The weirdest magic items thread got me to thinking about bonehaded player moves, and the fact that roleplaying isn't necessarily about winning, if everyone has a good time. I've known players who have more fun having a character killed than most people do conquering the world, so long as they die in an entertaining fashion.

So what's the most boneheaded (but entertaning) thing you've ever seen a player do? I can think of several, most of them in Top Secret:

I forgot to lock the windows of a house I was guarding once. But that wasn't the real bonehead move. One of the players on the other side didn't think to check before picking the lock, and managed to lock himself out. Then break off a lock pick in the lock, trying to unlock it. Had to move to a different window.

One mission, we snuck in to a secret Fourth Reich base in Africa, break in to the computer, get pretty much everything, and sneak out without anyone being the wiser. And then, the character who had been planting (what we though were) small, distracting C-4 charges all over the place (and I mean all over the place) detonated them all at once and blew up most of the base, rendering the intel we'd just gotten compeltely useless.

The first mission I ever went on, we were supposed to pick up a defecting Russian scientist and escort him back to West Germany. When we met up with him, he immediately reached inside his jacket for what later turned out to be some papers for us. I wasn't the only one who misinterpreted his actions as a threat, and pulled out a gun and shot him. I was the only one who used a .357 instead of a dart gun loaded with tranqulizers.

One character, a computer geek by trade, was going on a mission to Monaco that involved spending some time in a casino, so he needed appropriate clothes, i.e., a tuxedo. He had one custom made (the read bonehead move was the rest of us not supervising this process). When it arrived, it was made out of kevlar (which wasn't unsual, actually, for us) in a camo pattern. He tried in on, and discovered the pocket inside the jacket, and announced, "Cool. A special pocket for Pop-Tarts!" (Which is what he carried in it, in fact, but he had the last laugh later one, when we were trapped inside a no-longer-functional surveillance van by a high powered maser. We were safe inside, but had no way to tell if the maser was still pointed at us, until Pop Tart - his offcial code name by this point - stuck a Pop Tart out the sun roof and watched the frosting melt.)

But, hands down, by far, thst most bone headed move I've ever personally sitnessed by a player character was by a character who was known ever after as Clusterfuck. He was a Secret Service agent. His cover was as a DEA agent. We were investigating a kidnapping, and had reason to believe that the kidnappers and the victim were in a particular hotel room. Probably cause of a felony in progress. So we broke in to the room (and didn't find anybody), and while we were poking around, the hotel detective showed up. Now, remember, Clusterfuck is a legitmate law enforcement agent, with a cover that gave him a second set legitimate law enforcement creditials. So what does he do? Does he show his badge, and explain he's on an official investigation, and so on? No. He shoots and kills the hotel detective. Now, at this point, there's another character in the kitchen area of the room who doesn't know what's going on (since CF used a sliencer). Said other character is a German national, in the country illegally. And has highly illegal plastic explosives on his person at the time. CF knows this. Had his head been anywher but up his butt, he could easily have blamed the other character. Hell, the other characaters there would probably have believed him (given the nature of the German character). But no, instead, he, in his own words, "goes down to the lobby, has the concierge call a cab, goes to the airport, and takes the first plan to Portugal, because the US doesn't have an extradition treaty with Portugal." The GM finally let him bring teh character back, but his code name from then on was Clusterfuck. (On the other hand, the player will answer to that name, too, at least when he's on his meds.)

I had a whole session of them. Tales from the Table: Bumbling in Freeport.

Here's a sample:

At one point the party's wizard was hit by a silver dart which had a note wrapped around it, "You die at midnight." The party concluded, rightly, that this was a threat! So they head back to the inn where they were staying and resolve to all stay awake in the common room so that they can't be surprised...

... all of them except the wizard, that is, who instead specifically gets his familiar drunk enough that it's unconscious and then goes upstairs and falls asleep himself.

Oddly enough, when the rest of the group came in the next morning, they found the wizard dead with a knife sticking out of his throat.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;591075I had a whole session of them. Tales from the Table: Bumbling in Freeport.

Most of the gamemaster's I've played with would have found that particularly amusing, while mercilessly mudering character after character. The players, less so, but we'd have learned.

We did have a Chivalry & Sorcery campaign that ran for over a decade, which was, more or less, divided in to two groups of characters. The first was a classic group of heroic types, saving the world from evil. They were The Heroes. The second was as comical a bunch of losers as you've ever seen. They were know as The Zeroes. Mostly, they didn't live to see third level. One of them became a campaign villan by picking up an (incredibly evil) ego sword that we knew would take him over. Took the Heroes months of play time to track him down and kill him. One died after trying to jump across a moat (with no water in it, only jagged rocks many feet down) on to a closing drawbridge. Missed by 1%, and left fingernail marks on the wood of the drawbridge. Sir Matthew Chickenhelm got his name after being critted in the face and permanently disfigured by an hysterical kitchen maid wielding a live chicken (we figured the chicken's head got caught in the visor of his helm, which broke it's neck, and it spent the rest of the fight flopping around the way chickens do when you break their neck). He later tried to shield parry a cow. Which didn't work. (Not, mind, you an attack by a cow, the entire cow, which was trying to run away from an insane Paladin who was doing a full blown lance charge against it. It might have gotten away, but it had a peg leg - the wizard charged a 25% tariff for all goods crossing his land, and the peasants only had one cow. As it was, the Paladin ran his horse in to the cow, killing the horse and causing the cow to go bezerk. Nearly killed the Paladin, too, since everybody else was laughing to hard, in character and out, to help. The Paladin spent most of his career questing for The Evil Cow, convinced that the antichrist had, indeed, arrived on Earth, in bovine form. My character, a priest, did quite a bit of pennance for, shall we say, encouraging this belief, on purpose.)

But none of that was ineptitude on the players' part. We did it all on purpose, because we were bored of fighting Nazgul.

The legendary case in my group was in my WFRP campaign, when they were playing "Forges of Nuln".  The party had spent days investigating a plot that appeared to involve the sabotage of a giant cannon that was being built in Nuln's foundries; they had by then gotten proof that someone was trying to sabotage the cannon, but had not been able to uncover or stop the  culprit.

So on the day of the inauguration of the giant cannon, when its going to be fired the first time, the PCs go...  and stand right next to the cannon they suspect of being booby-trapped doing absolutely nothing to prevent it from being fired.

Of course, the cannon blew up, taking some of the PCs with it and leaving the rest badly injured for the coming battle.

They all later agreed that they'd suffered some kind of collective dementia on that one.

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This was back before I got... selective in my gaming.

So the party is going up against a bunch of pyromanics. They have this great plan where they'd cast Silence to stop spellcasting and use fire protection of various types and actually ya know, come in prepared for basic enemies using basic tricks.

No plan survives contact with the enemy and 3 Fireballs creates twice as many corpses. This, apparently was all my fault. Even though they recognized the need for caution, this was clearly very dangerous, and all they had to do was wait a bit for their anti fire gear to arrive and the enemy would be lucky to even inflict a point of damage upon them, much less kill anyone. Nope, Leeroy Jenkins must be my fault!

Before you ask, yes this is a small part of the reason why I don't respect those types at all.

During an old game of L5R, the group was tasked with killing some legendary oni that dwelled in the harbor of a moderately prosperous port town and was due to rise very soon.  Wanting to ensure their bushi had support from afar when engaging the oni, some of them managed to convince the local lord to provide them with a siege catapult.  They intended to hurl...something, I'm not sure.  Jade or rocks, perhaps.  They never got past the test-firing stage.

As a test, they decided to fire a dead cow (why not a rock is beyond me), carried by eta to avoid soiling themselves, into the lake at where they expected the oni to rise.  Upon deciding who would fire the catapult, they collectively realized that nobody in the group had any training with siege weaponry or engineering in general, and they were all completely unqualified to fire the thing.  They decided to trust in luck and fire it anyway, hoping that L5R's exploding dice pool rules would put them on target.

It was, perhaps, needlessly cruel of me to have the party courtier's tea ceremony with the local lord interrupted by a dead cow crashing into the middle of the scenic garden nearby, but in my defense they'd rolled all 1's.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;591075I had a whole session of them. Tales from the Table: Bumbling in Freeport

I've never flipped a table, but I would be sorely tempted in that description. :eek:

Quote from: Mr. GC;591425So the party is going up against a bunch of pyromanics.

That reminds me of a player who was a pyromaniac. Or, at least, in those days, every single one of his characters was. All mages, all specializing in fire spells, all fireproof. Favorite tactic was the drop a fireball between his own feet, since that wouldn't hurt him. Never bother much about checking whether or not the rest of the party was fireproof (they never were). Got to where he wasn't especially welcome in a party before he learned.

But that wasn't a boneheaded move so much as a boneheaded player. (Though far from the worst, by a long ways, back in the day.)

It's not mine, but there's a hilarious story on a blog somewhere about a cockatrice.

To cut a long story short, the players are exploring a dungeon and come across a weird rooster-like creature with bat wings in one of the rooms. Cockatrice! That turns you to stone, right?

So, after some debate, the group reveal their plan: the party paladin puts on a blindfold so that he can't make eye contact with the thing, and goes stepping into the room waving his sword blindly in an attempt to kill it.

Apparently the players forgot that D&D creatures which turn you to stone don't generally have to make eye contact anyway, but also the minor detail that cockatrices turn you to stone with their beaks, not their eyes.

Kudos to the DM for keeping his face straight while the players revealed their cunning plan. I would have been pissing myself laughing.

Star Wars rpg. We're Rebels, and we're sent to an Imperial base to rescue some hostages.

We're awesome - we sneak in, we steal uniforms, we sneak around, we get down to the main reactor core, we sabotage it so it'll explode. Then we head up to the hangar, take out the guards there, and steal the base commander's personal shuttle to fly to safety before the massive explosion wipes out the base and everyone in it. We're so thorough, we even sabotage the other ships in the hangar to make absolutely sure that no-one gets out of that base alive.

As we're flying away from the mushroom cloud, one of us goes "hang on, didn't the briefing say something about rescuing hostages?"

I've got a ton of these.  Here's a favorite -

In college we ran a Star Wars game that was pretty 'open table'.  If you didn't have a paper or something, feel free to come on down.  So we developed a lot of table techniques for dealing with players dropping in and out of sessions.

Matt played our Wookie for a stereotypical Wookie-Smuggler pairing.  Matt also had trouble staying awake on game night, particularly in his dorm room.  We made the rule that 'if Matt falls asleep, the Wookie falls asleep'.  It was loads of laughs almost all of the time.

One mission, ripped right out of the GM pack, IIRC, had the Smuggler tasked with delivery of a rare flower that would bloom the moment it was exposed to air.  The plan was to take it to a princess and have her open the box.  Only her, or they don't get paid.

So of course they got boarded by Imperials.  The Smugger is having a grand time with high bluff rolls and is working hard on conning the inspector that she is a guest, that the Wookie actually owns the ship, and that the mysterious box not on the manifest was just her luggage.

At this point Matt wakes up and says, in character, "Luggage?  What luggage?  You LIVE here."

Ah, yes, sleeping players. Fred used to do that (back when he bothered to show up). Chivalry & Sorcery game, very medieval. His character is a knight of considerabl renown. The party are guests in the castle of a duke, where we are negotiating a) a treaty, and b) a marriage (of Fred's characrter, IIRC). That being teh boring stuff, we found . . . bad things, in the basement. Turned out the duke was a dotard, unable to tell the difference between the toilet and his pants, and his son is a weak, simpering moron. The place is run by the senechal, who is a demon summoning creep. So we kill the demons, and the senechal, and are having a debate over whether or not the idiot son should be allowed to succeed his father as duke. We did so in front of the son, of course, because at times, we're all idiots. The son replies with "Over my dead body!" Fred, having been dead to the world, woke up just enough to hear that one phrase, and literally jumped out of his chair, shouting "SO BE IT!!! FEROCIOUS GREAT BLOW!!" Which, being the knight of considerable renown, did about 65 points of damage in a game where the average person about has about 12 hit points, thus killing our host, and doing so in his own castle, while the entire party were discussing stealing his title.

Of course, that led to a rather extended quest to redeem his honor, which turned fairly epic (and if you've ever played C&S, and death with a Nazgul, you know what I mean by epic - and we killed three in one fight).

There was a Dragon Mountain party that never actually got on the mountain.  They were searching for it and weren't having much luck.  Eventually they got into a 'if it moves, kill it' mode.

There was a village with a hidden thieves guild and upon discovering their headquarters in the brothel, the party promptly decided to burn down the building.  Of course the citizens had no idea that there was a den of thieves there, and many didn't know it was a brothel, either, and they were understandibly upset.  Having incinerated the clue I had hoped to give them, they moved on.

A short while later they came across a rival party made up of high level clerics and paladins.  They were asking about the razing, and the players got nervous.  During the conversation the rival party declared that they weren't that interested in punishing that crime until the dragon was dead, anyway.

At that point one of the players realized that her character wouldn't abide by the killing of any dragons, and attacked them.  The other players joined the fray, and at the end only the one smart enough to surrender survived.

I actually ended that campaign on that note.  The character in the dragon hunting party beginning a life-and-death combat because someone would dare to hunt a dragon... well it took a while to recover.

Quote from: mcbobbo;591624There was a Dragon Mountain party that never actually got on the mountain.

I recall one party that did, unfortunately, make it in to the mountains, or at least, in to the pass. In very late autumn. Though that was more bonehead characters than players, as their behavior was perfectly in character, since they were a bunch of knights who hared off on a quest that came up suddnely, without their servants (who normally handle things like packing food). They got snowed in, and very nearly starved (for which, C&S has detailed rules). When wolves attached, not a single one (of the wolves) got away uneaten. One character had a talking, spell casting Great Horse (for which, he'd paid 200 GP per 3d6 roll - in a copper based economy - until he rolled an 18) that froze to death. The owner was at the front of the chow line, and demanded first cut. (I believe this was the same character that was later scalped by indians, but that's another story.)

Quote from: mcbobbo;591624I actually ended that campaign on that note.

We had one guy tried to run a C&S champaign set in the Roman empire, as it thought he was quite knowledgeable about the period (which he was). His mistake was that he forgot the rest of us were, too. He didn't want us running about with heavy armor and weapons, so he told us we were "the scum of the empire," not realizing we'd take that to heart. At one point, we climbed over a wall by using live (when we started, anyway) babies as a step ladder, but the final straw was when were were crawling around in the sewers, and found the lair of some kind of wizard. One character jumped up on the wizard's bed, took a dump, then, in his words, "masturbated on top of it." (On the other hand, when the other characters told him he wouldn't be leaving the dungeon alive, he - in character - agreed that was for the best.)

IIRC, the Romaing Roman Rape Gang campaign only ran two sessions.

Quote from: noisms;591572It's not mine, but there's a hilarious story on a blog somewhere about a cockatrice.

To cut a long story short, the players are exploring a dungeon and come across a weird rooster-like creature with bat wings in one of the rooms. Cockatrice! That turns you to stone, right?

So, after some debate, the group reveal their plan: the party paladin puts on a blindfold so that he can't make eye contact with the thing, and goes stepping into the room waving his sword blindly in an attempt to kill it.

Apparently the players forgot that D&D creatures which turn you to stone don't generally have to make eye contact anyway, but also the minor detail that cockatrices turn you to stone with their beaks, not their eyes.

Kudos to the DM for keeping his face straight while the players revealed their cunning plan. I would have been pissing myself laughing.

A case of players trying to rely on OOC knowledge rather than trying to work with their IC knowledge.

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