What's the worst thing you've ever done as a GM?
Andre Canivet:
The worst thing I did I think was many years ago, playing Palladium Fantasy. I had written an adventure, where the characters had to travel to a roughly Japan-like island in a flying ship to find and recover 7 rune swords (the idea of the 7 swords I got from an episode of the BBC series Robin of Sherwood). Some of the swords were evil and cursed, while some were good--including a sword created for the Dragonwright religion. Unfortunately, it was my first experience as a GM, and I wasn't terribly well prepared. Namely, I hadn't actually figured out where all the swords were supposed to go. The group was left wondering what to do with them, and ended up dumping a lot of the evil swords in the ocean on their way back from the island. They took the remaining Dragonwright Sword to the one destination I had actually planned--which was a shrine deep in the Northern Wilderness.
I'd written a couple of riddles for them to decipher, which were challenging. But once they figured them out, they got there too quickly for my liking. So they stopped and looked around in a clearing. And after several minutes of asking me what was around and looking aimlessly for clues, someone asked me if there was a light to the North (aurora borealis, a clue from one of the riddles), and I said yes. They were upset that I hadn't told them right away that it was there, and I replied "you didn't ask."
They got funny looks on their faces, and I didn't GM again for a while. Too bad, too, because thinking about it now, that could have been an entire campaign if I'd done it right.
-A.
Luminous:
I killed the entire party with a dominated Kobold Cleric/Wizard/Necromancer in 3rd edition. The best part was using a spectral hand to grab the Bard's foot through the ground and cast Slay Living. The Ranger managed to kill the Drow that had Dominated the Kobold, but succumbed to poison and a Contingency spelled Fireball afterwards.
Months later, the new characters faced their old characters (raised as undead) and the kobold again.
darthfodder:
When I was DMing D&D 3.5, at one point I gave an archery focused ranger 50 arrows of 3rd level Magic Missile, because the party kept on getting nearly killed by things of equal CR. Terrible idea. I had to finagle in some spell casters with shield into the campaign and provide a few enounters with a CR a bit higher than the party. I hate those kind of cheap fixes, but in my defense;I was a new DM.
Ron Edwards:
Hi there,
In order to continue, this thread needs to become a discussion and not merely a poetry-slam about what each of us once did.
Aelwyn, please provide a general point or focus, or draw some conclusion to discuss. Otherwise this thread will be closed.
No one else post until then.
Best, Ron
Adam Dray:
The worst things I've done as a GM have nothing to do with gaming. Rather, they involve being a stupid twenty-something with alcohol. In one case, I got so drunk that I couldn't GM at all, and I passed out on the couch. In another case, I got drunk, psychoanalyzed my friends at the table, hit one of my brother's friends, and got in a screaming match with my dad. I stopped binge-drinking after that.
On a totally different level than that, though, in the past couple years, I totally railroaded a group through an encounter. It was obvious and awful. I was trying my hand at D&D 4E and I had this encounter planned. I ran a trial of the PCs as a skill challenge, except they won, but I convicted them anyway. When they asked what the hell the point of the skill challenge was, I said that they'd proven that they were innocent, but that the corrupt court had sentenced them anyway. They smelled the railroading and got pissed. The rest of the game was fine, but I vowed not to pull that kind of crap again. It's not like I didn't know better. I just slipped into decades-old habits I didn't realize that I still had.
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