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Last time I GM'd a Dark Heresy game, one of the Guardsman players who'd gone down the 'commander' career path had assumed command of a squad of NPC conscripts under attack by cultists. He was about to lead a bayonet charge, standing on the edge of a blast crater and urging them onwards to glory, when he started to stride fowards and fired his plasma pistol.

It overheated. He was already wounded and took enough critical damage to incinerate himself. Not the best example to set for the conscripts.

AD&D 2e.
Fighting a Red Dragon in its' lair.

Spider climbed my Gnomish warrior (Boots of Spider Climbing) up a wall to ambush the dragon (at this point, he was flying around the huge cavern complex).
We'd already established that the boots would work on nearly any surface that could be walked on or climbed normally. So, as the Dragon flew by, Gaddlroot jumped off the wall, landing on the Dragon's back (ALMOST didn't stick the landing - no pun intended). After 4 or 5 rounds of EXTREME hacking on the dragon, he (the dragon) used a specialized tunnel (about 50' up the wall of his cavern), got himself back up into a VERY tight spot (Gaddlroot had to lay on him not to be mangled against the ceiling), and blew a huge gout of flame breath.

Gaddlroot, with NO special protection from flames at all, failed his saving throw and took a LOT of damage.

The dragon returned to battle the party, who had a few rounds to resituate themselves, due to Gaddlroot's sacrifice, and died within 2 rounds.

Gaddlroot's selfless bravery won the day, but it cost him his life.

The overall scenario is considered an EPIC WIN for Gaddlroot.

So, where's the EPIC FAIL?
He failed his saving throw by ONE. Had he passed, he'd have lived.

Eric

Rolled up a character for a brief game whilst in Poland with some NWN buddies.

Rolled incredibly badly using 4d6, keep the best three dice. Stats ranged from a 4 up to a maximum of 12. Averaged about 9. Obviously, the DM let me re-roll. I actually rolled worse. I had a lowest stat of 4, but this time a max of 11 (so not even a single "plus"-stat and a terrible average. This time, even though the DM said roll again, I chose to keep the stats.

I decided to play an elven wizard. I landed up starting with 1 HP as I assigned one of the lowest stats to CON and the other lowest to STR. The DM (or me, I forget) decided that I was also a haemophiliac

Walking along the beach at the very beginning of the story, got a cut from some fauna just as we entered the jungle and bled to death before the cleric had joined the party.

(I should point out that we all found this riotously funny. I had hoped to have my character rejoin as a ghost or some other undead at some point soon in the story - it was that sort of silly campaign - but things just never got far enough for that to happen.)

During my first (and last) time playing Shadowrun, my Spetsnaz Orc got into a fight with an NPC Adept. During this fight, the dice gods decided to take a giant dump on me. Long story short, the guy jump kicked me in the face twice, I emptied an entire magazine at him from my AKSU 74 and missed, he kicked me some more, I reloaded and wounded him, knocking him on the ground. I came over and decided to shoot him point blank in the head. I missed. Then I tried it again. Blew half his face off, but he didn't die. Finally I just curbstomped him.

Bascially my epically badass Spetsnaz trained Orc street samurai failed repeatedly to kill what amounted to an acrobat.

EPIC. FAIL.

oh i'm a dm for my dnd sessions and have plenty of examples of stupid players. Heres the best one.
I describe something to the extent of
"big nosed, glowing eyes, grey skinned, short, hooded beings on top of a tower. they have bows and are watching you."

one player says i approach the tower.

"the beings yell angrily at you in a language you cannot understand, but the message is clear; Go Away!"

i approach with out my weapon saying i mean them no harm

"the beings whip out their bows and notch arrows, they are clearly aiming at you."

I put my hands up to show them i mean them no harm

"one fires and arrow near you, clearly a warning shot"

I approach the tower, in a non threatning way

"(roll) (roll) (roll) You take 98 damage as the arrows make a pincushion out of you"(IIRC)

This is not a fail but in the end it might as well be. I was DMing and one of my players was playing a bard, they were fighting a group of NPC's and the Bard charging into the fray ((no i don't know why he did this)), he swung at the NPC barbarian, he scored a crit!, then he rolled MAX damage! Then we factored in STR, and DMG Reduction.... and it equaled exactly "0" points of damage. The NPC barbarian thanked the bard for the shave, then slapped him twenty feet across the room putting the bard at -1hp.

When i played a Swedish post-apocalyptic role-playing game called Mutant, epic fails haunted me(perhaps due to the very stupid and pointless ideas me and my fellow players sometimes get), yet i always seemed to escape them. Here's some examples:
1: Our party was fighting some bloody close-quarter battles in a tall building. The enemy had warmed up a helicopter on the roof and planted C4 all over. They were just about to escape when we came out. One of my companions killed the guy with the detonator with a lucky shot, and a firefight erupted as both sides attempted to gain control of it. A friend of mine managed to keep the enemies low with his machine gun. This opened a opportunity for me to dash over and get the detonator. But naturally, i wanted it to be dramatic. so i decided to make a commando roll over to the detonator. I was forced to make a test. I protested, since i was the most acrobatic guy in the team, but the GM said: "Hey, you have to roll a 100 to fail."(Mutant uses D100.) Guess what i rolled? a 100. To add insult to injury, i fell on top of the detonator. Boom.
But, while the rest of the team crumbled to dust together with the building, I survived due to having wings. Neither players nor GM liked me for an hour after that.

2: We had just emerged from the deep after a dive. Everyone except one, who was keeping the boat running. Just as we broke the surface, we were attacked by a giant mutant-shark. We fought the shark desperately, and wounded it badly, but we were almost dead and needed our friend in the boat's assistance. He saw he only has to cause a minor damage before the shark dies, but he had to do it fast. Without effective weapons of any kind, he utters the fateful words: "Heck it, i just grab the closest stick-shaped object and jump out and attack the shark!" Only when he already have leaped out to our rescue, he realizes what he has grabbed. A fish. The following shark frenzy kills half of the party before the shark slashed itself to death on the boat propel.
Nobody liked him for an hour after that.

Played a game a few years ago where we had to kidnap some kid from a noble family. We had to go around asking people at town at first what the person looks like, where to find him. We didn't really get all that good of information, as you'll soon find out. I was playing a gnoll ranger at the time (one of my primary characters, he's still kicking!) and when we were sneaking through the targets residence, we came across a room, a crib and a sleeping baby, which we failed to avoid waking. It started crying, the brutish servant of the residence came to the rescue and engaged us.

Now, heres the kicker. The city we were in wouldn't allow 'visitors' weapons, we were all unarmed aside from the Ardent we had in the group (He had some pretty sweet psychic powers.) Anyway. The servent happened to charge at me first, and i rolled a search check to see if I could find anything as an improvised weapon. The DM rolled a dice and said

"Uh, you see the baby and take it by the leg. Swinging it mightily at the brutish human servant."

So, I did just that, managed to roll a critical on my dice and smacked him upside the head with the baby. The kid exploded, blood everywhere and the servant stumbled aside in shock. We ditched and fled the town, only to find out the baby was who we were supposed to kidnap. Alive.

Greusome, but still one of the most horribly hilarious things I have ever done in DnD.

Wow.
I find that disgusting and disturbing... and not at all humorous.

MagickalMemories wrote:Wow.
I find that disgusting and disturbing... and not at all humorous.

Have to agree - that is gross.

As an old school RPGer, I have to say, that's what happens when you let Gnolls as PCs!!!

RatherFatRat wrote:Played a game a few years ago where we had to kidnap some kid from a noble family. We had to go around asking people at town at first what the person looks like, where to find him. We didn't really get all that good of information, as you'll soon find out. I was playing a gnoll ranger at the time (one of my primary characters, he's still kicking!) and when we were sneaking through the targets residence, we came across a room, a crib and a sleeping baby, which we failed to avoid waking. It started crying, the brutish servant of the residence came to the rescue and engaged us.

Now, heres the kicker. The city we were in wouldn't allow 'visitors' weapons, we were all unarmed aside from the Ardent we had in the group (He had some pretty sweet psychic powers.) Anyway. The servent happened to charge at me first, and i rolled a search check to see if I could find anything as an improvised weapon. The DM rolled a dice and said

"Uh, you see the baby and take it by the leg. Swinging it mightily at the brutish human servant."

So, I did just that, managed to roll a critical on my dice and smacked him upside the head with the baby. The kid exploded, blood everywhere and the servant stumbled aside in shock. We ditched and fled the town, only to find out the baby was who we were supposed to kidnap. Alive.

Greusome, but still one of the most horribly hilarious things I have ever done in DnD.

thats rediculously funny, but why didn't your dm let you just punch (or perhaps in your gnolls case, claw) him in the face? More over why did you have to kidnap a baby?

It wasn't the act of killing the kid I found funny, just how badly we had ended up screwing our mission over.

And yeah, gnolls will be gnolls .

Anyway, I rolled a search check to find something blunt and usable as a club rather than clawing (the DM prefers using his own weapon stats for certain improv weapons rather than what the PHB states. This is 3.5 Mind you.) and I suppose there was more than one thing since he rolled for the outcome of what I found, which was the kid, which was used as a club.

Anyway, we didn't know the baby was who we had to kidnap, and the reason apparently was because a rivaling family wanted to use the kid as ransom and to gain power over the others. Since weapons aren't exactly readily available in the city usually kidnapping and ransom are their primary actions to intimidate and gain power over others. For us, there was a lot of money involved.

When we screwed up, we had mercs on our asses for a good remainder of the campaign since that pissed off the 'client' pretty bad.

We were sailing across the seas, having captured a pirate's ship, when another pirate's ship appeared, and challenged us. Ollie the rogue attempted to lie us out of trouble, by claiming to be an infamous pirate lord. In the minutes that followed, our DM rolled four critical fails. Not only did the pirate believe him, he also recalled hearing stories of "Captain Bloodybeard's" exploits, wife and family, despite him being made up on the spot.

MagickalMemories wrote:Wow.
I find that disgusting and disturbing... and not at all humorous.

I have to disagree because I find babies annoying as all they do is cry and gak everywhere.

It made me lol.

Am I going to hell?

yes but so am I

Haha I was playing with 3 friends, and THe dm

Me: RANGER
Devin: Barbarian
craig: Cleric
tony: Monk

We were all level 16, and we went through several doors, we found this journal with a map of the dungeon, and various wrightings. There was a big room with a treasure chest in it, we go there, open the chest, find 4 rings. We put them on and we all get a chill, the rings are red yellow blue and green.
mine was red, my charictor started to cry blood and he ended up bleeding to death -_-.
The blue one (devin) got attacked by like 30 water monsters,who tried taking the ring, he ran and fell in a water cavern and got impaled on a stalagmite..
The yellow one (tony) got Insane demonic powers, but his holy symbol started to burn into his chest, and scarred him. he still lives today.
The green one(craig) later on went into a room of pure emralds. and he started collecting, but the door went shut, and the oxygne got absorbed and he ran out of air...

But the monk still had the journal and next to the map, by the ring room, it said go to page seventy four... so he did and it said in bold letters If you enter, your greed will kill you... To find what is real you must dig deeper.

So he went and threw the chest over, and there was a
Deamon Sword
a pair of flaming blue claws
A crystal bow,
And a bunch of spells


So guys, always listen to your Dungeon master and dont be greedy

I generally play pretty conservatively so I generally avoid getting myself into bonehead situations, so really bad things that happen to me are usually the fault of the dice more than anything else.

The only example that really comes to mind when I was playing a Cleric and a scholarly variant with less combat skills at that! He preferred to resolve things nonviolently whenever possible sure enough, after the group cleaves its way through about half the goblin king appears and appeals for a truce to stop the slaughter. My character being more than happy to act negotiator/representative takes his invitation to talk things out, and is promptly turned into people slurry.

I didn't feel to bad since it was a pretty in-character end and there was no way he wouldn't have taken the offer, no matter how shady it seemed.



However, putting myself aside I can certainly think of some great ones by other people. In particular one individual in a group I DM'd for stands out.


Session 1:

The group is starting at level 3 and the basic premise is that after being pulled through a serious of unexplained magical distortions they've suddenly materialized in a strange jungle. During their time dimension hopping before the game began characters had picked up a bunch of items. Sort of think it like starting with a grab bag of mystery items.

Anyway. Amongst their items was a bunch of "Small smooth metal orbs, that fit neatly in the palm of a human hand. On each orb there are three indentations on one side that are about the right size for a human finger to fit. Each of the indication is a different color one, one red, one blue, one yellow on each orb".

Group: "Eh. What are these, they look suspicious. Better check if they're magic"
*Detect Magic*
Group: "Yep they're magic, powerful too. Maybe we should leave them behind or at least seperate them out from the rest of our items, we don't what exactly they do"
Me: "Does anyone want to use spellcraft to try and ascertain more about the magic aura"
Him "Okay."
*rolls*
Me: "You can't figure out its exact purpose or the spells used in the orb's creation but you know that it is aura is that of extremely powerful evocation magic"
Group: "Yeah.. these are defaintly going to be dange........."
Him "I push one of the indentations on the top"
Group: "Wait don't do that!"
Me: "Which one?"
Him: "The Red one"
Me: "The orb turns partially transparent, you can make out the image of a flame burning in in the center of the orb. It gets very hot to the touch, not quite enough to burn you but it's a noticeable heat. It is making a very high-pitched buzzing noise"
Me: "What do you do with it once that happens?"
Him: "I put it in my backpack"
Me: "Okay, everyone within 20ft of him please make reflex saves"

This proved to be one of the least stupid moves he made during the entire campaign.

Hmm...I've had a few in my day:

As an Elf Warrior/Cleric, the group had retired to an inn for some R & R, so I spent my 8 hours meditating or whatever, and decided to come down the stairs "looking serene", the GM told me to make a reflex save on the dodgy step, and I fell down the stairs knocking myself out and causing some decent damage to the floor thanks to my FullPlate armor, left me out of pocket and the butt of several jokes in that town.

That character also had a narrow escape through a dimensional portal after being teleported to the head of a Great White Wurm and trying to stab it in the brain with a ghost blade...completely failed and had the choice of fighting several dragons and around 10000 assorted goblins or running into the mysterious portal said army was standing in front of (Luckily I fell between them and the portal)

Some kinda GM fail from the same campaign, pitted us against an Elder red dragon with the intention of killing some or all of the party (The GM had sorta let us get a little too powerful and rich, and wanted to either kill us off or at least weaken us at one point we had 2 flying fortresses, but decided to sell one for what was basically unlimited amounts of gold, his solution ended up being the aforementioned dimensional portal after throwing an elder White Wurm, serveral other dragons and an army or two of goblins), My cleric attempted to cast Harm on the dragon and failed, so our Warrior decided to make use of a fortress cube we had found by inserting into the dragons *ahem* Backdoor *ahem* and speaking the command word....after the battle all of the armor wearing types had a nice supply of red dragon scale armor.

Another character I had was the only survivor fighting some giant armadillo thing (cant remember what it was called) and decided to cut it open to try and salvage some magical gear off the devoured corpses of my party, only to get killed by the creatures exceptionally nasty stomach acids.

And once in a shadowrun campaign I played a maniac troll with a penchant for cop killing and large guns shoot down a helicopter from the back of a moving vehicle, only to have the helicopter crash on the road in front of us, causing the truck to be totalled and out precious cargo destroyed...funniest thing was it was a random news helicopter that happend to be nearby, and was in no way a threat to us.

del'Vhar wrote:As an Elf Warrior/Cleric, the group had retired to an inn for some R & R, so I spent my 8 hours meditating or whatever, and decided to come down the stairs "looking serene", the GM told me to make a reflex save on the dodgy step, and I fell down the stairs knocking myself out and causing some decent damage to the floor thanks to my FullPlate armor, left me out of pocket and the butt of several jokes in that town.

I would personally consider this a possible GM fail. Requiring rolls for trivial stuff like this is asking for failure and usually a sign the GM is frustrated at 'how good' the players are doing. Unless there was a combination of an additional source of difficulty, some sort of plot reason, a previous warning/hint that these stairs were difficult, or some other factor it comes off as a bit petty.

I think when I was GMing I wouldn't have done this situation unless wit was such that a failure was actually beneficial to the players, such as "You trip and fall, but in doing so knock a board loose from the wall revealing a small cubby hole. And, hey, that looks like a map inside! Maybe to a cool adventure and/or plot progression..."

The player characters are the stars of the story, and few players want to be the leads in a comic farce. The GM has a no-limit credit card on monsters, traps, and other ways to screw the players and should realize that they can enjoy their successes as well as their defeats. Let the player characters be what the players intended without a problem, especially in a non-combat cut scene, since the GM will probably want to get through the Villain's Big Monologue without being interrupted by "I attack!"

I think the GM was more just making me pay for making it clear I wanted to look super serene and godly like, and yeah, I rolled a 1 on the check so that particular step basically just crumbled under the weight of my armor...interestingly enough, it did lead to a sort of mini adventure, as I was unconscious while a pair of our more...evil party got in a fight with a drunk dwarf, and proceeded to shave his beard off and leave him unconscious outside the local "blue oyster" (see police academy if you dont know what that means )
Im pretty sure that the GM was basically just sorta nudging us along so we didnt stay in the town for too long, so me being the laughing stock of a bunch of people, and the local dwarf community wanting our blood was a pretty good incentive to leave

At least that's something. In general, requiring a roll when not doing 'hero stuff' in an RPG is usually the GM being passive-aggressive.

I have a number of faults as a GM... I don't describe the scene nearly as well as I feel I should, I can speed through things, and I've been known to let the players idle a bit too much... but I have (at least since I stopped being a teenager) always considered there to be a mutual level of respect and responsibility between players and the GM to make the game fun for everyone, not just one party.

I was once late to a gaming day and got left behind.

Dark Heresy intro adventure Shattered Hope, it happened at "that" room. Location number 10, with the Promethium tanks.

I had them perform perform an intelligence test each and they all recognized the scent as belonging to Promethium, the stuff that is extremely flammable.

Me: *reads out loud the description of the room*

Steve: "This could be tricky."

My brother, the genius: "I've got just the thing for that."

He grabs one of the grenades he got earlier.

Me: "Are you sure about that? I mean, really really sure?"

My brother: "Feth yes!"

He proceeds to lob a grenade..

Them:

Me:

So yeah, here's hoping he feths up even worse with Rogue Trader.

This is more of a DM fail then anything else. my friend's gnome rogue named oscar got a little to ahead of himself in a dungeon. He snuck aboard a zombie pirate ship looking for loot. then ended up soloing a zombie pirate captain, which was the minor boss of the dungeon. Oscar took no damage.....

not my character (i was the DM) but i had one of my player's rogues sneak up to a hill giant standing watch at the entrance to a cave and roll a crit to sneak attack him... and then roll all ones for the damage dice! 1d4 for the dagger, and 5d6 for sneak attack... all ones. when i looked at that roll, i told him (also a 40k player) "that's a dead terminator squad, buddy!". we RP'ed it that he gave the giant the worst stubbed toe he ever had in his life.

I was playing a game of 4e.

It was the Trollhaunt pregen.

We were level 11 and my fighter had a +20 to hit, so I only needed a 2 to hit most of anything.

Our DM decided to go along with the old critical misses thing from 3.5.

I rolled a one, and killed myself by punching myself in the face with a spiked gauntlet....

Not fun.

I had a moment like that. I was the group mage and to help the thief with sneaking into rooms I cast invisibility on him. now the invisible thief sneaks into a room and tries to backstab a zombie, needing a 3 to hit he somehow gets a one. And in the next rounds proceeds to have the gak kicked out of him, so far I haven't had any epic fails myself yet, although I haven't been playing long.

These are really not helping my inability to play this game....

They might make you feel better about yourself though!