Dumbest group you've GMed for

[solmanian]

Do tell.  :)

[panzerfaust150]

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.

[MrJake]

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.

 
 

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

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

[Nuclear-Fridge]

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.

[Pat Payne]

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]

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."

[Deadborder]

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.

[Black_Knyght]

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]

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.

[YingJanshi]

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 )

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

One wonders what "Bob's" plan would have been in the event that the Pirate Captain showed up in a Daishi or something.

[Black_Knyght]

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.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

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.

[NutritiousSlop]

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. 

[Taber_Evans]

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]

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."

[DarkSpade]

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.

[DOC_Agren]

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

[garhkal]

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"..

[Simon Landmine]

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.

[DOC_Agren]

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.

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

[Simon Landmine]

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.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

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.

[DOC_Agren]

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.

[Cannonshop]

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.

[Lone-Wolf]

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]

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?

[Lone-Wolf]

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]

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.