What was your biggest screw-up as a GM?

[jtaylor]

Well, I just told a story over on the house rules thread about how I killed off all of my plaers one time and I have got to say that was my biggest screw-up as gm. I was just wondering about some of the mistakes you may have made and what happened because of them.

To get things statered I will repost my tale of woe from the other thread:

I had a problem with characters in a GURPS supers game long long ago. We decided to make a god level infinity crisis, save the world scenario, and we had five 1500 point characters. All of our games were fairly combat heavy so everyone had the ability to level a city if they wanted to.

I decided to start the game with a fairly standard group of three villains, two 500 point supers and their 750 point ringleader. I wanted this to be an opening to the action; an easy victory t set the mood before the herald of doom showed up. Their only advantage this team is that I designed them to work as a team. The ring leader could fill an area with smoke that he and his teammates could see through but would make the area invisible to anyone else. There was a tank that could extend a force field to protect the rest of the team, and there was a blaster attack the supers. If you took out any one member of the team and they would all fall.

The problem was, all of my players didn’t work together as a team. No one had any powers to neutralize the smoke to they were fighting blind, and they didn't think to make any kind of plan to deal with the situation. My underpowered team of super crooks destroyed a team that should have had them for breakfast.

After that point, I didn't make the characters for the players, but I did always make the first session of any campaign for character creation where everyone designs their characters together, with gm and player input.

[Blaze]

Singling it down to one biggest screw up... 

Allowing people who are really siblings to play siblings, when they brought all their baggage along from real life.

That just about put an end to the game group for some odd reason...  Oh, yeah, the sibs were married to two other gamers and expected the whole party to pull into sides.  I ended up not needing villains, they were already in the party.

[glmagus]

Mine was blowing up a spacestation the party was on just to kill two characters, the characters deserved to die but not the whole party. I was just a little angry and so I went overboard. My funniest mistake on the other hand was that the 1st lvl Bless spell makes your weapons Holy. 

[Rechan]

Oh geez. I have like, a lot. But I'll list my top three.

In high school I let a friend who was a notorious powergamer to play a spellfire wielder in Forgotten Realms. If you know what that is, yeah, you understand.

I wimped out of killing a character, and everyone knew it. Evil priestess cast a spell, I rolled the dice, the PC and the DMPC were going to eat death. Then I said "You know what, she does something else". I think I made myself look really weak.

Same campaign, later. The PCs were dealing with an elven druid who had went insane. It came to light that she had went insane becasue she had an accident, miscarried, and just "snapped". The female player in the game got very upset with me.

[Nemo]

1.  Running a 1st Ed World of Darkness game with 30 regular players, and another 10 rotating ones.  Of that total 40, there were 8 Changlings, 2 Wraiths, 10 Mages, 5 Werewolves, and 15 Vampires (12 of which were Toreadors, and I hate Toreys).  There was also one immortal midget named Jose that the players couldn't kill no matter what they did to him.

2.  Rolling all 10's during a Faith check for my NPC Vampire hunter while the party was in the middle of nowhere.  The result was that the sun came out at 1a.m. and all the PC's burst into flame

[Corbin DeBec]

Well as they come to me i'll have to revisit and add to this but, I once decided a neutral tavern in my gameworld didn't want anyone to have weapons in it's bar so at the door was a rust monster sniffing people who entered, kinda mystic metal detector, my mistake was in the description.  As you walk into the bar on your left you see a rust monster CHAINED to the wall.  Nobody picked up on it at first not even me then a very smart player said "HEEEEY, how is that rust monster bound", I looked back over my notes, head hid behind DM screen I love those things for this reason nobody saw me flinch.  I looked up and said "Ok you get extra xp for that test to see who was paying attention" the rest of you pay more attention cause i've got more test in the adventure.  If dnd back then had a bluff check i'd rolled a natural 20

[Blaze]

ROTFLMAO -- I like that one!  Thanks for sharing Corbin!

[Soulless Mystic5523]

My biggest mistake as a GM / ST was being one in the first place. My group of friends that i gamed with had gotten pretty small, and they were all tired of STing, so they decided to make me do it. I had never had any experiance and was still trying to learn the system. They couldn't figure out why all my games were mostly spent talking and not really doing anything. And then, right when i was finnally getting the hang of it, I got a new job and had to work on game nights.

[cbmurphy]

When my friends and I got to the Storyteller system, we had a habit of rotating the GM duties.  One of the worst mistakes holding a session in a smoking-OK zone.  Unliveable atmosphere, somehow the only two players who were smokers talked us into it and managed to polish off a pack apiece amidst a 5 hour gaming session.   Nothing to do with what was going on in game, but I felt like burning my books and materials from the smell alone, and I had a headache from that smoke for nearly a week. 

[Corbin DeBec]

This isn't my mistake but was the result of me being woke up at 1am to come run a dnd game, my friend was running it up till then but here's the exchange between him and another player that cause them to come get me.

Ron-ok greg the goblin hit you

Greg-what's the damage

Ron- 1 to 4 hps

Greg- waits...."Ok i'll take 1"

Ron- OK

[DragonFire]

This isn't my mistake but was the result of me being woke up at 1am to come run a dnd game, my friend was running it up till then but here's the exchange between him and another player that cause them to come get me.

Ron-ok greg the goblin hit you

Greg-what's the damage

Ron- 1 to 4 hps

Greg- waits...."Ok i'll take 1"

Ron- OK

Mine was forgetting I'd killed an NPC and bringing hi back into a later game(he was a cool NPC).
I managed to get around it by spontanously writing plot that meant there was actually a bigger bad guy PRETENDING to be my NPC.

[13x13]

I was playing as a GM and a character in a Mage game set in the middle ages.  I ended up roleplaying a conversation with my character and an NPC for 10 minutes.  So I talked to myself for 10 minutes trying to convince myself to be let out of a walled fortresses gate.

I have never heard the end of it.

[LexVIII]

I had a 4-color Champions series( this was college 1994 before good superhero RPGs came out- too many numbers!!!!!!). My team of players were on a moonbase that was in fact a jail for some of the worst criminals in the world. There had been no communication with the base so they had sent a group of government supers to investigate.

They had with them a character (I think his name was Blowback) that had a god awfully powerful explosive energy blast and the rest of the team had little else in the way of being protected from the environment. The entire team thought of there being some sort of jail break when in actuality an alien horde invaded the base and had siphoned of the life of the guards. Irronically, the cells that housed the criminals was also protecting them; the Aliens would eventually get through but it would take time.

Despite *every* hint i could throw that it seemed that the jail was still in lock down and it might be a good idea to keep on the space suits only 2 kept them on. The rest expecting a superbattle wanted more mobility.

I thought to point out that maybe something more was going on that i would show one of them one of the creatures in a non-combat arena. So as they walked from the landing bay to the main complex through a 10 foot wide transparent tunnel i pointed out that a creature *on* the lunar surface about 100 meters away was observing them.

Before the leader could ask any thing of me or any players, Blowback rolls his dice and announces that hes goiing to fire through the godawful- explosive energy blast at the creature. I pointed out that this was a relatively confined tube *on* the moon. I looked from player to player for someone to state the obvious, no one bit. Everyone agreed that they could fly or use other powers or use one of the other players to help them. I even fudged the first die roll ensuring that:

A: the tube didnt completely give way and

B: the explosive energy blast didnt injure the team standing only maybe at max 10 feet away.

I even made a point of just putting a crack in the plexiglass to emphasize that there was a hiss of escaping air.

To no avail.

Blowout undaunted fired again this time pushing his powers up a notch and faster than you can say explosive decompression; "spaced" himself and all but two members of his team.

The two suited player had no powers that were of any use in getting the characters back inside. Even not allowing for the instant death of what is in effect dry cleaning ones lungs.

ironically it led to a more interesting version with some of the criminals along with the heroes getting off the base

[Falar]

Running a 17 PC battle in a system that was notorious for time length difficulties after you got above 5 PCs.

It was one of the last fights of a 45 or so player game (mission based, different characters would go on different missions, mercenarial) that had run into some difficulties. I thought I'd do a never-before-seen thing and close it with a bang.

It wasn't a bang. It was a crawl. Each combat round took about 45 minutes.

[NecroKeogh]

In Masquerade, I grew tired of playing GM to my group, and as a quick--but ultimately ill-advised--solution to that issue I manipulated the storyline to bring the players into contact with Caine. Suffice to say, not a single player survived the encounter (expectedly, considering the book lists the rules for combating Caine as "You Lose"). So, I suppose my biggest screw up would be laziness in the position of GM.