can rotate between various types so sometimes I do hand them enough rope to hang themselves.

Best case I can still remember was I when I ran a heavily modified/AU Clan Invasion Battletech campaign where one of the players was Andrew Steiner.  After a couple sessions I let him get his command company involved in the rescue of Victor Steiner Davion.

The commander of the other forces involved in the rescue told the PC of an approach that was less defended then the one his forces took.  Being a stand up guy he attached his Command Lance to show the way but because his troops were running into trouble he let the PCs know and returned to his troops.  Because the player running Andrew was a power hungry bastard he decided this was a perfect opportunity to lose witnesses and sent everything besides the PCs to go help.

Now because I had planned the defenses to be facing an entire mech company were now facing only 4 mechs I did not reduce the opposing forces any.

So the PCs wound up losing and getting captured.

Campaign continued after that but it fell apart pretty quickly after that because I let myself do some things I shouldn't have because I was starting to grasp for ideas.

iamfanboy

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #15 on: 23 June 2015, 20:37:11 »
Okay, not necessarily a dumb group, but a dumb GM that I took over for:

We've all heard rumors of the classic Monty Haul GM, the one that throws treasure after treasure at a party until they say, "Well, this Scimitar+4 isn't even flaming! Why would I want that? Throw it on the heap with the rest."

So back when I was 15 or 16 (maybe 17?) one of my friends was leaving for a month, he thought I was a pretty good GM, and he asked me to take over his group for the month. I sat in on a session and was in awe of how bad he was at giving rewards - his monsters were dumb too. I took a look at the player's notes of what was in their CASTLE, which was defended by griffons, men-at-arms, and other monsters (some dragon hatchling too, can't remember the color, but I do think it was a metallic), and a thought occurred to me.. an evil thought.

This is, I think, what I read to them that first session: "As you ride towards your home, singing songs of your heroism in slaying the dreaded liche, a horrifying sight cuts you all short - lying across the road, one wing separated from its body, is a griffon. One of YOUR griffons."


One man's home is another man's dungeon-crawl, and their home got crawled HARD. All the guardians they'd amassed? Dead. That treasure they'd saved? Gone. Those extra magical weapons and armors they'd tossed on the pile? Looted. And those Amulets of Non-detection they'd been saving for a rainy day? Well, turns out someone else saw clouds on the horizon.

Still one of my proudest moments as a GM. It turned their whole game around from an unmotivated slaying of monsters, pure monty-haul, to a revenge-quest motivated by role-playing. The look on the wizard's face when I said, "You find your apprentice's corpse outside the door to your laboratory; from the blast marks, you can tell he put up a valiant battle for as long as he could." He was almost in tears over the poor guy's fate.

Apparently they kept it up after I left, too; I gave some advice to Kevin after he came back and the game went on.

Sereglach

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #16 on: 23 June 2015, 21:46:28 »
Ok.  So, been GM'ing for over 20 years, now.  There've been good moments, there've been bad moments, and there've been really horrid moments.  I'm here to share a few of these latter moments with you.

The first is the story of the May the Halfling Barbarian.  Now May's player was new to D&D but in no ways new to TT RPGs.  She even had a good backstory as a sensible, self-taught Halfling whose best friend was her maul, because it'd never betray her or let her down.  I thought there'd be good experiences for this character, especially since the whole group had at least some RPG experience.  Boy . . . was I wrong.

May's first instance of extreme stupidity was their first encounter with "the Black Powder" (I do have some primitive firearms in my personal world setting, but they're rare and relatively expensive, and most peasants go their entire life without seeing any).  Now, the party, discovering a small barrel on a raided merchant's cart, was curious if it was worth anything, or would serve as a clue to finding the owner/raiders.

While everyone knew what it was the moment I described its gritty, black, sandy appearance (well, I thought they did), they set out to properly roleplay discovering this alchemical material.  The Druid, the leader of the group (and the person who even exclaimed "Oh God . . . I know what this is, but I know I need to roleplay it and not kill myself"), decided it would be prudent, seeing that it was some sort of alchemical substance, to take a small sample and start experimenting.  So, he took his sample and began his tests (read: alchemy rolls).

May . . . well . . . May decided she needed to have a look, too, despite warnings from the rest of the group.  It was late in the evening, May was a Halfling, and the barrel was taller than her.  So, while everyone else was securing the area and setting up camp, she was off finding a rock big enough to act as a step-stool.  She then took a lit torch, and went to inspect the barrel.  I did the obligatory "Are you sure?" moment.  Several times.  I then blatantly warned her character of the dangers and had her roll wisdom (common sense) to see if May would realize the dangers; especially after witnessing the alchemical experiments of the Druid and how hazardous they had become.  May succeeded on her wisdom save.  May's player decided that May still needed to inspect the inside of the barrel, with a torch, for any traps . . . or if there was anything buried in all that sand.

So, since the Druid was testing a larger chunk of sample materials to see what this "fiery sparking powder" created, the pop of about an ounce of powder going off startled the whole group.  May fails her balance to hop up and look over the edge of the barrel.  The torch falls in.  May is blasted nearly 30 feet into the air.  I "Hand of God" her, seeing that the player is horrifically distraught and didn't believe that I'd sabotage her existence with a barrel of gunpowder.  Therefore, the player comically flew through the air, covered in charred soot, before landing on the ground.  Her first thought was, "Where's my hammer!?".  With her frantic scrambling for her Maul . . . she looked up just in time to have it knock her out cold . . . acting as a "divine" reminder to use some sense in the future.


After thinking that the lesson has been taught, things continue with the group for quite some time.  Only minor hiccups occur.  Several levels pass, and the characters are getting much stronger.  Well, the group is escorting a carriage across the great wilderness between nations, when they're onset by brigands.  The trap, which everyone failed to notice (the bandits had rolled surprisingly well in setting it, in all honesty), disables the Wagon.  The group dismounts, at the demands of the terrified driver, to defend the carriage and its cargo.

In the first round of combat, while randomly determining who the slew of bowmen are aiming at, May gets hit with two arrows.  The damage rolls are low, and she only takes 3 points of damage.  May's players response (completely out of character) is to mock me and say that I can't kill her with petty bandits.  She even stated that her character was untouchable, and that I was a joke of a GM.  The Druid, sitting next to her, who knew NOT to directly challenge what a GM can and can't do, literally scoots an extra few feet away from her and says, "I'm in no way associated with her beliefs on this matter." Despite them being a "thing".  I ask her, staying calm, "Are you sure you think that?"  To which I was mocked more and called a horrid GM for giving them too many easy-street encounters (despite the party having some rough times and nearly dying, twice).  My response was, "Okay . . . you think this encounter is easy?"  I then turned every ranged combatant onto the barbarian, along with all the melee combatants that could surround her, since she charged right in being "invincible".  She was down in one round.

I didn't fudge the rolls, in fact I rolled them in the open with my designated "player killers" (black dice with red numbers that never fail to get high numbers when I want them to).  She apparently failed to acknowledge the Fighter's count; that there were 20+ archers in the wood-line, near the road, aside from the 10+ melee combatants that were closing on the group.  When I went back to randomly determining arrow destination (simulating a rain of crossfire), and spread out the melee fighters some, it became a modest fight, but not too terrible for the group.  They fended the attackers off, after defeating a significant portion of their forces; and May's carcass was dragged to the next town for attempting resurrection, at the utter horror of the player and under a litany of swears.

May the Halfling Barbarian's player didn't come around much, after that, and when she did, she made sure to stay close to the group leader's heel and not do anything too stupid.  Apparently the Druid and her had a talk, at some point, to reign in the stupidity and tell her that she doesn't run the game and that he can't command her character's safety just because they're a "thing" and he's the GM's best friend.
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Sereglach

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #17 on: 23 June 2015, 23:18:31 »
Another story to bring you . . . the story of the Red Dragon Hatchling and the far too cocky party:

So, completely different party . . . back when I was in the military.  There were 5 of them, all levels 5-7 . . . a Cleric, a Sorcerer, a Wizard, a Ranger, and a Rogue.  They had been through some decent adventures and were at the level band I loved GMing for most in 3.5.  Level 5-10 characters are at just the right amount of power to be dangerous and really stand out in their builds, but aren't reaching the points where the numbers get stupidly high.  It's my favorite time for characters.  I was thrilled.

However, this group, having bested some hefty constructs, overthrew a corrupt Cleric, escaped a cursed island, and defeated slews of other opponents, thought they were ready for the "big time".  They wanted to go dragon hunting, and were pressuring me to set something up out of character.  I told them that really wasn't smart, because I don't play dumb enemies, as they've seen, and dragons are exceptionally dangerous.  They said they could take it, just look at how well they'd handled all my other encounters.  I said, "Alright, I'll give you a test sometime soon, and if you can best it, then I'll set up a real dragon-hunting scenario."

In the next few sessions their group is set to the task of intercepting a transport ship that's carrying supplies to the enemy of their aligned side of a nation, in a civil war.  The battle is a bloody one, but the tides are turned when the Sorcerer falls off the ship onto one of the cannons of their enemy.  Fearing for his life, he casts Fireball on the gunnery crew in front of him, who seek to pull/push him to his death.  Thankfully he made his reflex save (and they only had 4 guns to a side of a big ship . . . like I said, archaic black powder weapons are there in my setting, but rare) and was blasted through the air into the sails of his friendly ship, where he made his tumble check to safety on deck.  The remaining enemies are quickly routed and killed off by the party. Victory is secured, though very costly and taxing for everyone.

The party thinks they just passed their test . . . oh no . . . the fun is just beginning.

See, the Sorcerer's "ingenious" maneuver killed off a large quantity of the crew for their ship, who had boarded the enemy's vessel.  With minimal crew left, they have no choice but to tow in the enemy vessel, instead of just capturing it and sailing both back.  For the flawed victory, the party is left on the crippled vessel to keep it secured and search it while they're being towed into port.  They're left with their rations to eat, whatever they can scavenge from the ship, and a very . . . very long tow cable between vessels.

The party instantly sets out to search through the loot they had secured.  Among the items, they find a magical storage crate with a massive egg inside it, surrounded with enchanted straw that's keeping it as hot as a smith's forge.  For some dunderheaded reason, the group starts talking about how long it's been since they've had omelets.  The wizard makes their arcana roll, identifying the egg as that of a Red Dragon.  Then the group starts talking about the fact that they've never eaten dragon before, and they wonder if it'll be like having an ostrich omelet.  The Wizard utterly ignored the fact that in her arcana roll, she was made aware that dragons understand and learn things while inside their egg, and can even hear the outside world around them.  The player, well he (guy player playing a female character) gets right into the conversation, and starts up a debate about not eating the egg, but selling it on the Black Market, or keeping it for dissection and studies.  The Ranger is the only one thinking that this is all folly and that the egg should be destroyed, while they have the chance.

Too late.

The egg, no longer kept in it's magically contained and preserved state, hatches.  The small hatchling scurrying away into the hull of ship like the chest-burster from the original Alien.  The Wizard screaming like a banshee and the others frantically scrambling for the gear that they had piled in the remains of the ship's captain's quarters.  After signaling to the lead ship and informing her captain what was going on, the tow line was cut, and the party told they were to be left adrift until they had dealt with their problem.  They would not allow anything so dangerous to potentially cross over to their ship and wreak havoc.  The hunt was on.

This is where things go from "What are you thinking?!" to "What the hell is wrong with you idiots?!?"

First off, they split the party.  The Sorcerer starts searching around the remains of the gunnery deck, the Rogue starts going through the crew quarters, while the Wizard stays glued to the Cleric's keister as they search the hold.  The Ranger states he won't allow such a destructive creature to escape, so he decides to remain on the deck and keep watch (someone seems to be getting a hint).  At this point I'm pulling people aside to keep out-of-character knowledge from acting as a game-changer.

The first to go down was the Rogue.  Being isolated, and more suited for being a face/lock picker then any actual combatant, he gets caught in the twists and turns of the large ship bunk-house.  A bunk-house of which he had sealed himself in, thinking that if he traps the hatchling in here with him, by chance, then it won't escape his sneaky backstab (because he just KNOWS he's going to catch the thing off guard . . . isn't that just automatic for rogues?)  The hatchling darts in, maneuvering through all the tiny crevices that the bulky human can't reach, and picking him apart hit after hit . . . the Rogue not even able to get in a single attack.  By the time he's actually screaming for help, he's already at 25% hit points and falling fast.  With a critical hit, the hatchling rips out his throat as the sorcerer (the next closest character) bursts in.  Moving to his dead friend, the hatchling takes the opportunity to escape out the open door.

One Down.

The Sorcerer gives chase . . . not even thinking about calling for help.  He just feels he can take the hatchling out, no problem.  He'll just chase it to his friends, or nuke it first and claim all the glory.  After all, the Rogue was stupid and locked himself into a tight, confined space with the thing.  While the sorcerer does chase it to the galley, he gets an "ingenious" idea.  He had filled the group's cooking pot with black powder that he had taken from the other ship.  He was enamored with it after seeing what it did to the enemy vessel, and wouldn't shut up about the stuff . . . including around the egg.  He decides he'll pull that out and use it to blast the hatchling to kibble.  I ask him if he's sure he wants to start handling something so dangerous around a fire breathing dragon hatchling.  He says, "YES!  Of course!  This will take the dragon out in one shot!"  I ask again if he's sure.  I get the same response.  So he stops in the middle of the galley and starts making alchemy rolls to create a bomb out of the cast iron cooking pot, its respective lid, and several pounds of black powder.  Well, this leaves him completely vulnerable to a surprise attack.  The hatchling, seeing an opportunity, decides to ambush the oblivious Sorcerer with his "paltry" breath weapon (still more potent then Burning Hands).  It's more than enough.  The blast rocks the ship and obliterates the Sorcerer, who utterly failed his reflex saves vs. both the breath weapon, and the resulting explosion.  His corpse (or what's left of it, rather) is blasted out the side of the ship and into the ocean at -20 some hit points.

Two Down.

The Ranger presumes the Sorcerer is doing something stupid, and remains vigilant, as the Sorcerer liked blowing things to pieces.  The others, however, become quite wary down in the hold.  The Wizard is already freaking out, and the Cleric just wants to complete the search and meet up with the others (those others who are dead).  As the Wizard virtually runs for the stairs to check on the explosion, hoping the ordeal is over, the hatching swoops past her, down into the hold, hoping to hide.  The Wizard turns and casts grease, hoping to slip up the hatchling and leave it vulnerable for the Cleric.  The Wizard wasn't paying attention to the fact that the hatchling was flying.  The Cleric slips and falls while blindly chasing the hatchling deeper into the hold, ignoring the spell that was just cast by the Wizard.  The Wizard follows up with Web, hoping to trap the hatchling that she now realizes is flying.  Not only does the hatchling make it's save, and escape, but the Wizard was ignoring the fact that she was casting Web with the Cleric in melee range of the hatchling.  The Cleric fails his save, and is stuck.  The hatchling does a sweeping series of hit-and-run attacks, on the Wizard, doing modest damage, before going for cover entirely.  The Cleric, hoping to get free and be of use, cast a "Still" Bull's Strength on the Wizard and tells her to get him loose (not himself, who even starts with more strength then her, and not Dex, which would make his recurring save easier).  The Wizard moves into the oil-slick, and among the webbing, to attempt to free the Cleric.  The hatchling takes this moment to use it's finally recharged breath weapon on the mass of webbing, the pile of grease, a ship hull of wood, and the two people held within.  Not only do they take massive damage from the initial attack and combusting materials (killing the Wizard outright), but the Cleric's burning to death is only subsided by the lower hull flooding and bringing him to the bottom of the ocean.

The Ranger, seeing the hull sinking, grabs his gear, signals for the other ship, and swims to safety.  The red dragon hatchling is never seen again, and presumed dead, until the ship makes landfall, at which point he actually catches a glimpse of it fleeing the ship, out the anchor port, like a scurrying rat.  When asked what the Ranger wants to do, he says, "I'm acting like I saw absolutely nothing, and I'm looking for a new party."

At least ONE member of the group learned his lesson.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #18 on: 23 June 2015, 23:32:47 »
How do you live long enough to get to the 5-7 range and still think that "let's split the party!" is a good idea?
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #19 on: 23 June 2015, 23:41:51 »
How do you live long enough to get to the 5-7 range and still think that "let's split the party!" is a good idea?
I think part of it was that they hadn't been put in any situation quite like the one set before them.  The other part was that they were seriously all suffering from their own sense of power-hungry-greed.  It was almost like the second that I put the egg in front of them, all sense of reason went out the window.

I still laugh my butt off, to this day, whenever I think about that story.  I hope it gave people here at least a little chuckle.

EDIT:  If the stories are actually received well, I'll post some more, but those are two of the most memorable ones, and I figured they were certainly worth a read for people.
« Last Edit: 23 June 2015, 23:54:13 by Sereglach »
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #20 on: 02 July 2015, 20:42:39 »
Ohhhhhhh
I have to share this story.
So, i decided to run Call of Cthulhu. now, my group is kinda new to RP, and, since i live in the middle of NOWHERE, its only two people. First off, their characters are a Gangster and a Bed and Breakfast owner. I make up something involving Bootlegging, and they are on route to a town. so, they stop to talk to some old woman, and the Bed and Breakfast guy, lets call him Bobert, is being a weird silly guy like he usually is. So Mister Gangster, lets call him Jakben, HITS HIM IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD WITH A GOLF CLUB. He nearly killed the poor guy, and gave him PERMANENT  BRAIN DAMAGE, on account of the guy being out for ~30 minutes. Then, they hear about a Cult from the next guy they see, and they decide to go into the Golden Grain Inn (I was adapting Cult of the Reptile God, an old DND adventure. with any other group it would have been great). they walk up to the bar, and order drinks. At this point they notice a creepy looking guy. So, Jakben DRAGS HIM OUT AROUND BACK, AND STARTS CUTTING FINGERS OFF TO GET INFO ON THE CULT. The poor guy eventually talks, and they go back inside. Jakben walks up to the bartender, and says "So i hear you are in a Cult?" and then looks at me in TOTAL INDIGNANT SHOCK as the whole cultist bar erupts into violence against them. Jakben crits with a handgun to the phone that the bartender was holding, preventing cops from being called, and they run into the hills. Later that night, they see the bartender walking home, BLUDGEON HIM TO DEATH, and bury him in a shallow grave. They ended up getting arrested for murder, attempted murder, torture, and possessing Alcohol in the 20s. Life sentence.
« Last Edit: 02 July 2015, 21:00:36 by Perigrin »
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #21 on: 02 July 2015, 21:14:51 »
Wow.  I've got to commend you for putting up with that player's shenanigans as long as you did.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #22 on: 02 July 2015, 21:31:29 »
Wow.  I've got to commend you for putting up with that player's shenanigans as long as you did.
I took a three month break from GMing, and spent the whole time writing an adventure, with some help from a 4chan story, and i got back at the guy, scared the living REDACTED out of him. We need a thread for Best game Gmed
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #23 on: 03 July 2015, 01:18:30 »
Wow.  I've got to commend you for putting up with that player's shenanigans as long as you did.
If it all happened over the course of one session, I'd say it's pretty much par-for-the-course on having a player pulling that kind of crap.  If it happened over many sessions at that intensity then I'd say commendations are certainly due.  In this case, I don't know if it's stupidity as much as intentional destructiveness.

One thing that's always boggled my mind is the intensity with which some players strive to destroy the games they get involved in.  Sometimes it really does just feel like this:


I took a three month break from GMing, and spent the whole time writing an adventure, with some help from a 4chan story, and i got back at the guy, scared the living REDACTED out of him. We need a thread for Best game Gmed
Ahhh . . . GM justice.  Gotta love it, right?
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #24 on: 03 July 2015, 09:06:25 »
THAT was one session. That player is usually the smart one, if a bit immature. Usually the other guy is more homicidal and insane.
Other session. I was running an older adventure from a dragon magazine. First off, they killed the kindly orc selling pies. Then, they got ambushed by a member of the conspiracy they were tracking. So, after knocking him out, they dragged him back to a house, put a shard of glass in his mouth, and punched his mouth until he told them everything. This was the LEAST brutal torture that happened to that guy. They then killed him, and decapitated him. The Druid, Bobert, kept his head, and the 30 odd heads they collected over the adventure, in a burlap sack, which he was clubbing people with. So, they wrap up that adventure fairly quick, so I decide to run a stop gap because I did not expect them to finish it. So, they get hired to deliver a novelty stove across town. First, they see the beggar they saw earlier inside counting a lot of money, as begging could make you a LOT in the middle ages. So, they beat him up, set his house on fire, try to put out the fire, fail because the only spell caster is a druid, and end up poisoning the entire town watch.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #25 on: 03 July 2015, 10:43:10 »
THAT was one session. That player is usually the smart one, if a bit immature. Usually the other guy is more homicidal and insane.
Other session. I was running an older adventure from a dragon magazine. First off, they killed the kindly orc selling pies. Then, they got ambushed by a member of the conspiracy they were tracking. So, after knocking him out, they dragged him back to a house, put a shard of glass in his mouth, and punched his mouth until he told them everything. This was the LEAST brutal torture that happened to that guy. They then killed him, and decapitated him. The Druid, Bobert, kept his head, and the 30 odd heads they collected over the adventure, in a burlap sack, which he was clubbing people with. So, they wrap up that adventure fairly quick, so I decide to run a stop gap because I did not expect them to finish it. So, they get hired to deliver a novelty stove across town. First, they see the beggar they saw earlier inside counting a lot of money, as begging could make you a LOT in the middle ages. So, they beat him up, set his house on fire, try to put out the fire, fail because the only spell caster is a druid, and end up poisoning the entire town watch.
Yep . . . par for the course.  Sometimes people really are a "special kind of stupid" when there's no real consequences on the line.  Of course, no real consequences are ever on the line when it's just a game and characters on paper.  So, question:  How do/did you go about keeping these people in line?  Just curious, since every GM has different little techniques.
« Last Edit: 03 July 2015, 10:44:49 by Sereglach »
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #26 on: 03 July 2015, 10:52:02 »
I didnt until last session, when i scared the living REDACTED out of them. Its a long story, and i am kinda proud of myself. the reason i put up with it until then was that there was no one else to play with.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #27 on: 03 July 2015, 12:53:06 »
I didnt until last session, when i scared the living REDACTED out of them. Its a long story, and i am kinda proud of myself. the reason i put up with it until then was that there was no one else to play with.
Yes, but this guys were obviously sociopaths. Sure, there's the troop about adventurers being omnicidal ******, but this guys sound shifty. "Hey, everyone fantasize about decapitating people and carrying around their heads in a sack, right?", no, not really. Roleplaying is an outlet for urges you can't do in today's civilized society, like raiding a castle of "villains", pillaging and looting; I'd be concerned what if this guys would decide to being their torture fantasies tot he real worlds. It's basically the worst stereotypes about D&D players being devil worshippers, using tabletop games as prelude to violent orgies and orgies of violence. >:D

maybe it's time to look into online RPing...
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #28 on: 04 July 2015, 00:26:45 »
I didnt until last session, when i scared the living REDACTED out of them. Its a long story, and i am kinda proud of myself. the reason i put up with it until then was that there was no one else to play with.
Good.  Glad you finally laid the "Godly GM Smack-Down" upon them.  Even if you have no one else to play with, making sure people aren't just trying to break the game, be nimrods, and/or ruin other people's fun (including yours as a GM) is always important.  That was an important lesson I learned very early on in my GMing "career".  That's another one of those stupid player stories . . . maybe I should type that one up.

For people who complain about that . . . tell them that they get to write the adventure and run things for once; and it better be enjoyable and worthwhile with good storytelling and a great plot and epic loot and solid immersion and all the other things that players always incessantly want and seem to think comes along so easy for a GM to craft . . . but no one else ever wants to do.
. . . . . *pause and a deep breath* . . . . .
Not going to lie, there's a little bit of sarcasm and a little bit of sincerity in that last statement.  Even if you're the kind of GM that only does premade stuff, it still isn't easy.  Every GM that puts up with all the crap that comes with it (let alone those of us who enjoy doing it and are dedicated to it), deserves major kudos.

I give that kudos to you, good sir, particularly since you enacted GM Justice upon them.

Yes, but this guys were obviously sociopaths. Sure, there's the troop about adventurers being omnicidal ******, but this guys sound shifty. "Hey, everyone fantasize about decapitating people and carrying around their heads in a sack, right?", no, not really. Roleplaying is an outlet for urges you can't do in today's civilized society, like raiding a castle of "villains", pillaging and looting; I'd be concerned what if this guys would decide to being their torture fantasies tot he real worlds. It's basically the worst stereotypes about D&D players being devil worshippers, using tabletop games as prelude to violent orgies and orgies of violence. >:D

maybe it's time to look into online RPing...
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #29 on: 13 November 2015, 16:06:58 »
I GM'ed Paranoia once.

Once.

Half the party did not make it out of the initial briefing room.

As in ran through all of their clones before the briefing was complete.

It was insane.

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #30 on: 14 November 2015, 03:15:32 »
Do tell.  :)
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #31 on: 10 August 2016, 14:28:03 »
Hate to necro this..but it's too damn funny not to share:

It was one of my earlier efforts at GMing MechWarrior.

I decided, ok, let's run a small lance-sized Merc lance in the Chaos March. No worries. The group I got together seemed cool, fun, younger but not too insane. They all wanted Firestarters...no big deal..good for killing Cappie guerillas.

Then the stupid starts..I offer several different contracts out there, the one they pick? Security for a forestry operation on Tall Trees. Oh, and did I mention the planetary noble running the operation was cozy with the former FC regime, and had gotten himself into a nasty little conflict with the Zhuang De Guang? Nope? Well, am now. And of course, said noble wants "little collateral damage" (As Archer would say..phrasing). My players did not get the hint..not even when I gave them a counter offer doing anti-infantry work on Caph for the Mariks.

Nope. This contract paid, they said..um, yeah. So, we go to Tall Trees, get the players settled in, and run them through some contacts with the guerillas, who mostly had technical and a lot of SRMs. Easy for the 'Mechs to handle..but while the 'Mechs were on patrol, the guerillas would hit one of the logging camps, and kidnap/kill workers or smash machinery or both. This was really angering the noble, but of course, the patrols had been his idea in the first place.

Well, so the players pull back to the main logging camp where the saw mill is. They are supposedly backed up by some local armor. Like the movie "13 Hours", said locals booked when the guerillas came...and helpfully left their equipment for the guerillas. At this point I was giving the players pointed hints that it was time to grab their employer and run. Nope..they did the one thing they really should not have done. They used their flamers..in the middle of a tinder-dry (it had been a hot summer) virgin forest that was the backbone of the area economy, and the money source of said noble's landhold. An hour later..nothing left but four blackened (but still functional) Firestarters..a barren landscape..and a very, very angry employer.

They did rack up a battalion's worth of guerillas. And, the planetary government of Tall Trees bought up their contract for something more suitable..But that noble never forgot..later on, he hired a company of fast striker mechs to wipe my players out on a contract on Saiph. It was how the game ended, and surprisingly, the players won with some local help. We ended it with the idea of bringing it forward 10 years and doing the adventures of the company..but it was all for naught.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #32 on: 10 August 2016, 22:00:55 »
During my first trip to Gencon (waaaaaay back when), after getting tickets to the wrong town, propositioned by the perv who gave me a ride to the right one, being awakened in the middle of the night by my luggage floating past my bed in the 18 inches of water that had flooded my room, and a couple of other misadventures, I finally sat down at a big boy table to play some tournament DnD. I was exhausted, broke, and so very, very excited.

We were a chaotic evil party tasked with finding an underground passage into the "Last City of Good," so we could destroy its magic defenses and burn it to the ground. Our first encounter was with a large group of orcs. Our leader ordered an immediate attack. I immediately protested.

"Whoa! Why don't we talk to them first? They may know the way or have other useful information."

"Oh. Okay," replies our fearless leader. "What do you want to let us pass?" he asks their leader.

"A thousand in gold."

Our leader immediately orders an attack.

"Whoa!," I hastily interject. "What's the problem?"

"I don't have a thousand gold pieces."

(At this point, I should have asked how much he had. It did occur to me, but seemed of little importance, so I dismissed it. I really shouldn't have.)

"Well, tell them we'll give them what we have now, and they can have 10,000 when the city falls. Tell them they can have the damned city when we're done with it, if they help us through the tunnels!"

"We don't have the authority to do that."

"So? Lie."

Our leader gets a horrified look on his face.

"We can't just...lie!"

"We're evil! We're chaotic evil! We can do anything we want! It's kinda the definition of chaotic evil. We lie!"

He refuses, but reluctantly agrees to negotiate with the orc chieftain.

At this point, the DM gives a little, sly smile (Oh, do I remember that smile. My players had seen it many times, but this was the first time I'd been in a position to observe it), and says, "Pay me what you think me and my people are worth."

There was maybe a heartbeat of time to change the outcome. Maybe I could have done something. I don't know. It...it happened so fast.

Fearless Leader holds out his hand, opens his fist like he's showing something, and says, "Two copper pieces."

The DM laughed out loud while reaching for the dice, Fearless Leader looked confused ("What?" he said. "It's all I have!"), my forehead hit the tabletop a couple of times, and the totally unnecessary combat began.

Yeah...we didn't advance to the next round.

 
 
« Last Edit: 10 August 2016, 22:07:18 by MrJake »

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #33 on: 10 August 2016, 22:16:49 »
That's why I hate evil parties, they're almost always an excuse to be a dumbass because that's "evil."
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #34 on: 11 December 2017, 06:38:38 »
Oh boy. There was one player in my old MechWarrior RPG campaign who was that suicidal gopher. There's a particular stand-out scene he was involved in... It was during a battle against a bunch of pirates that had a 3025-tech Pillager; a 100 ton assault machine that packed twin AC/20s. He was using a 75-ton Black Knight. He decided to take on the Pillager, mainly for the bragging rights.

So he marched his 'Mech up to 3 hexes range and halted in front of the Pillager. He was getting huge chunks of his 'Mech blown off, the other players were telling him to get out of there and let them hammer the Pillager with their LRMs, but he kept refusing. He was sure to score a critical hit any moment and...

After the battle, there was almost nothing left of the Black Knight above the waist. His pilot, having had to eject, marches up to the unit's Chief Tech and started pestering him to start repair work on his machine first. I can clearly remember the guy's offended look when I - playing the unit's Chief Tech - told him there was no ****ing point. His 'Mech was toast.

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #35 on: 25 December 2017, 15:43:49 »
I GM'ed Paranoia once.

Once.

Half the party did not make it out of the initial briefing room.

As in ran through all of their clones before the briefing was complete.

It was insane.

Yeah ... I knew where this was going when you said you'd GM'd Paranoia. The game is designed to where this is a favorable outcome :)

I never really had "dumb" groups, but some who were varying flavors of insane. One time I was running a group through Castle Greyhawk, and they had had a benefactor who wanted them to retrieve a McGuffin from the famed fortress. I'd played him as "generic upper-class jackass", and one of the PCs decided he was evil and trying to lead them to their deaths. So he went in and assassinated the guy. (I rolled with it and made the guy into a memorable illusionist villain who came back to haunt the party throughout the campaign). This campaign also had one of the most epically hilarious character entrances and exits -- one player whose character had bit the big one wanted to do a tinker gnome, which are from the Forgotten Realms. He gave me a backstory that was just too good to not allow -- his character was trying to perfect the ultimate tomato-soup making machine. He entered with an explosion as one try failed -- and when he wanted to retire the character, we pulled a prank on the other players, by my making sounds of a large number of machine noises, followed by a large KABOOM! The other players, having no idea what was going on, came into a room filled with a burnt spot and a LOT of red liquid. For a time they were mourning the death, until someone decided to investigate the liquid. It was tomato soup.. and pretty good soup too! :D

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #36 on: 25 December 2017, 16:37:57 »
That reminds me of some of the shenanigans my Planescape group got into.

To give you some idea, my character was a tiefling wildmage who's nickname by the rest of the party was "Friendly Fire."
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #37 on: 31 December 2017, 04:37:21 »
Disclaimer: This story occurred over twenty years ago, so my recollection might be a little gappy. Take whatever’s said here with a grain of salt.

So I had just inherited a MechWarrior 2nd Ed group from another GM somehow. Unfortunately, this GM was… crap, to say the least. Basically he was rather spineless, let the players walk all over him and had handed out copious amounts of loot to them for very little investment on their part. It also didn’t help that he didn’t know the rules very well. Clearly, things were going to change.

I began with a complete reboot of the game; clean slate, new characters, new everything. After a bit of grumbling, I got the new player characters. Two of them were troubling, in that not only were they identical, but they were also rather min-maxed. However, I did dismiss this a little, given that they had opted to only pilot light BattleMechs. Yeah, they’d made their giant kill-bot their dump stat. So that did seem to pass. Or so I thought.

As I was getting ready for the first mission brief, they dropped their bombshell. They were going to use their ‘Mechs to rob a casino, and with the money they got, buy bigger ‘Mechs.

I admit that I didn’t do too much to try to talk them down from it. Rather I accepted it, got out some mapsheets and record sheets and went to work. The other players wisely chose to back out of this, simply because they knew that there was no way this was ending well. After all, stomping through a city and cracking open a casino with a giant kill-bot is pretty grossly illegal, no matter where you are.

Meanwhile, Oceans Two were walking through town, and had attracted a lot of attention from the authorities. After a little bit of skirmishing with infantry and light APCs, the cops called for backup, in the form of two UrbanMechs. At first, the players laughed this off, after all, it was but the humble Urbie. Then one of them took a shot to the head, nearly killing them in a single hit. That changed their tone, leaving them panicking and running.

Player One tried to make a dash for it, only to be shot in the back by an Urbie. This took out his gyro, immobilising his ‘Mech and leaving him completely helpless. Player two, in the meantime, decided that with his newly air-conditioned cockpit, he would be best off getting as far away from the trouble as possible. After all, it would only take another two points of damage to the head to kill him utterly dead.

Unfortunately for him, he instead became a victim of Battletech physics. Player 2 was so afraid of being ventilated that he was willing to run that risk. The inevitable happened, and he skidded and fell, ramming head-first into the side of a building, crushing him to death.

That building, by the way, was the Casino.

So of our two would-be criminal geniuses, one was dead and another was in prison. The other two PCs denied all knowledge of them and their activities, and planned to leave the jailbird behind. Instead, the campaign kind of fell apart, and never even got to what I had planned for Session One.

Not that big a loss, really.
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Black_Knyght

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #38 on: 31 December 2017, 14:54:15 »
In our ongoing CBT/AToW campaigns we had a player (I'll call him "Bob") who'd made a dumb decision, then threw an even dumber tantrum, and ultimately quit when it blew up in his face.

Our GM had us running as part of a low level merc company, and "Bob" was chosen to be our original unit commander. We'd been tasked with hunting down a particularly ruthless and devious group of pirates that had been raiding several LC worlds along the Periphery border. We'd encountered them briefly twice before, but the GM had them cleverly make their escape each time. We finally caught them in a rugged canyon, and quickly discovered our 12 mech were outnumbered by 16 of theirs.

It would've been a tough fight, but we believed we could win it, but then suddenly "Bob" decided to personally challenge the pirate leader to single combat! He offered to let them go if they won, but said they'd have to surrender to us if he won.

EVERYONE thought that "Bob" was insane and that this was a BAD idea but he insisted and pressed his plan with the GM, who let him play it out. "Bob" then agreed to let the pirates withdraw and set a place to square off against the pirate leader.  "Bob" then took his mech ALONE further into the canyon to duel with the pirate leader at the agreed upon place. Role-playing it out we let him go ahead, but we prepared to cover "Bob" as best we could all the same. "Bob" and the pirate leader then squared off, and a few rounds after the duel began ALL of the pirates popped out from hidden positions and opened up on "Bob" simultaneously.

Rather than try to withdraw towards us under covering fire "Bob" chose instead to close with the pirate leader, hoping to take him down and force the pirates to surrender. Despite everything we kept telling "Bob" he insisted they'd honor the agreement if he won. Instead "Bob" got blasted and his mech exploded, killing his character. In the aftermath we took a few more losses, and the pirates managed to escape again having badly bloodied us and killed our leader.

"Bob" got pissed that the pirates "cheated", and that his character had been killed as a result. When the GM offered to let him create a new character as a replacement "Bob" got pissed and in a tantrum packed up and quit the group. He berated the GM for not letting him play out his plan the way HE'd wanted it to go, saying he knew he could beat the pirate if the GM hadn't "cheated".

It sucked losing a player, but ultimately "Bob" wasn't that miss in the end...

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #39 on: 31 December 2017, 15:33:07 »
He sounds kinda like a guy I played D&D 3.5 Edition with years ago.  "Dave" was the king of bad decisions, but the rest of the party would always bail him out.

First of all, he was playing a Wizard/Monk, two classes that don't benefit from multiclassing at all.  He'd started as a Wizard, then switched over to Monk at level 3, robbing himself of a major jump in spellcasting power.  And, of course, this build meant that charisma was the only stat he could afford to have a bad score in, so distributing his points between the other five meant that none of them were actually that high.

So we're at a point where this pirate captain and his crew ambush us: we were trying to cross a bay in a small boat and they showed up at the docks to extort money from us.  We were busy negotiating with them, and doing relatively well since we had a couple of characters with good diplomatic skills in the party.  The GM had also hinted that the dock guards had been alerted and were on their way.  But then "Dave" decides that "negotiations are pointless" and attacks.

He immediately charges the Pirate Captain, and gets shot repeatedly because we were outnumbered almost 3 to 1 and they had crossbows ready and aimed at us.  His AC was just high enough to prevent them from getting too many successful hits in, but then he was surrounded by the pirates.  I was playing a Dwarven Defender and chopped my way through the pirate lines until I was standing next to him, giving us a tactically sound position where we could take on the pirates without being flanked, since our backs were to the boat.  And what does he do at that point?

He jumps back into the boat, leaving me all alone.  Well, I was the toughest and most heavily armored character in the party, so I knuckled down and started chopping away with my axe- wasn't likely to win the fight even with the support of the other characters, but I personally took out about half the pirates and did serious damage to the leader since every time I killed a pirate I used my Cleave feat to get a free hit against him.  Meanwhile, "Dave" spent three rounds cowering in the back of the boat behind the bard, rogue and cleric, ineffectively casting his first level spells.  Then the dock guards arrived and arrested the remaining pirates.

The next week, I saw "Dave" in the local comic book store, and he proceeded to tell me about the previous week's game: the incredible story about how he totally saved the whole party from the evil DM's trap and singlehandedly took on on the pirates without any backup from the rest of the party.

I looked him in the eyes and reminded him that I was one of the players in that game and that the session had consisted of the rest of the party saving his sorry behind in a fight that he'd started then ran and hid from. He turned an interesting shade of purple at that point.
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YingJanshi

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #40 on: 31 December 2017, 15:38:00 »
In our ongoing CBT/AToW campaigns we had a player (I'll call him "Bob") who'd made a dumb decision, then threw an even dumber tantrum, and ultimately quit when it blew up in his face.

Our GM had us running as part of a low level merc company, and "Bob" was chosen to be our original unit commander. We'd been tasked with hunting down a particularly ruthless and devious group of pirates that had been raiding several LC worlds along the Periphery border. We'd encountered them briefly twice before, but the GM had them cleverly make their escape each time. We finally caught them in a rugged canyon, and quickly discovered our 12 mech were outnumbered by 16 of theirs.

It would've been a tough fight, but we believed we could win it, but then suddenly "Bob" decided to personally challenge the pirate leader to single combat! He offered to let them go if they won, but said they'd have to surrender to us if he won.

EVERYONE thought that "Bob" was insane and that this was a BAD idea but he insisted and pressed his plan with the GM, who let him play it out. "Bob" then agreed to let the pirates withdraw and set a place to square off against the pirate leader.  "Bob" then took his mech ALONE further into the canyon to duel with the pirate leader at the agreed upon place. Role-playing it out we let him go ahead, but we prepared to cover "Bob" as best we could all the same. "Bob" and the pirate leader then squared off, and a few rounds after the duel began ALL of the pirates popped out from hidden positions and opened up on "Bob" simultaneously.

Rather than try to withdraw towards us under covering fire "Bob" chose instead to close with the pirate leader, hoping to take him down and force the pirates to surrender. Despite everything we kept telling "Bob" he insisted they'd honor the agreement if he won. Instead "Bob" got blasted and his mech exploded, killing his character. In the aftermath we took a few more losses, and the pirates managed to escape again having badly bloodied us and killed our leader.

"Bob" got pissed that the pirates "cheated", and that his character had been killed as a result. When the GM offered to let him create a new character as a replacement "Bob" got pissed and in a tantrum packed up and quit the group. He berated the GM for not letting him play out his plan the way HE'd wanted it to go, saying he knew he could beat the pirate if the GM hadn't "cheated".

It sucked losing a player, but ultimately "Bob" wasn't that miss in the end...

I...what? Pirates cheat, it's just what they do. I'd have been surprised if the GM hadn't had the pirates cheat. (Actually I was expecting the duel area to be mined or something... :D )

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MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #41 on: 31 December 2017, 15:57:49 »
One wonders what "Bob's" plan would have been in the event that the Pirate Captain showed up in a Daishi or something.
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Black_Knyght

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #42 on: 31 December 2017, 17:08:07 »
Yeah, EVERYBODY thought "Bob"s idea was moronic, but he was ridiculously stubborn about it and felt the pirates would respect a show of force and will. OF COURSE pirates cheat, and they had before when they managed to escape us! "Bob" just couldn't grasp that concept though.

I personally figured they'd mine the area too, or cause an avalanche or something. It wasn't a big shock that they'd somehow chosen to flee down the canyon for a reason, or knew how to conceal themselves in it.
« Last Edit: 31 December 2017, 17:09:41 by Black_Knyght »

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #43 on: 20 August 2019, 14:42:34 »
Well, here's one from the 5th Edition DnD game I was in last year.

We had a guy come in by GM's invitation after the game had been running a few months.  He was going to play a ranger.  Rangers are, unfortunately, one of the weakest classes in 5E, and the group already had a fighter, a barbarian, and a paladin at that point anyway.  Oh well.

The group used the roll 4d6, drop the lowest and reroll any 1s until they're something other than ones method of stat generation.  I'm not sure what this guy did but his ranger ended up with terrible stats.  DEX was his best ability score and it was a 16 after racial modifiers.  The GM flat out told him he could and should reroll his stats, but he refused.

He was playing a human character, and used the default human racial stats (+1 to all ability scores) rather than the variant (the one that gives a free feat).

For gear, he decided that since he was playing an archer, he didn't need good armor or a good melee weapon, so all he had was a longbow, leather armor, and a dagger.

And then there was his choice of specializations.  As I said, he went with archery (not a horrible idea) but he took the Hunter archetype.  Hunter has some decent abilities but it also has some terrible ones.  And without fail he went with the bad ones- at thier level he chose the Horde Breaker ability, which allows you to make a bonus attack against an enemy that's adjacent to an enemy you just attack.  Sounds cool, but it's situational to begin with and decidedly weaker than Colossus Slayer, which gives you bonus damage against an enemy that's at lower than max hitpoints.  The only time that you would want to spread fire out instead of concentrating it is if you have a reasonable expectation of killing both targets in a single blow.  As weak as his character was, this was unsurprisingly not something that was common (except for one hilariously bad time).

So that was character creation.  During the game itself, the player tended to sit sullenly at the end of the table, actively refusing to participate in the game outside of combat.  He never bothered using his spells, instead burning them to uselessly use his Primeval Awareness class power at random times to see if there were any demons around (since we were playing a campaign about fighting giants rather than demons, there never were).  Once we got into combat, he would inevitably wander away from the party to attempt to snipe.  This would have been fine if we had been fighting individual foes, but often we were outnumbered and this would do nothing but put his poorly armored and practically unarmed character into a position where some orcs or goblins or whatever it was we happened to be fighting would notice that he was off by himself, unsupported, and run over to kick his ass.  He'd get rescued, eventually, but this would just serve to fuel his all-too-frequent whining that we hated him and wouldn't let him participate (to be fair, I, at least, had started to hate him by that point, due to him being a whiny, useless lump of a player who refused to do anything).  The GM even gave him some options to either boost his stats to be in line with the rest of the party or roll up a new character.  He refused to do either.

I mentioned above his choosing the underpowered Horde Breaker ability.  There was a grand total of one time when he actually managed to use it to take down multiple enemies a round.  Unfortunately, this was when we were fighting Magmins, which are a type of fire elemental that explodes when they die.  So he was carelessly shooting at the little suckers while they were standing next to other party members and causing more damage to the party that way than the critters themselves were.

The player got invited to a few Battletech games, where he also refused to participate and whined a lot.  The GM promptly asked me to not bring him back, since I'd only brought him as a favor to another player and really hated dealing with him sitting in the back seat of my car and sulking for the entire drive there and back (it was over an hour away).

I quit that game due to issues with some of the way things were being run, but last I heard the same guy was still there, only he'd finally decided to change over to playing a sorcerer.  At 11th level, he is apparently fond of using... Withbolt, a 1st level spell that by that point deals less damage per round than using cantrips would.
« Last Edit: 20 August 2019, 19:16:57 by MoneyLovinOgre4Hire »
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NutritiousSlop

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #44 on: 12 September 2019, 16:30:36 »
This is more of a dumb GM story. 

I was in a small Demon: The Fallen group with a GM and one other guy.  He'd been cagey about setting details, so I read a ton of fluff and felt fluent in the lore of the world.  The other guy essentially played a custom-class anime character.  I played a demon-possessed Gordon Ramsay clone celebrity chef.  The GM didn't exactly like this, as he was planning on having all our characters be on the verge of poverty and needing to use some kind of dimensional translation mechanism he'd made up.  My character's wealth solved a lot of our problems, and the anime character's brawn and fighting abilities solved some other ones.  We had a good two-person team working through his half-baked mysteries. 

The amount of homebrew stuff jammed into an otherwise cohesive game should have been a tip-off.  After 3 months of weekly 6 hour sessions, another player joined our group- he played a demon-possessed homeless librarian.  Unfortunately, that character didn't add all that much. 

We started losing momentum around that time, and I forced the issue with a marathon 10 hour game day.  I made a crock pot full of meatballs and wasn't going to let anyone leave until our GM advanced the story more than what we'd done.  He just never connected any of the dots.  We'd seen New York City consumed by a demonic hurricane, and then the GM got mad at me because my character tried to seek shelter in a strip club off the turnpike where we'd fled.  My character had evolved into someone kind of shallow and gross, so it wasn't inconsistent.  He basically had me get jumped, and it was at that point that I realized how bad we were getting railroaded with no idea where we were going. 

After that, the group fell apart.  The GM prioritized playing in another group (and never even tried to invite us) over continuing the story, so everything went to trash.  The GM later revealed that I should have interrogated a BBEG character that was trying to kill us as he brought the demonic hurricane into NYC instead of punching him out and apparently killing him.  The he revealed that his whole goal was that we uncover that we were in a Matrix-like simulation and that our characters were programs or something like that.  The whole thing was unbearably contrived, and I felt betrayed that we'd sunk this much time into learning and playing a game that he wasn't the real game in the first place.  He railroaded us on homebrew and didn't even tell us that's what he was doing. 

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #45 on: 22 September 2019, 09:26:21 »
Way back when--the one page adventures from the Greyhawk box--the one about hunting the goblins in the grape farm.  So the good aligned party goes up the hill to search the place and happens to see a Faerie dragon flying around helping itself to some ripe grapes.  Party yells attack and starts rolling before I can say " What?!?".  So they miss the little fella.  The dragons stat sheet listed Polymorph  Other as an innate ability.   And its rated NG alignment and listed as friendly so doesnt really want to fight them.   Random roll target-save vs poly- fail save-roll on poly table-repeat-repeat.   Wound up with the mage as an ogre, barbarian as a kobold, thief was an orc, and i think the sorcerer a bugbear(and the only one to make his INT roll).   The ogre smashed the pally flat.  The cleric and ranger wound up killing them all while the bugbear sorcerer promptly ran away    Then died of their own wounds since the cleric was at neg hp and the ranger had no healing .

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #46 on: 24 November 2019, 00:04:19 »
Well, here's one from the 5th Edition DnD game I was in last year.

We had a guy come in by GM's invitation after the game had been running a few months.  He was going to play a ranger.  Rangers are, unfortunately, one of the weakest classes in 5E, and the group already had a fighter, a barbarian, and a paladin at that point anyway.  Oh well.

The group used the roll 4d6, drop the lowest and reroll any 1s until they're something other than ones method of stat generation.  I'm not sure what this guy did but his ranger ended up with terrible stats.  DEX was his best ability score and it was a 16 after racial modifiers.  The GM flat out told him he could and should reroll his stats, but he refused.

He was playing a human character, and used the default human racial stats (+1 to all ability scores) rather than the variant (the one that gives a free feat).

For gear, he decided that since he was playing an archer, he didn't need good armor or a good melee weapon, so all he had was a longbow, leather armor, and a dagger.

And then there was his choice of specializations.  As I said, he went with archery (not a horrible idea) but he took the Hunter archetype.  Hunter has some decent abilities but it also has some terrible ones.  And without fail he went with the bad ones- at thier level he chose the Horde Breaker ability, which allows you to make a bonus attack against an enemy that's adjacent to an enemy you just attack.  Sounds cool, but it's situational to begin with and decidedly weaker than Colossus Slayer, which gives you bonus damage against an enemy that's at lower than max hitpoints.  The only time that you would want to spread fire out instead of concentrating it is if you have a reasonable expectation of killing both targets in a single blow.  As weak as his character was, this was unsurprisingly not something that was common (except for one hilariously bad time).

So that was character creation.  During the game itself, the player tended to sit sullenly at the end of the table, actively refusing to participate in the game outside of combat.  He never bothered using his spells, instead burning them to uselessly use his Primeval Awareness class power at random times to see if there were any demons around (since we were playing a campaign about fighting giants rather than demons, there never were).  Once we got into combat, he would inevitably wander away from the party to attempt to snipe.  This would have been fine if we had been fighting individual foes, but often we were outnumbered and this would do nothing but put his poorly armored and practically unarmed character into a position where some orcs or goblins or whatever it was we happened to be fighting would notice that he was off by himself, unsupported, and run over to kick his ass.  He'd get rescued, eventually, but this would just serve to fuel his all-too-frequent whining that we hated him and wouldn't let him participate (to be fair, I, at least, had started to hate him by that point, due to him being a whiny, useless lump of a player who refused to do anything).  The GM even gave him some options to either boost his stats to be in line with the rest of the party or roll up a new character.  He refused to do either.

I mentioned above his choosing the underpowered Horde Breaker ability.  There was a grand total of one time when he actually managed to use it to take down multiple enemies a round.  Unfortunately, this was when we were fighting Magmins, which are a type of fire elemental that explodes when they die.  So he was carelessly shooting at the little suckers while they were standing next to other party members and causing more damage to the party that way than the critters themselves were.

The player got invited to a few Battletech games, where he also refused to participate and whined a lot.  The GM promptly asked me to not bring him back, since I'd only brought him as a favor to another player and really hated dealing with him sitting in the back seat of my car and sulking for the entire drive there and back (it was over an hour away).

I quit that game due to issues with some of the way things were being run, but last I heard the same guy was still there, only he'd finally decided to change over to playing a sorcerer.  At 11th level, he is apparently fond of using... Withbolt, a 1st level spell that by that point deals less damage per round than using cantrips would.

I recently talked with one of the other people in that party, and apparently shortly after I posted this story the group collectively finally got fed up with the player's passive aggressive refusal to participate in the game and stopped inviting him (wasn't hard, since he didn't have a car they just stopped driving over to pick him up for games).

Anyway, a conversation I once had while GMing: "Yes, technically it is possible to attempt to bluff the wizard into thinking he can't actually cast spells.  Unfortunately for you, that skill check takes several minutes while casting Disintegrate only takes a standard action.  Make a Fortitude save."
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #47 on: 24 November 2019, 10:21:35 »
I've never had a plan stupid group, but I have run for a group that just wouldn't shut up. I was running a shadowrun game based off of Shadowrun Returns. Every time I tried to describe anything, they'd start talking over me.  Naturally, they'd miss out on a lot and get stuck, leaving me to describe the room again just so I could get talked over again.   I should have known it was going to be a huge problem from the first session.  They were supposed to be helping an old friend solve his murder and as such were in the morgue where his body was.  Part of the room description was a police evidence bag laying on a small table next to the gurney.  Having gotten tired or repeating myself, I finally had one of the NPCs say," and make sure that evidence bag gets to the police station before your shift's over," as he left.   One player immediately exclaims, "What evidence bag!? You never said anything about an evidence bag!"   :facepalm:

Okay, maybe one was a little dumb, because later, they got their hands on a crashed plane's black box after getting some hints that their were people out there who wanted it. This was never a part of the plot, or even a red herring.  It was just a way for them to pick up some easy cash mid mission.  One player became obsessed with it and was sure this would break the whole case to the point that he forgot about everything else that happened at the NTSB facility including the actual evidence they had gathered.   Now a more experienced GM may have been able to work this into the story, but this was my first time running and I had no clue how.  Hell, this was so far off course, I don't think I could now.  I decided I had to get this thing away from them.  I did so by having the lady who ran the safe house they stayed at call them into her office.  She chewed them out over doing something so stupid while showing them on the security monitors that her bartender was distracting armed federal agents.  They were told that they could give her the black box and she'd arrange for this whole problem to go away.  If not, she'd still honor their arrangement to protect them in the safe house, but once they stepped outside, they were on their own.  First, the player argued with me for a few minutes about how the black box was tracked.  :facepalm:  Then the players debated what to do for a long time while frequently getting off topic.  They finally came to a decision once they noticed I was playing solitaire on my tablet.

I called the whole campaign after that.  Between constantly getting talked over and the extreme paranoia the characters had about everything, I just wasn't having fun running it.  Funny thing is that in this story, the money reward at the end turns out to be pure bunk.  To make up for it, they players were going to earn several very useful contacts, which is huge in Shadowrun.  At least, they would have if their paranoia hadn't made them disliked by just about everyone they dealt with.
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DOC_Agren

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #48 on: 28 December 2019, 20:42:37 »
I GM'ed Paranoia once.

Once.

Half the party did not make it out of the initial briefing room.

As in ran through all of their clones before the briefing was complete.

It was insane.
Sounds about right for a good game >:D
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garhkal

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #49 on: 29 December 2019, 02:51:39 »
Ok.  So, been GM'ing for over 20 years, now.  There've been good moments, there've been bad moments, and there've been really horrid moments.  I'm here to share a few of these latter moments with you.

..snip..

Sounds like Mary was a relative of one guy i had back at Gencon 05/06.  Was flying on a speeder bike with a passenger who carried a LOT OF explosives..  Going over the wall of an imperial base..  HOWEVER the enemy saw him and FIRED a # of smoke grenades out.
HE Kept on his flanking speed..   RIGHT INTO A WALL.   Blew up.

Then the passenger asked "So what happens now, with all the explosives i am carrying!"

I didnt until last session, when i scared the living REDACTED out of them. Its a long story, and i am kinda proud of myself. the reason i put up with it until then was that there was no one else to play with.

I for one, would rather NOT play, then play with sociopaths..

That's why I hate evil parties, they're almost always an excuse to be a dumbass because that's "evil."

Agreed.  Even one game, where most every player was LE or LN, the Evil characters ran as "lawful stupid"..

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Simon Landmine

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #50 on: 29 December 2019, 09:06:41 »
I had a player in a _Shadowrun 2e_ game that I was running, who wasn't exactly paying a great deal of attention. His character was providing the magical (and Earth Elemental) support to a team doing an intrusion on a secret Mafia backup data-store. They've become bogged down in a corridor, which is defended by a couple of guards at the far end with a sturdy position and a machine-gun - a carefully designed kill-zone. The rest of the party, in cover, spend a minute or two discussing options, and decide that it's time for the mage to earn his pay, and suggest that he ask the Elemental to go down and swat the machine-gun nest. Our mage then looked up from the book that he had been reading under the table with the immortal line "What machine-gun nest?" There was sobbing.

One of my other players regularly did dumb things but, entertainingly, they were also pretty much in character - after all, someone who dumped half of their starting cash into _Wired Reflexes 3_ might end up being a little bit impulsive. (Especially as this was before the introduction of the Reflex Trigger, allowing you to switch off those over-amped responses.) But he wasn't utterly dumb. Daft, yes, but not dumb.

And then there was the guy I played with last year at a drop-in session. I was running a fork of _Feng Shui 2_ (Hong Kong action movie roleplaying, transposed to London). Our heroes have just taken down a bunch of gang members, backed by a dodgy (and surprisingly well-armed) estate agent, in an abandoned house beside a canal. They have then gone down into the half-flooded cellar, found an altar, and rapidly despatched a demon that burst out of the water (thanks to a stack of exploding dice and the Both Guns Blazing schtick, it went down before it could even attack). At which point, 'Jim' decided that he was going to wade into the water and investigate the part-flooded tunnel that obviously headed towards the canal, which has some rusted and broken bars at the cellar end. Then he wades further down the slightly-sloping tunnel, with the water rising up to his chest. And as it reaches the canal wall, he announces that he will step straight out of the tunnel, dropping into the canal. And that his character can't swim.

The same guy, in a D&D game, decided to cast a powerful AoE spell while not only other party members were in melee with the opponents, but so also were some town guards that we were trying to save. One of the guards was fatally injured (but fortunately saved at the point of death by our cleric), and the other was pretty much crippled. Later he cast the same spell while in a room smaller than the AoE. At the end of the adventure, the town elders arrested him and sentenced him to death for attempted murder. The rest of the party headed off to their next adventure without him.
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DOC_Agren

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #51 on: 10 January 2020, 11:57:23 »
I had a player in a _Shadowrun 2e_ game that I was running, who wasn't exactly paying a great deal of attention. His character was providing the magical (and Earth Elemental) support to a team doing an intrusion on a secret Mafia backup data-store. They've become bogged down in a corridor, which is defended by a couple of guards at the far end with a sturdy position and a machine-gun - a carefully designed kill-zone. The rest of the party, in cover, spend a minute or two discussing options, and decide that it's time for the mage to earn his pay, and suggest that he ask the Elemental to go down and swat the machine-gun nest. Our mage then looked up from the book that he had been reading under the table with the immortal line "What machine-gun nest?" There was sobbing.
I have had a player like that, but in her defense while 90% time she clueless to what going on I have watched her pick apart defense plans like a savant.  She has twice found the undefended backdoors that I had no planned in my games and done the same in others.

Quote
And then there was the guy I played with last year at a drop-in session. I was running a fork of _Feng Shui 2_ (Hong Kong action movie roleplaying, transposed to London). Our heroes have just taken down a bunch of gang members, backed by a dodgy (and surprisingly well-armed) estate agent, in an abandoned house beside a canal. They have then gone down into the half-flooded cellar, found an altar, and rapidly despatched a demon that burst out of the water (thanks to a stack of exploding dice and the Both Guns Blazing schtick, it went down before it could even attack). At which point, 'Jim' decided that he was going to wade into the water and investigate the part-flooded tunnel that obviously headed towards the canal, which has some rusted and broken bars at the cellar end. Then he wades further down the slightly-sloping tunnel, with the water rising up to his chest. And as it reaches the canal wall, he announces that he will step straight out of the tunnel, dropping into the canal. And that his character can't swim.
So what was Jim plan for this action?

[/quote]The same guy, in a D&D game, decided to cast a powerful AoE spell while not only other party members were in melee with the opponents, but so also were some town guards that we were trying to save. One of the guards was fatally injured (but fortunately saved at the point of death by our cleric), and the other was pretty much crippled. Later he cast the same spell while in a room smaller than the AoE. At the end of the adventure, the town elders arrested him and sentenced him to death for attempted murder. The rest of the party headed off to their next adventure without him.
[/quote]
good plan for the party he to dangerous to keep arund
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"

Simon Landmine

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #52 on: 10 January 2020, 13:00:33 »
I have had a player like that, but in her defense while 90% time she clueless to what going on I have watched her pick apart defense plans like a savant.  She has twice found the undefended backdoors that I had no planned in my games and done the same in others.

Nice!

So what was Jim plan for this action?

Plan? Plan? [grin] I don't believe that the word plan even entered into it. (Jim flailed about in the water, caught the edge of the tunnel, and managed to pull himself back into it, returning, soaked and spluttering, to the cellar, and the perplexed expressions of the other characters. And, indeed, the other players.)

good plan for the party he to dangerous to keep around

That was exactly our thinking.

And I've just remembered one of the guys in the Vampire The Masquerade campaign I ran back at university, who decided that, as a vampire trying to remain subtle and inconspicuous in an unspecified area of generic RPG America, his best mode of transport was a race-modified Lotus sports car. (This, obviously, had nothing to do with the player being an unmitigated petrol-head who wanted a Lotus.)
Although his high point was probably when he'd been assigned to keep watch on some suspicious types by the other members of the party, and to let them know when they left their motel room. The party knew that there were (at least) two of these suspicious types in the room.
While he's watching, three people leave the room.
And, rather than thinking "Wait a moment, seems like our information may not have been entirely accurate - I'll call the others and let them know", he opted for "Ooh, we knew there were two in there - if three have left, it means that they've all gone, and I can search their room unimpeded".
He deserved the .357 Magnum round he took to the chest. (Being a vampire, it didn't kill him, but the ensuing fight meant that it did have plot ramifications, as did his frenzied feeding on the first human to appear.) He'd have come off a lot worse if his loyal ghoul hadn't unloaded a 12-gauge into the NPC vampire that had been in the room, and forced it to flee the scene.
"That's Lieutenant Faceplant to you, Corporal!"

Things that I have learnt through clicking too fast on 'Move Done' on MegaMek: Double-check the CF of the building before jumping onto it, check artillery arrival times before standing in the neighbouring hex, and don't run across your own minefield.

"Hmm, I wonder if I can turn this into a MM map."

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #53 on: 11 January 2020, 01:31:33 »
This one is a bit of a doozy.  I was a player rather than GM, which is probably a good thing as I'm friends with the guy in question and had I been running the game I doubt our friendship could have lasted.

D&D 5th Edition.  We had a decent party, he wanted to play a bard.  Not a bad choice in 5th Edition, but he wanted to be a swashbuckling hero type.  Well, the College of Valor is good for that.

But he went for the College of Swords, which is considered to be the worst Bardic Archetype.  He also hated casting spells and generally refused to use them, same for his Bardic Inspiration.  So he was effectively trying to be a fighter with lower hitpoints and less armor and weapon proficiencies.  And rather than choosing to go with strength or go with dexterity as his combat ability he tried to go with both and ended up being equally poor at them.

Our first game we go into a town that's controlled by a criminal gang.  He, the party's paladin, and my character, the sorcerer, run into three thugs.  The bard immediately challenged the leader to a duel.  He won initiative, then proceeded to spend several minutes describing his overly intricate act of attacking, which involved flipping through the air and all sorts of crazy stunts "in perfect form" (practically his catchphrase) until someone else at the table finally shouted at him to roll the bleeping dice already.  This was something that would go on to be an issue in pretty much every fight.

He fumbled.  Since he was using two-weapon fighting style, he tried again and fumbled a second time.  At this point the thug proceeded to beat him like a set of bongo drums, forcing the paladin and I to step in and rescue him.

Flash forward a few games.  We're in a goblinoid encampment looking for some missing NPCs that we think were kidnapped.  We bypassed most of the goblins and end up facing the leader, a bugbear, and his guards, along with a drow.  We get into a fight and get the upper hand, at which point the bugbear orders his troops to surrender, which they do.  The bard decides that because he's an elf, he just hates drow so much he's going to kill that drow anyway, so he attacks again.

He fumbles.  The enemies in the room naturally decide that they're actually not going to surrender at this point, and one dashes past us to run down a hallway we haven't explored yet while another rings a large gong.

The gong, of course, summons the entire rest of the goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears that we'd bypassed, and the only reason we weren't overrun was because when they got bunched up trying to enter the chamber my character used a scroll of Fireball to roast most of them.  The hobgoblin who ran down the other hallway slaughtered the prisoners we'd come to save.  Had I been the GM I'd have immediately dropped the bard's alignment down from good to neutral and hoped he'd get a clue.  Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened.

Now, I mentioned that my character was a sorcerer.  I had proficiency in persuasion.  The bard did not.  The bard also had a lower charisma than I did because he kept trying to boost all his ability scores so he could do everything, which meant that he didn't do anything well.  We also had the paladin.  Any time we got into any sort of interaction with NPCs, the bard would immediately blurt out that he was going to talk to them, which generally consisted of him demanding that they tell him their stories so he could write songs about them.  He was profoundly unwilling to let anyone else at the table have a go at something before him.  This usually resulted in us getting into a lot of unnecessary fights because he couldn't take a hint: he kept pestering a stone giant after it told him to go away while it was holding a boulder in a ready position.  Cue him getting a boulder to the face and the lot of us in a fight we really didn't need and could have easily avoided.

We got hired onto a caravan as guards, and partway through the trip a group of Githyanki raiders swooped out of the sky.  They immediately started negotiating, at which point I actually did manage to step in and say that since they were willing to talk rather than attacking outright, we should listen to them and see if a peaceful solution was possible.

Whether one was or not is something we'll never know, because about that time the bard looked up and said "they're evil, I attack!"

We fended them off, but numerous NPCs in the caravan were killed.  After the battle was over I managed to convince the party to leave the Githyankis' silver swords behind.  When the caravan got to its destination the caravan master paid us but only paid the bard half and told him outright that he should feel lucky to receive that much for starting that fight.

One of the other players quit about that time, and the bard decided, without asking anyone else, that he was going to run that player's character as well as his bard.  This was an issue because A) he's got attention issues to begin with and B) now he was getting to do twice as much as anyone else.

I tried to broach the subject with him at one point away from the rest of the players but he refused to hear anything suggesting that he was anything less than a perfect player.

I quit the group the next session.

I still hang out with him and watch anime or play Battletech, but I will not ever play D&D with him again.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

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DOC_Agren

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #54 on: 26 January 2020, 17:18:20 »
MoneyLovinOgre4Hire, I feel your pain.

We had a player who is a good GM, but I had not played with him since early nighties..  He joined our Dark Heresy campaign and became basicly, I want the spotlight on me, GUY.  His PC was an Assassin, no great social skills, yet he tried to talk to everyone and managed more the once to get our unit into fights, that we won because well The Emperor loves us.
Finally 4 of the party had to tell the GM, who was good friends with the player, that it was him or us, because well we weren't having fun anymore.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"

Cannonshop

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #55 on: 27 January 2020, 18:41:08 »
Sounds like Mary was a relative of one guy i had back at Gencon 05/06.  Was flying on a speeder bike with a passenger who carried a LOT OF explosives..  Going over the wall of an imperial base..  HOWEVER the enemy saw him and FIRED a # of smoke grenades out.
HE Kept on his flanking speed..   RIGHT INTO A WALL.   Blew up.

Then the passenger asked "So what happens now, with all the explosives i am carrying!"

I for one, would rather NOT play, then play with sociopaths..

Agreed.  Even one game, where most every player was LE or LN, the Evil characters ran as "lawful stupid"..

Funny, back in the 90s I ran a LE character and had more than half the players convinced by mid-point in the campaign that I was playing Lawful Good.  (this continued through to the end of the campaign).  This may have been influenced in some ways by my leaning heavily on the template from Palladium of their equivalent of lawful evil, iirc "aberrant". 

You know, "Mafioso evil".  Part of that though, is that I was doing less evil shit than the paladin of Tyr.

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Lone-Wolf

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #56 on: 11 February 2020, 15:22:03 »
My turn...

When I began to roleplay I went to a Con and if you Gmed you were given your entry fee back. So I decided to try it out and I had four guys in a free style X-Files adventure.
They started in the middle of the desert and when they came to a fuel station they decided to play with their zippos.
I warned them - twice.
Then BOOM time.
It was the shortest GMing I did and I got my entrance fee back.

I was a member of two roleplaying groups (the one I met while being a member of a martial arts club and the other I met while I was at a Con for the Dark Eye - german RPG.)
In the first group I decided to GM Robotech. All the players got their Veritechs and to begin I dropped just ONE Fighterpod on their tails. I rolled to hit and three missiles hit. I rolled damage and scratch one Veritech. Even with the half damage when rolling to evade the Veritch was toast. So we took it as a combat example.
Another time we played The Dark Eye and one player (he died many years ago) decided to play a Nivese. Thats an Inuit. He looked at his skills and went ballistic. "Why do I have a dancing skill of just 6? I am a master of Nivese dancing. I must have a 16 at least."
We needed about an hour to explain to him that the dancing skill is meant to encompass all forms of dancing and that he will get modifiers if he dances Nivese dances.
Then one day this guy decided to GM himself. We knew he liked cathedrals. We should have listened.
He even showed us a picture of a cathedral were about a hundred windows were in a row.
He took this as an inspiration but instead of windows it were doors. And the rooms behind those doors didnt match to the required space.
So we were in a hallway with 100 doors on each side. And the majority were empty.
In the end we just said: "Standard."
He: "What does that mean?"
We: "We open the door, look if there is anybody in it, fire arrows or fireballs at it. If nothing is in it we look three times for traps. and if the room is empty we close the door."
After four hours or so we had opened every door and proceeded down the hallway to the door out of the hallway. There were stairs and then came - you guess it - a hallway with 100 doors on each side.
We demanded that our regular GM was running the next adventure and the guy was miffed.

Yes, our regular GM. Our enemy entered always with acrobatics straight from martial arts (he was our trainer with a level 2 black belt) or gymnastics straight from World level competition.
And after encountering those enemies we found a trainer who specialized in this form of combat in the next city. Of course our paladin/fighter would always try to learn this fighting style but in the end he had about 40+ fighting styles but would still get his behind handed to him because only the NPC who tagged along was capable of standing up to the enemy.
Our elven mage was the girlfriend of the GM but she didnt get any preferential treatment. She was of the "Could you please get a move on!" type.
Whenever we encountered enemies she would go through her 7 sides of spells and couldnt decide which spell to use. In the end we knew her spells better then she did.
Ok, I am responsible for her dropping out of the game. I GMed an adventure and when she FINALLY decided to use a fireball (her fastest decision in all the time we played) - inside a stable - I told her that she not only killed the bad guy but also burned down the stable. Yes, we still talk occasionally but sometimes I think I should apologize to her. It was fun playing with her.
Unfortunately this group is dead. I miss them.

The other group:
We played Vampire The Masquerade and you are not allowed to say you are a vampire. But my ahem vampire needed to know if another player was also a vampire. So she asked him: "Are you also one of the long teeth owners?"
Once we had a Vampire / Werewolf crossover. And my character has a fear of spiders. And one of the other players played an Ananasi, a werespider. And those are BIG. So, this Ananansi went to her warform, my character freaked out and the AK-47 in the hands of my character went full auto. Luckily only the bad guys were hit.
In a fantasy adventure my character did something wrong. You remember Kingdom of Heaven were one of the guys is relieving himself upstream and not downstream? My character did the same and was cursed. And as the week had been heavy I was angry. So I decided to wreak havoc. We encountered the evil spirit we were supposed to kill but my character tried to help him. And even though the other players knew it, thew did distinguish between player and character knowledge.  In the end my character was killed but we had so much fun.
Unfortunately this group meets only occasionally. Yes, getting a live with a job and getting old wreaks havoc on those groups.
I always thought that in the end, when I am 80 or so, I would be in a retirement home with all of them and we would still be playing.

Sorry, for going off the road.

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #57 on: 11 February 2020, 16:30:40 »
My turn...

When I began to roleplay I went to a Con and if you Gmed you were given your entry fee back. So I decided to try it out and I had four guys in a free style X-Files adventure.
They started in the middle of the desert and when they came to a fuel station they decided to play with their zippos.
I warned them - twice.
Then BOOM time.
It was the shortest GMing I did and I got my entrance fee back.

Did they have some sort of minimum number of games they had to play that they were just trying to blast through?
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

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Lone-Wolf

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #58 on: 14 February 2020, 13:41:33 »
Did they have some sort of minimum number of games they had to play that they were just trying to blast through?

No.
It was a Con where some people had posted in advance that they wanted to GM, but they were open to anybody who wanted to give it a try.
There were no rewards etc if you played in five games or something like that.
You just paid the fee and could do whatever you wanted. Buy stuff, look at others gaming or taking part in a game.
The funny thing was, this con was in a library that was also open to the normal people. And some of the normal people looked very alarmed at some of us because they arrived in their costumes.

guardiandashi

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #59 on: 19 February 2020, 00:02:56 »
I wouldn't say I was stupid, but I was playing in character and doing stuff that I thought would be amusing /funny

so I have a hatchling gold Dragon, as in literally just hatched around the time some of the other characters showed up,  and one of the encounters was a hill Giant.  The nasty hill giant threw a boulder at me and missed, then while I was distracted, he hit my tail with his club, Well I got really upset that the club "bit" me so I bit it back.

one of my next things was I decided I needed to work on trying to improve my dexterity, so I started using the boulder as a balance ball, and "rolling" up and down all the corridors on the boulder, and when we had to head up stairs in the mountain dungeon well I carried my boulder.... then started rolling around on it again..... this kept happening until we cleared out the boss encounter a small family of red dragons.

in another campaign also with a Gold dragon character, I had picked up a variety of equipment, and was using one of the expanded Dragon books, and was an ~15hd gold dragon and between 3 and 5 levels of fighter, mage, and cleric.  I was actually polymorphing myself into an Elf, and pretending to be a paladin (I think) and dual wielding long swords +5, and I also had some +5 weapons for when I was in dragon form.

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #60 on: 19 February 2020, 00:10:42 »
Your GM let you play a dragon without hitting you with crippling level adjustments?
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

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guardiandashi

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #61 on: 20 February 2020, 01:02:39 »
Your GM let you play a dragon without hitting you with crippling level adjustments?
not really I had the level adjustments, but one thing the GM did allow was buying down level adjustments by burning XP

I misremembered the classes on my high level (epic) gold dragon.

Character name Dalivinjah Foxfire.  Gold Dragon, Classes Dragon 16, Fighter 5, Cleric 5
Alignment Lawful Good, Diety Bahamet  experience 524,170   char level 26 (6)
Gender Female, age 22, size L  Weight 2500lb  Hair Gold, eyes Gold

Str 36 Dex 22, Con 30, Int 29, wis 26, cha 23  HP 443
fort save 28 ref save 21, will save 23
Melee 38, BAB 23
ranged attack bonus 31

weapons and equipment
long sword +5 x2  damage 1d8+15
claws +5 x2  damage 2d8 +10
Armor, White Dragonhide Chain +5 type medium, armor bonus 5 (10) check penalty -4 0% spell failure, speed 20, weight 40lb, Glamoured, Wildshape, 45 cold Resist
Broach of shielding,
Cloak of Arachnia
Cloak of displacement 50% miss chance
Amulet of +5 Natural Armor
+5 armor ioun stone
+2 saves ioun stone
ring +30 sonic resist
Ring of Breathing (Special) Allows use of breath weapon while polymorphed/ Shape changed
Bag of holding
Headband, +6 cha
Earrings +6 Cha
Tail Bracer of deflection +8


MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #62 on: 20 February 2020, 01:48:57 »
Ah, the buyback option for level adjustments from Unearthed Arcana.  Yeah, that was the one thing that actually made playing a powerful race potentially feasible.
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Cannonshop

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #63 on: 21 February 2020, 00:50:47 »
kind of a tangent since this is for GMs, but as a player, we often get away with things we really ought not.

Rifts game.  That should probably be sufficient warning right there, but it gets more wrong.

see, this was a group with a library of books.  one of the patterns with Rifts(TM) is that each and every successive book put out by palladium through the 90s and early 00's was chock full of yet-more-powerful character types and classes, optional gear that is overwhelming, and so on, to the point that (at that time) someone with the latest supplemental could (and did) generate characters capable of eating the lunch of the baseline RCC's and OCC's (Character races and classes) from the core book without taking a scratch.

Or, at least, that's the conventional wisdom.

I walked in with a baseline, core book, character.  Operator OCC, surrounded by a party containing stuff I don't even remember the names for, but powerful.  we're talking 'mud-stomp Chi-Town's Armies singlehandedly' powerful.

and I'm running what amounts to an average guy who's a pretty good mechanic.

in the process of running my pretty good mechanic, I ended up forcing the GM to reset the scenarios three times, by using what he gave me to break his carefully constructed situations.  It began with a custom vehicle.  Because most of the team were in one way or another flyers, I ended up with a plane.

an A-1 Skyraider.

do you know how many 'fusion blocks' you can put on the wing hardpoints of an A-1 Skyraider?  yeah.

so he reset something like three weeks of gameplay  to 'it was all a dream' it after I bombed and strafed the megadamage bigbad with an airplane dating to the 1950s.

Campaign goes on, the big, wealth-laden and superpowerful guys in the party set up a base at a coastal airport next to a river.  My contribution was to make sure the lights come on, the toilets flush, and the fire suppression system works.

Not 'gunfire suppression', we're talking sprinklers to put the fires out.  In the process, I also made sure the grass was green and the crops were watered.

So he attacks us with a vampire invasion.

I pulled the fire alarm.  RIFTS vampires are vulnerable to running water-as in water-in-motion.

and I'd set up sprinklers, in game, in character, with both outside and inside arrays, because I wanted the wooden buildings to not catch fire thanks to the presence of multiple dragons in the group, along with mystical-technology sentient golems with loads of firepower, and other weird crap.

The vampires attacked, and I pulled the fire alarms.

(and turned on the sprinklers outside.)

this spoiled lots of things for guys who'd been counting on their ultra-magical-supertech badassery to save the day, and...I kept the water running.

keep in mind, now, I'm neither the leader of the group as a character, nor the guy who absorbed most f the time with the GM.  I was just 'this guy', and my character wasn't even particularly powerful.

They trace the vampire attack to a series of tunnels nearby.  I ask questions, and the GM was happy to show me his carefully laid out maps of the surface of the area (it was supposed to be like, boston, or philadelphia or something.)

I noted two things: the placement of the rivers...and the placement of the tunnel entrances.

While the others were arguing about going into the tunnel network to root out the bloodsuckers...

I set about figuring out how to drop the river into the tunnels.

and the GM let me carry out my plan.

nobody stopped me, and the dice rolls worked.  This forced a SECOND reset, as I filled the vampire lair (and their accesses) with running water.

using the power of math.

so he drops a goddess into the mix.  because so far, this damn operator type whose whole powerset is 'pretty good mechanic' has just 86'ed two main badguys without engaging in glorious single combat.

also killed two player characters with that second one-apparently godlike power doesn't include breathing water.

(Hey, they should have TOLD me they were going to go in there and try to battle the horde of uglies on their own!)

Third time, the GM made the mistake of answering my questions.  see, he lined up a Xiticix conflict, and let me find some mostly-intact F-111's.

again, while everyone else is running off in a dozen different directions picking bold, glorious personal expressions of might, I'm wiring up a simple guidance system into a 1960's era airframe with Terrain following radar.

The guidance system is because I'm turning them into big, fat, cruise missiles.

(I even calculated the fuel use.)

I started to realize he was letting me do this kind of thing, because he'd made a mistake by letting people bring in new/replacement characters every time they bought a new book, without checking to see how unbalanced their new characters were going to be.  My character had become the reset button for the campaign.

anyone else, would have at LEAST argued against some of the shit he let me do.

"If you have to ask permission, then it's no longer a Right, it has been turned into a Privilege-something that can be and will be taken from you when convenient."

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #64 on: 21 February 2020, 01:47:02 »
Rifts was a campaign setting made for abusing the rules.  The one GM in my area was the kind of guy who'd give the new player a premade human character and then tell them that it was tots balanced against the apocalyptically powerful dragon the other player was running because each day there was a 1/100 chance that the dragon would be polymorphed into an ordinary rabbit for six hours.

Did not join that game.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

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Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #65 on: 21 February 2020, 18:15:34 »
*snip*
using the power of math.
*snip*
Math FTW!  :D

Cannonshop

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #66 on: 29 February 2020, 14:14:54 »
Rifts was a campaign setting made for abusing the rules.  The one GM in my area was the kind of guy who'd give the new player a premade human character and then tell them that it was tots balanced against the apocalyptically powerful dragon the other player was running because each day there was a 1/100 chance that the dragon would be polymorphed into an ordinary rabbit for six hours.

Did not join that game.

want a sick, sick way to abuse rifts?  "Ninjas and Superspies"-and the Rifts conversion rules.  where it takes several mighty hours to construct a baseline Rifts character, that's not fully utilizing the power of Palladium's system.  In particular, the skills system.  Eighteen Hours to generate ONE character that is, for all intents and purposes, a baseline human more dangerous than most of the RCC's in the game.
"If you have to ask permission, then it's no longer a Right, it has been turned into a Privilege-something that can be and will be taken from you when convenient."

Simon Landmine

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #67 on: 29 February 2020, 14:26:12 »
want a sick, sick way to abuse rifts?  "Ninjas and Superspies"-and the Rifts conversion rules.  where it takes several mighty hours to construct a baseline Rifts character, that's not fully utilizing the power of Palladium's system.  In particular, the skills system.  Eighteen Hours to generate ONE character that is, for all intents and purposes, a baseline human more dangerous than most of the RCC's in the game.

Ouch. Yes, N&S was an 'interesting' fork of the Palladium house system anyway. But converting them to Rifts as well? Ouch!
"That's Lieutenant Faceplant to you, Corporal!"

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monbvol

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #68 on: 29 February 2020, 16:55:56 »
Ah Palladium.

I haven't come across a system that they've put out that isn't actually finished, poorly laid out, makes AToW's Life Module system look damned nice in comparison for creating characters, but somehow still utterly fun.

DOC_Agren

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #69 on: 03 March 2020, 22:41:49 »
TMNT Kungfu Weasal converted to a Rifts Juicer
sick and hard abused in Rifts
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Liam's Ghost

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #70 on: 03 March 2020, 23:49:12 »
I wouldn't use the term dumbest (though techically it's pretty much the only group I GM for, so by default...)...

But one of the players in my current d6 Star Wars game is playing around with and feeding souls to an ancient dark side artifact, knowing full well it becomes more conscious and powerful and hungry the more souls it consumes, in the hopes of eventually being able to talk to it and control its ravenous appetite.

Also, the players have caused something of a planetary scale apocalypse by poorly directing fast moving star destroyer debries, and their abuse of the dark side artifact was dramatic enough that the Emperor noticed all the way from Coruscant, and has taken... interest.

(I'm not going to blame them for accidentally exposing the local duchess to space mustard gas, it was still a pretty slick rescue op and the situation was already out of control)
Good news is the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show an immediate latency of 44.6 years. So if you're thirty or over you're laughing. Worst case scenario you miss out on a few rounds of canasta, plus you've forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into my calculator, it makes a happy face.

(indirect accessory to the) Slayer of Monitors!

monbvol

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #71 on: 04 March 2020, 00:21:36 »
I've learned that the player who wound up with that artifact is probably the worst person, I do mean person not just a character, to give such a thing to.  Or Best.  Depends on your point of view.

Though I'm trying to remember if I shared the story of the last Pathfinder game I ran or not already.  Pretty sure I have.

monbvol

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #72 on: 04 March 2020, 00:28:40 »
Okay going back through this thread seems I did not.

So basic setup is the group got a side quest to find out what was going on in a nearby quarry providing the stone for a tower under construction.

I setup as opposition a dozen Troglodytes against 4 level 1 characters.  To give them a chance I spread them out enough that a stealth approach could make the encounter easier.  I also decided if they wanted to they could negotiate with the Troglodytes and avoid combat all together.

They chose to just bum rush in making lots of noise resulting in the quarry workers to be slaughtered by the Troglodytes.  They managed to come out pretty battered but alive.

Cannonshop

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #73 on: 04 March 2020, 13:39:09 »
So, a group of 3rd level characters, I'm running the only rogue.  We have 1 priest, 1 Paladin, 1 Ranger, an arcane spellcaster of a sort, and me.

We find our way to a dungeon crawl.  First 'indoors' mission for all of us.

we get past the Myconids guarding the entrance by...well, not interacting with them, honestly. 

Now, all the doors in this place seem to be either locked, or rusted shut.

Naturally, we pass through what appears to be a desecrated chapel of some sort, to a pair of rusted-shut doors, and I set about doing the thief thing of working on getting the damn doors open..right?

So everyone else, well, takes off for parts unknown.  It winds up being a long, sustained action of working on the doors to get them open by lamp light, since I'm the only human in the party and do NOT have enhanced dark vision.

The rest of the team wanders-and-wanders the same two corridors, gets themselves all the way (not that far) back to the entry and voyeurizes the communication/reproduction habits of fungusmen.

with me so far?  good.

Now, to get this further in perspective, our Ranger is a High Elf and he does the High Elf Snob act perfectly.  The Priest is a half-Elf, the Arcane caster is some other form of demihuman with red eyes and gray skin and little bump horns on his forehead, and the Paladin's some kind of dragonborn/hybrid thing.

Both Priest and Pally have significant negatives to stealth.  This is unimportant.  the Ranger has skilled into close combat but stays sixty feet away minimum at all times when it looks like trouble, and the arcane spellcaster REALLy likes dropping AOE effects into the middle of melee and doesn't quite understand why that might not be a good thing.

esp. considering my thief? half the time is doing that jackie-chan shit thanks to an unshakeable case of hellbie dice that have had me falling off of roofs and cliffs right into the middle of enemy guards more than once.

apparently I am at my most lethal when trying to recover from a humiliating fall or fumble.

so here I am, getting the door into the rest of the complex (we were given a MAP) while they're clanking around trying to stir up trouble far, far, far, away from the only guy who's managed an unassisted face-to-face kill on more than one occasion.

(because I'm locksmithing/safecracking the door they all gave up on after one or two loud bashes.)

eventually, I get the door open (Sustained action, GM had me rolling for 20 minutes straight.)

and...they finally return, enter a short corridor with a bend, to find another door.  same condition as the first-locked, and rusted shut.

I'm going through supplies of oil and files at a furious pace unsticking the lock, and when I do, one of the casters lights to the bright idea to use a specific cantrip to open the door. 

Now, that's certainly better than 20 minutes of me prying and lubricating the damn thing to get it open.  (I am a ****** hero.)

So the Priest does this instead of the arcanist, who's busy hanging back behind the Ranger, who is also hanging back, and the Paladin, who's ALSO hanging back, leaving me beside the priest.

door opens, and it's the first time any of us has (In character) seen a troll.

the Priest's player wanted to try a 'friendship' spell on the Troll, who's been trapped in this 10x10 room long enough to be just about insane from hunger.

roll initiative.

Priest beats everyone.  I just tell the GM I'm 'holding my action'.

ufortunately, Troll beat me.

so here's what happens; Priest digs out a Ration pack, and offers it to the hungry troll...who proceeds to accept both rations, and his arm. Chomp!

My held action triggers, and I haul back on the Priest, dragging him out of the room as his hitpoints hit zero.

Troll rakes his ribs on the way out (opportunity attack) and we barely squeeze past the Paladin, who's suddenly become interested in what's going on.  HE runs into claw range and gets chopped up pretty good, but that's our entire healing battery right there. Priest's on his second death failure and I'm using my  (Skilled into it because I had a feeling at first level) ordinary medicine skill to try and stop the bleeding and keep his insides on his inside.

Now, is the time when it's time to shout 'retreeeeeaaat!!'  The passage is narrow and the troll is large, it can't quite reach us easily (Yet).

but I'm stuck doing a sustained action right around the corner from the place our Priest gave his arm for a...pet? friend? whatever.

second death save for the Priest, I roll a 2.  Not happening, but since it's a sustained effort, and my character is...well, he's really stubborn...we go for try number 3.

Natural frikking 20 on a barely-proficient nonmagical healing check.

Essentially stopping the Priest from bleeding out to dead on his third death save.

My 20 success, beat his 3 failure.

He lives!!

only now we've got a wounded paladin, a confused ranger and an apparently apathetic and slightly cowardly mage.

with a troll crawing its way into the open.

I end up with a little time, hand the now-stabilized Priest to the wounded paladin, "Get Out!!" the heroes obey this simple advice, leaving me behind in the room to do my dirty thiefy thing.

In this case, with a jar of lamp oil, 50 ball bearings, a rag soaked in alcohol, and a guttering torch.

I grenade the Troll in the tight entryway just as it pushes its teethy maw through the doorway with arms hooked on the door-sill.

and run away, luckily NOT on fire.

can't say same for the troll, which will have to deal with both ball bearings on the floor, and a 5x5x5 blazing-merrily mix of alcohol, soap, and lamp-oil.

I am thinking I will be negotiating for both a larger share of the treasure from this, AND leadership of the party.  (We're burning through my toys faster an they're harder to find/more expensive than yours.)

assuming of course, the burning troll doesn't find its way outside to finish us off while we're all wounded.  The lesson from this?

do not feed the damn trolls!!!!

"If you have to ask permission, then it's no longer a Right, it has been turned into a Privilege-something that can be and will be taken from you when convenient."

Simon Landmine

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #74 on: 04 March 2020, 13:45:54 »
[applause]
"That's Lieutenant Faceplant to you, Corporal!"

Things that I have learnt through clicking too fast on 'Move Done' on MegaMek: Double-check the CF of the building before jumping onto it, check artillery arrival times before standing in the neighbouring hex, and don't run across your own minefield.

"Hmm, I wonder if I can turn this into a MM map."

grimlock1

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #75 on: 04 March 2020, 14:26:50 »
I've learned that the player who wound up with that artifact is probably the worst person, I do mean person not just a character, to give such a thing to.  Or Best.  Depends on your point of view.

Though I'm trying to remember if I shared the story of the last Pathfinder game I ran or not already.  Pretty sure I have.
Advice one GM gave me was that the best games happen when players are active agents of chaos.:-)
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Apollo's Law- if it needs Clan tech to make it useable, It doesn't deserve those resources in the first place.
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MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #76 on: 04 March 2020, 14:33:31 »
Well, there's chaotic but smart and then there's Chaotic Stupid.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

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Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #77 on: 04 March 2020, 17:24:04 »
I could use a player like you in my D&D game, Cannonshop…  ^-^

Cannonshop

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #78 on: 05 March 2020, 09:15:29 »
I could use a player like you in my D&D game, Cannonshop…  ^-^

There are MANY players like me out there-just look for the guys who primarily play Rogues and/or generic fighters-particularly the ones who pick 'baseline human' by reflex instead of min/maxing for optimal stats on the sheet.  (Generally we're all ex-munchkins of one sort or another who burned out on the 'maximize your stats' style of play).

this isn't to say I'm not still a powergamer, just that I tend to put a lot more into intelligence and wisdom without running a spellcaster than the book tends to recommend for non-spellcasting classes, because often as not, I wind up having to 'patch a hole in the lineup'.

which is, in a way, the entire schtick of the adventuring rogue classes in most games.  'able to do most things, but not as well as the specialists'.

accepting that 'not as well as' is the key, of course.  In that above situation, the Pally wasted his spell for the day on a detect magic on a door behind us, the Arcanist was kind of chasing butterflies and the Priest was...well, I guess he was just used to having the highest armor class in the party and didn't think.

not that I haven't done some pretty stupid things in this campaign-I went through an entire adventure without putting my armor on (and almost died three times).

"If you have to ask permission, then it's no longer a Right, it has been turned into a Privilege-something that can be and will be taken from you when convenient."

grimlock1

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #79 on: 05 March 2020, 13:20:54 »
do not feed the damn trolls!!!!
That's what you got out of this encounter?  There are a few other conclusions I might draw...
I'm rarely right... Except when I am.  ---  Idle question.  What is the BV2 of dread?
Apollo's Law- if it needs Clan tech to make it useable, It doesn't deserve those resources in the first place.
Sure it isn't the most practical 'mech ever designed, but it's a hundred ton axe-murderer. If loving that is wrong I don't wanna be right.

Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #80 on: 05 March 2020, 17:33:06 »
I've found Rogues to be somewhat OP in 5e.  Being able to sneak attack every round with the barest scrap of cover (with a bow, or against flanked opponents) is simply killer.

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #81 on: 05 March 2020, 18:42:16 »
Rogues are extremely good at killing single targets.  They're much less effective at fighting in groups and they also tend to do poorly when enemies actually focus on taking them down rather than going after the tanks.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

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Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #82 on: 05 March 2020, 18:48:47 »
If that happens, the tanks aren't doing their jobs...

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #83 on: 05 March 2020, 21:02:55 »
Depends on the situation.  Sometimes you just have too many enemies for the tanks to lock down all of them, and sometimes you're up against enemies who are smart enough to realize that the puny humans that are in the back aiming bows or wands at them are more dangerous than the puny humans shaking swords at them (though that's more true of older editions since fighters, paladins, and barbarians are all pretty good at dishing out sustained damage to single targets).
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

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Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #84 on: 05 March 2020, 21:05:15 »
After my wife departed the game, I inherited her Rogue in addition to my Fighter.  Her shortbow plus my 20 AC seems to drop things pretty fast, though not due to any damage I do...

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #85 on: 05 March 2020, 23:38:50 »
With Fighters it can depend on which fighting style and fighter specialization you go with- a Battle Master with Two-Handed weapons style can get some impressive damage output with their Maneuvers whereas a Purple Dragon Knight with Protective Style functions more as party support.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

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Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #86 on: 06 March 2020, 04:32:27 »
I'm a Battlemaster, but I need a shield to get to 20 AC...

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #87 on: 06 March 2020, 12:20:53 »
That still doesn't necessarily hurt your damage potential, but just pumping out damage isn't the only way to be useful.

But we should take this to a new thread and leave this one to talking about dumb players.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

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Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #88 on: 06 March 2020, 16:20:35 »
True, true... PM inbound...

grimlock1

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #89 on: 06 March 2020, 16:31:36 »
True, true... PM inbound...
I'ld be curious to listen in on that conversation...
I'm rarely right... Except when I am.  ---  Idle question.  What is the BV2 of dread?
Apollo's Law- if it needs Clan tech to make it useable, It doesn't deserve those resources in the first place.
Sure it isn't the most practical 'mech ever designed, but it's a hundred ton axe-murderer. If loving that is wrong I don't wanna be right.

Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #90 on: 06 March 2020, 17:14:29 »
I'll forward you what I sent...

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #91 on: 07 March 2020, 21:47:41 »
I just remembered one guy I had in a group for a while.  He was super vocal about not wanting to fight rats because "they're noob mobs and not a challenging monster."

He brought this up every session, despite my never having thrown any rats at the party.

Finally, though, I got tired of it since he refused to stop even after one of the other players said it was getting annoying.  So I arranged for the party to have an encounter with "Abyssal Scourge Rats," which were brown bears with the Fiendish template that inflicted Filth Fever with their bites.

After his character was nearly eaten, he got the message and knocked it off.
Warning: this post may contain sarcasm.

"I think I've just had another near-Rincewind experience," Death, The Color of Magic

"When in doubt, C4." Jamie Hyneman

DOC_Agren

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #92 on: 08 March 2020, 13:58:32 »
Okay it is not my group but a GM I know who running a Dark Heresy Group for 4 players (Arbite, Cleric, Guardwoman, & Adept) rank 5/6 operating for the 1st time fully undercover, not overt members of the Inquistion.
While operating in new planet "think like Wild West", investigating Smugglers, the team endup staying in hotel in a small village while waiting to travel farther inland overnight.  They had a few drinks with supper in the bar and then went to bed.
Unknowning that the a gang had decided these travelers well, were ripe for a robbery/murder.   2 team of 3 mook gunslingers (1 armed with sledgehammer and revolver, 2 with a pump action shotgun and revolver, 3 armed with a revolver) line up on each door to the rooms they are staying in back by 1 "experienced gunslinger" with a SMG and a revolver.  Not that this group should really be a challenge for these 4, but they never posted a Watch, so the 1st clue they had anything was wrong was sledgehammer hitting the door lock and then the shotgunner slamfiring the shotgun into the room.  Had 1 door not taken 2 sledgehammer swings to open, we might be talking party kill (as the Arbite and the Cleric were caught by surprise in that room for 1 round).   

Okay so what group of experienced players doesn't keep watch at night????

End result
Guardwoman shot twice once from shotgun in the left leg, right arm by revolver
Adept shot in the chest by revolver and in right leg (trying to stop the bleeding)
Arbite shot twice by shotgun 1 body other head (min damage)
Cleric shot once in Head by Shotgun still kinda functional, revolver to head (blew a fate point to avoid death)

Guardwoman with autopistol on full auto dropped most of the team hitting her room
Adept got 1 hit with heavy pistol he had into a mook head
Cleric drew his pistol hit nothing
Arbite grabbed his combat shotgun and blew away the team hitting his room and then made to to the hallway to asssit the next room

"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"

DarkSpade

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #93 on: 08 March 2020, 14:09:20 »

Okay so what group of experienced players doesn't keep watch at night????


I have never once played any RPG where the players bothered with a watch when they were staying in an hotel in a town.  Was this a really small town with a bad rep or did they know they were being hunted? 
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Daryk

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #94 on: 08 March 2020, 14:20:21 »
No Shadowrun in your experience, then?  ???

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #95 on: 08 March 2020, 14:22:28 »
Yeah, usually keeping watch in town is only done 8f the place has a seriously bad rep or they know someone is targeting them.  Also, it's difficult to have an effective watch if they're in separate rooms.
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DarkSpade

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #96 on: 08 March 2020, 14:38:45 »
No Shadowrun in your experience, then?  ???

To be fair, I've only once been part of a shadowrun game that got far enough for the players to actually need rest and they had a reliable safe house to do so.
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DOC_Agren

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #97 on: 08 March 2020, 15:22:11 »
Yeah, usually keeping watch in town is only done 8f the place has a seriously bad rep or they know someone is targeting them.  Also, it's difficult to have an effective watch if they're in separate rooms.
Did the place have a bad rep, not to them they were strangers in a strange land...  but was like any Wild West style town, and they took no security measures outside of locking the door.
The group that hit them, had no connection to the their target just want the wealth the "tourist" brought with them.
No Shadowrun in your experience, then?  ???
oh yes, any cheap motel u always keep 1 or more up and alert while you are running.
To be fair, I've only once been part of a shadowrun game that got far enough for the players to actually need rest and they had a reliable safe house to do so.
A reliable safehouse!!!! 8)  I know groups I've played with who would still have made sure 1 person was assigned security and rotated thur
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"

MoneyLovinOgre4Hire

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #98 on: 08 March 2020, 16:10:50 »
Yeah, that was a mistake on their part but not really an extreme one.

Also, even in a dangerous Wild West town, the typical dangeris still more likely to be pickpockets or burglars rather than an outright shootout. Gangs like that would be more likely to pick a target that they'd ambush outside of town.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #99 on: 01 May 2020, 09:29:55 »
Oh, here's one I was reminded of.  I was a player in the group, but this guy's antics deserve a mention here.

Can't remember the player's name anymore, but let's call him Edgy the Edgelord.

D&D 3.0.  Party is first level.  He's set to join the game.  He's playing a wizard.

The party is in town.  He announces that his first level wizard is going to go into the roughest bar in town.  Once there, he starts to loudly complain about "being forced to associate with such riffraff."

He unsurprisingly angers most of the patrons.  Rather than attempt a charisma check to cool things down, he announces that he's going to cast a spell.  Now, people who've played 3rd Edition probably remember that casting a spell while someone's in melee range with you provokes an attack of opportunity.  He did not.  His character was immediately set upon and beaten senseless.

The guards were, of course, summoned.  And what was discovered upon his chest but a tattoo of the (un)holy symbol of Vecna, and a search of his bags revealed other items proving that he was, in fact, a Vecna worshiper.  Something that was banned in that kingdom.

Edgy the Wizard was executed on the spot.

He'd never even introduced his character to the party.
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Greatclub

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #100 on: 01 August 2021, 13:34:36 »
I wasn't actually the GM, I was playing battletech a table over. This was about two years back.

The group was on the younger end of teens, their parents using the store as cheapish babysitting. One guy was playing D&D like it was a MMO - kick in the door, attack the closest thing heading your way. The rest of the PCs were getting wroth at the fact he kept NOPEing their scouting, diplomacy, and anything resembling planning or tactics, to the point where they had their PCs kick the crap out of his PC. Sock party with swords, and they left him too low on HP to survive running ahead again.

Kid was literally crying at the table. Hurt to watch. He smartened up a little, but I think changed groups later.
« Last Edit: 01 August 2021, 13:42:37 by Greatclub »

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #101 on: 01 August 2021, 15:38:47 »
I'd have had the very next monster, be something that could paralyze him, and then watch as the other pcs just LEFT HIM in the doorway, while they escaped.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #102 on: 11 August 2021, 21:54:01 »
I wasn't actually the GM, I was playing battletech a table over. This was about two years back.

The group was on the younger end of teens, their parents using the store as cheapish babysitting. One guy was playing D&D like it was a MMO - kick in the door, attack the closest thing heading your way. The rest of the PCs were getting wroth at the fact he kept NOPEing their scouting, diplomacy, and anything resembling planning or tactics, to the point where they had their PCs kick the crap out of his PC. Sock party with swords, and they left him too low on HP to survive running ahead again.

Kid was literally crying at the table. Hurt to watch. He smartened up a little, but I think changed groups later.

I'd have had the very next monster, be something that could paralyze him, and then watch as the other pcs just LEFT HIM in the doorway, while they escaped.

as a GM, I would've used a trap, or had him run into an environmental hazard instead.  a long enough fall and he could be stuck at the bottom with 1 hitpoint, then the other players get to roleplay debating whether or not to save him before the fungus gets too bad.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #103 on: 14 January 2023, 22:56:06 »
I wasn't a GM, but in D&D, a player was searching some bones for treasure and found something slimy and green so they picked it up with their bare-hands (Green-slime).

In an Aerotech game, a player thrusted all his fighters to max-speed, and ran out of fuel shortly; most hit asteroids.

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #104 on: 23 January 2023, 10:20:38 »
Just had to share this even though I was not GMing.

Since the regular group is in a bit of flux right now we decided to do a one shot level 1 campaign.  First idea a Plasmoid Barbarian but decided not to go that route.  Then I said screw it since I was being indecisive and used D&D beyond's randomized character creation option constrained to 1st level.  Got a Satyr Rogue that absolutely would have died in the first combat(AC 11 with Leather armor and a 10 Dex but a 16 Strength can't remember the rest of the stats).  Second try I got a Mark of the Sentinel Human Wizard named Pheobe Ragewillow with the background of Pirate Strength 8, Dex 14, Con 18, Int 11, Wis 12, Cha 10 with the cantrips Blade Ward, Dancing Lights, and Shape Water.  For 1st level options it gave me Charm Person, Distort Value, Earth Tremor, Illusory Script, Silvery Barbs, and Snare.  With Mark of the Sentinel giving a 1/d casting of Shield I have declared the character Brick Wizard.  I find it absurdly hilarious despite being nearly completely ineffective.

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #105 on: 03 April 2023, 05:06:27 »
I had an interesting group when GMing Shadowrun. The run was fairly standard, until part of the group tried to sell out the other part to the megacorp that was their target. I ended up having to put the two parts of the teams into different rooms, as the characters went to great lengths to work against each other, and devised devious plots to kill each other. Two characters were dead by the end of all this, and a feud had started that would last until the end of the campaign.

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #106 on: 03 April 2023, 10:13:20 »
My brother in law recently forced me out of retirement to DM a 3.5 campaign. He tried to play like medieval grand theft auto. He thought storming the mayor’s residence and killing the city leader would somehow make him, a third level barbarian, in charge. I mean never mind the city leader is a retired 15th level bard (and like a dozen guards); the logic was astonishingly dumb. I would have let him die horribly but I didn’t want to spend another three (3) hours rolling a new character

So now we’re doing a crash course in How Not To Die. The last session’s lesson was “Sometimes the Wizard casts fireball at you.”

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monbvol

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #107 on: 03 April 2023, 11:40:47 »
I'm getting to know the feeling.

Since we had a couple people missing someone else decided to do a 5e level 3 campaign yesterday.

We were told to make characters that were part of a group of semi-cadets that had been getting trained to become part of a city guard.  Honestly if I were DM I would of told a couple of them to try again with their character concepts.  I think you'll see what I mean as I give the party rundown.

So we wound up with a Minotaur Rogue whose background was a Pirate.

A Wood Elf Beast Master Ranger who I'm pretty sure took the Outlander background.

A Simic Hybrid Artificer background unknown.

Me as a Plasmoid Circle of the Moon Druid with the Mercenary Veteran background.

The problem child murder hobo.  Yeah no matter what that player puts down on their sheet that's what they end up being.  They claim Chaotic Neutral or even Chaotic Good but I have yet to see them play anything other than text book Chaotic Evil.  Some sort of small race Circle of Wild Fire Druid so yeah all about causing problems.

The Minotaur wound up being the party leader.  It was them or me and narratively it made very little sense for it to be my character for reasons a bit long to get into.

Our task was to investigate reports of slave trading coming from a apartment complex with a commercial zone on the first floor with a courtyard.

But because we had zero party cohesion, one member not paying attention to the task given to us, and no attempt at any sort of plan well things got stupid fast.

I knew this was coming so I gave up any hope of playing a serious character and decided mine was very curious about feeling the textures and shapes of EVERYTHING they could.

So when we went into a shop that's what I did.

The Minotaur was trying to go undercover, the Ranger was flashing their badge a lot, and we got no where with our task.  So we left.

We had a pointless conversation with our boss.

Then we went back.

We finally start focusing on our task a little.  Find a door that looks suspicious in the merchant shop in the complex.

I get told we're going to check it out.  So we roll for initiative so we can decide who is doing what in the shop.  The problem child wins and chooses violence.

No attempt at diplomacy or persuasion.  Just straight to Firebolt at one of the shop guards.

Yeah.  It went worse from there.

Honestly I do find myself becoming a little exhausted with this trend in my gaming group.

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #108 on: 03 April 2023, 15:06:54 »
I ran a short campaign in college where one of the players decided this was his chance to live out all of his… romantic inclinations. I made it clear I wasn’t going to indulge him beyond the normal CHA related shenanigans in service of the party objectives. This apparently did not sound enough like No. After a couple sessions of setting DCs extremely high I inserted a new barmaid. A bored succubus on vacation. He was dead within ten minutes.

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #109 on: 03 April 2023, 18:01:06 »
That's a little more than a fireball, but it sounds like it was EARNED...  ::)

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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #110 on: 03 April 2023, 18:28:14 »
He went out the way he deserved to.
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Re: Dumbest group you've GMed for
« Reply #111 on: 03 April 2023, 18:59:57 »
He went out the way he deserved to.

And possibly the way he wanted to.
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