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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: jtaylor on March 07, 2007, 07:28:55 PM
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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.
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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.
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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. ???
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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.
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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
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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
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ROTFLMAO -- I like that one! Thanks for sharing Corbin!
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Please forgive the vulgarity...
I had an adventure with super agent types investigating an assassination plot at an opera house (it was based on a movie - title escapes me right now). By the time we were ready to go I was really tired from a double shift at work, but I thought it would be okay. I slammed a few sodas and we started. Well, I was definitely punch drunk and getting loopy, when they asked the name of the opera. Somehow I had forgot to name it when I wrote up my notes. Thinking quick, with my tired and caffeine laden brain, feeling loopy, I said "It's the famous Italian tragedy 'Fellatio on a Cat'", thinking this would just get a quick laugh and we could move on. Well, no. It got a *huge* laugh, and whenever we tried to proceed one of the players would crack up, which triggered another and so on. They started to work the title into all of their character's dialog setting each other into more fits of laughter. I finally just apologized for killing the story and went to bed.
I keep *very* detailed notes now.
wlg
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Please forgive the vulgarity...
I had an adventure with super agent types investigating an assassination plot at an opera house (it was based on a movie - title escapes me right now). By the time we were ready to go I was really tired from a double shift at work, but I thought it would be okay. I slammed a few sodas and we started. Well, I was definitely punch drunk and getting loopy, when they asked the name of the opera. Somehow I had forgot to name it when I wrote up my notes. Thinking quick, with my tired and caffeine laden brain, feeling loopy, I said "It's the famous Italian tragedy 'Fellatio on a Cat'", thinking this would just get a quick laugh and we could move on. Well, no. It got a *huge* laugh, and whenever we tried to proceed one of the players would crack up, which triggered another and so on. They started to work the title into all of their character's dialog setting each other into more fits of laughter. I finally just apologized for killing the story and went to bed.
I keep *very* detailed notes now.
wlg
That would explain all that high pitched screamy singing you find during an opera. Finally it all makes sense!
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well in the 1st game I ran of cyberpunk, I accedenly wiped the party in the 1st 10 minutes
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Well my worst mistake was in a system that we designed ourselves about 10 years ago it was in a Swords and Sorcery style but as we wanted a little unpredictability in our magic system instead of D10 to decide a result we used playing cards, 1-10 was a measure of success and face cards delivered different critical. However we decided to use Joker as a wild card in this instance the Referee would decide the result.
Well we were a long way into a campaign where our heroes were simple villagers tracking raiders who had either taken their wives and daughters as slaves, ruined their livelihoods or killed family.
The party were giving chase across the sea when i devised an attack on their ship engineered by the raiders, who had hired a mercenary to track them. i had hoped this would be a serious test to see how far my players had come and so had made this mercenary and his team very tough. However after about only 5 rounds of combat several critical on the players part and many fumbles on mine most of my guys were mortally wounded which i hate to say annoyed me. One of the PCs had received a bad wound but as they had a healer i was not worried. The healer though pulled the joker and i decided that it would be fun to give them a little exercise and ruled that a surge of power meant everyone on the ship was fully healed including the bad guys.
Guess what all of a sudden my guys couldn't miss and instead of an encounter i had intended to last 30 mins it went for the whole session of 3 hours we lost there players of a 6 man party and came within a whisker of losing the whole battle and so the entire party. I felt terrible and to compound it i said to the priest player "and so the Gods demonstrate the unpredictability of magic"
I will say that the players all said at the conclusion of the scenario that the 3 hour battle was the most thrilling experience they had role-played. I just felt bad for nearly killing a whole party and 3 very well developed players over a matter of wounded pride.
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Well my worst mistake was in a system that we designed ourselves about 10 years ago it was in a Swords and Sorcery style but as we wanted a little unpredictability in our magic system instead of D10 to decide a result we used playing cards, 1-10 was a measure of success and face cards delivered different critical. However we decided to use Joker as a wild card in this instance the Referee would decide the result.
Well we were a long way into a campaign where our heroes were simple villagers tracking raiders who had either taken their wives and daughters as slaves, ruined their livelihoods or killed family.
The party were giving chase across the sea when i devised an attack on their ship devised by the raiders, who had hired a mercenary to track them. i had hoped this would be a serious test to see how far my players had come and so had made this mercenary and his team very tough. However after about only 5 rounds of combat several critical on the players part and many fumbles on mine most of my guys were mortally wounded which i hate to say annoyed me. One of the PCs had received a bad wound but as they had a healer i was not worried. The healer though pulled the joker though and i decided that it would be fun to give them a little exercise and ruled that a surge of power meant everyone on the ship was fully healed including the bad guys.
Guess what all of a sudden my guys couldn't miss and instead of an encounter i had intended to last 30 mins it went for the whole session of 3 hours we lost there players of a 6 man party and came within a whisker of losing the whole battle and so the entire party. I felt terrible and to compound it i said to the priest player "and so the Gods demonstrate the unpredictability of magic"
I will say that the players all said at the conclusion of the scenario that the 3 hour battle was the most thrilling experience they had role-played. I just felt bad for nearly killing a whole party and 3 very well developed players over a matter of wounded pride.
But it's one of those scenarios that lives on in infamy...or better put, one of those "you won't believe this but..." stories.
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Biggest P&P screwup?
Adapting a critical hit table without modifying it to avoid screwing over the storyline. Improv is where the best fun lies, but when the squishy caster fop lucks out and kills your Big Bad Mojo Demon End Boss with one super-well placed +2 dart through the eye, well, that kind of makes for a short night. I had allowed the players to see the charts, so I couldn't even pretend that the little twit hadn't killed the boss.
Boss drops dead. Well. There you have it. Anyone wanna watch a movie?
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LOL -- that is when you pull out the demon's Mommy! Didn't anyone ever tell you that?
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Ha, so the entire reason behind Grendel's mother was Beowulf got a lucky die roll? No wonder I didn't do well on that test...
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Well, Yeah! Grendel's Mother was the first example we have of the now time honored sequel.
Grendel II -- Yo Momma soon by a bard near you.
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LOL -- that is when you pull out the demon's Mommy! Didn't anyone ever tell you that?
Ah, that was the other part of the screwup. Not having contingencies for when players demonstrate their usual talent for screwing things up from Hell to breakfast.
Since then, I learned to have a Stack of Unpleasantness and Prepositioned Nastiness from which I could pull out something nasty to keep things interesting and educational. ;)
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I haven't made any glaringly huge mistakes. Nothing that merits being told- Rather, I have made millions of small screws ups. With a previous GM of mine he made large mistakes, but was meticulous to a point and to that point there were no mistakes. I don't know which I dislike more, tons of tiny mistakes or just immense debacles.
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screwing things up from Hell to breakfast.
Ooo, I like that phrase! Now I want eggs and bacon.
cybrgrl
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Ooo, I like that phrase! Now I want eggs and bacon.
cybrgrl
Can I just have the bacon?
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... switching from dnd3 to dnd4.
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Introducing an Army officer with an off-the-cuff name, a Colonel... Sander...(oh shit oh shit I can save this! think brain think!)...son.
Colonel Sanderson. The session was done for as soon as that name leapt past my lips. Certainly not my biggest screwup, but the one that comes most easily to mind right now.
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... switching from dnd3 to dnd4.
You have admitted your crime, so you are forgiven (although 3.5 is where it's at).
DnD 3.5: a 6-PC game (including my DMPC), set in a well-established campaign universe. We had one game-breaking player- always an elven mage who got suspiciously high rolls all the time, and was able to get wish at level 6 (for those who aren't DnD fans, that's near impossible without stretching tangential logic and questionable loopholes). Basically they ran through trial after trial without any difficulty. This went too far when this PC dropped a city-sized asteroid on the city using wish, killing all the inhabitants so he could take their gold. Sithis, god of evil and "conveniently" chief deity of the town, appeared and sent them to another plane, ending my campaign (but sparking off a better one...)
DFRPG: Maybe a lack of knowledge on the complete breadth of rules, but nothing hysterically funny yet.
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Using a Construct as the damage-dealing part of a trap in a D&D 3.x game. The players were supposed to be intimidated enough by the Construct (perhaps after getting run over once or twice) that they would seek another way out. They never did. The Construct ground most of the party down to their deaths, and the remainder were captured by the enemy, which inadvertently ended that campaign, despite there being ready hooks for another band of adventurers motivated to rescue those captured.
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That's a very common mistake - setting up "and the PCs will have enough sense to run" encounters. Most players assume that all encounters will be balanced so they have a good chance to win and even when things go bad many of them will fight to their last hit point/health level.
The only time they work is with narrative control and/or the GM pointing out "if you stay you will die - no I'm not joking" - and when that happens the railroading comments start. "Here's my character sheet - since I'm not allowed to make any decisions why don't you play it?" type comments.
The worse mistake I've ever made? It involved saying yes to a plan piecemeal. Saying yes to "Can I have X?", "Can I do Y?" type questions without knowing where things were going. No one request was unreasonable or unbalancing (many were just slightly odd) but after 3 - 5 sessions of it we had an unstopable killing machine put together by some obscure rules. No way to challenge that one PC without using things that would wipe out the rest of the party and if a fight was challenging for all the other PCs combined then the killing machine would stomp everything before the other PCs had a chance to do much. It was like if a bunch of wannabee sidekicks were adventuring with Superman.
Now I say things like "Where are you going with this?" and "I'm not sure - what kind of end result are we looking at?"
Richard
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To date, my biggest screwup was in the Dresden Files. Near the conclusion of a session after my PCs had had their asses handed to them several times, a warlock unleashed a nightmare into the world through a ritual powered by the blood of children. Seriously.
Out of the ground erupted fire and brimstone. I told them it was effectively a 4 shift attack with a 20 shift weapon. Everyone in the group was able to avoid the attack, but apparently the extremely high weapon rating made it very nerve wracking for them.
See, I was not going to let that huge attack hit any of them. I did it to create some tension and increase the "big bad" effect. But apparently, by neglecting to mention to my players that they were in no real danger, some of them got upset and called shenanigans by the randomly huge attack.
I don't make such huge attacks anymore. :P
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Sitting down to run a con game having had no sleep and still hungover and opening my 'GM kit bag' to discover that all the pregened characters, the rule book and my game notes were in the other bag - which was now on its way down the motorway back home with my husband that had only been able to attend the first day due to work commitments- and all I had to run with was my husbands supply of underwear for the next week...
It was an interesting adventure to say the least.
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Telling one of my players that a character he eliminated in favor of another would be coming back as an NPC. I then later changed campaigns, figured out that one wasn't working, then switched to a small-fish-in-a-big-pond type game... where he made his character his old character's son. Now I have to bring back the were-bear. Ugh.
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Everything about the first D&D game I ran. That was back when I was in middle school if I recall correctly.
Ignoring that, I screwed up pretty badly running the Enduring The Apocalypse PbP a while ago. A former poster here (Tbora) cast a spell that was completely wrong by the rules and very messed up flavourwise. I wan't paying much attention since he was using it in a very easy encounter, and I didn't read it carefully enough. So I said it was alright. When it was called to my attention, I went over it again and misread it again. So I said it was alright again. This offended another player (MijRai) so much that he quit the game. Tbora also quit soon after, but I have no idea if it had anything to do with this.
So yeah, that was dismal.
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and all I had to run with was my husbands supply of underwear for the next week...
Did you use them as FATE chips?
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Probably trying to run for a group that decided they didn't want to do anything. This was a GURPS game although the system didn't matter. We were swapping off who was running and as far as I could tell, the other players wanted me to run an "adventure" where they went around shopping and took a vacation where nothing bad happened. Right there I should have stopped and asked if everyone wanted a break, maybe watch a movie or something. Instead I kept at it and eventually found something that motivated them. Unfortunately it didn't motivate their characters to do something, it motivated the players to rant at me. Yes I eventually railroaded them (local nobility stole their airship) but I didn't feel bad doing it because this was after an hour or two of trying to tease them into various different adventures, plot hooks, and even just outright asking them what they wanted failed. And frankly they'd been the ones who asked me to run in the first place.
Got a couple more that ran into the PC invincibility theorem where players just expect to go toe to toe with anything you throw at them and win, largely by hiding behind numbers on a character sheet even in games and game systems where that's discouraged.
Two mistakes that ended up being fun in the end:
1. Amber Diceless RPG - If you're not familiar with Amber, suffice to say it's a setting where the players are among the few who can walk between worlds. And they're all pretty much as tough as your average action movie star or Greek hero. With a moment's thought you can see how just about any character can easily upset your average adventure. But that wasn't my mistake, that's just what's built into the system and setting. I could handle that. My mistake was letting someone have a bag that let them gate in things from another world. It was a pretty cheap item (Amber is a points system). The issue was the player, who was new. He decided to go megalomaniac on us and pull troops in to assault the castle where all of the PCs lived along with other people who could walk between worlds. I should have said no but I thought I'd be nice and let him run with his idea. In the end, his guys had overrun the place but were being pushed back until he eventually surrendered. Everyone had a lot of fun and just kind of ran with it. Among other things watching the thin, pale sovereign walk down the halls in a bathrobe carving up gorilla space marines with a sword while ranting at the top of his lungs about people making a mess in his damn castle amused everyone.
2. Earthdawn (original FASA system) - My group was two PCs who couldn't have been more different. One had very little health and mediocre damage but could hit anything and was very difficult to hit in return. The other was more of a brick. So I made a slug monster Horror with a big maw and a tiny but accurate pea shooter type appendage to challenge each of them. I thought I made it tough enough but it was the big bad for that session and... it would have died in like 2-3 rounds. Fast rounds. So on the fly I described an odd glow and figured the thing had more health. And then they killed it twice over. And then a third time... and I finally let it die. Afterward they ended up using part of it to make an item and the players thought it was awesome that one of their first adventures had contained an epic battle.
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Did you use them as FATE chips?
Actually it was a long time ago and I was running Cthulhu.
So it was more a case of SAN loss.
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AD&D - leaving 3.5 for 4...which sucks (imho).
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First game I ever ran was new wod Hunter The Vigil. I had previously played in only two games that were quite short lived, but I had the bug of gaming by then and no one was running anything so I decided to give it a shot. I'm told my story was excellent if a bit railroaded, but my balance issues were atrocious. I wanted to give each player a strange unexpected power they didn't know about beforehand and have them adapt to it and learn about it and from it. It got out of hand really quick.
One character regularly rolled around 30 dice on attack rolls. The average being 8-12.
Another had 13 defense, the average being 2-5.
Another could avoid damage almost entirely at will.
Sure they power gamed to get there, but I gave them the tools to and allowed it. By the end of it anything I threw their way either was far too powerful for some members or far too weak for others. It did lead to some interesting moments though.
-Throwing a regular mook into the blades of a flying helicopter
-Father of all werewolves killed in 3 rounds by a 2 dimensional frisbee
Me: Theres a locked ( wooden office )door in front of you, you don't have the key.
Player: I have ten strength ( Olympic bodybuilder would have 5 )
Me: Ok the door is unconscious.
Mind you Hunter is supposed to be a game for mere squishy mortals against things far more powerful than them...
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Having the supervillains win in a long-running Champions campaign.
It wasn't entirely my fault. One of the PCs was investigating the plot; unfortunately, the other PCs were investigating each other, convinced that one of them was 'up to something'. So, because the group remained unfocused, the villains managed to reset time, take over the world, and banish all the heroes.
This was the same campaign I had one of my most awesome moments as a GM, though. Just a bad ending, though.
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I'll share one of my friend's SNAFUs. We were playing heavy gear for a while and we stumbled on some piece of tech that we couldn't identify. Finally after a while of trying to figure it out the GM says "Ok, a technician comes by and says that looks like Earther and it says this on it." (heavy gear focuses on some colonies that have been disconnected from earth for a while, it's been long enough that the language is different and the two societies have developed in completely different ways. Now the Earthers are now trying to retake the colonies) For a second we all move on, but then we look at him and go "Wait... That technician speaks Earther!? Why do we have a technician that speaks Earther? Get him!" The GM's immediate response is "He trips on a random live wire and is electrocuted to death."
To this day we still give him crap about it. "Hey Greg, maybe we should go find that technician that speaks Earther."
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You have admitted your crime, so you are forgiven (although 3.5 is where it's at).
DnD 3.5: a 6-PC game (including my DMPC), set in a well-established campaign universe. We had one game-breaking player- always an elven mage who got suspiciously high rolls all the time, and was able to get wish at level 6 (for those who aren't DnD fans, that's near impossible without stretching tangential logic and questionable loopholes). Basically they ran through trial after trial without any difficulty. This went too far when this PC dropped a city-sized asteroid on the city using wish, killing all the inhabitants so he could take their gold. Sithis, god of evil and "conveniently" chief deity of the town, appeared and sent them to another plane, ending my campaign (but sparking off a better one...)
Um... HOW did he get that spell at 6th level? He's got to be 17th level MINIMUM to cast it. There are no feats or spells that let you cast spells from a higher level (yes, they can make it so you're able to cast spells you ARE eligible for as if you were a higher-level caster - e.g., longer duration, more HD damage, etc. - but nothing gives you spells that are exclusively for higher-level casters).
One cure for suspiciously high rolls: make players make rolls out in the open.
Using a Construct as the damage-dealing part of a trap in a D&D 3.x game. The players were supposed to be intimidated enough by the Construct (perhaps after getting run over once or twice) that they would seek another way out. They never did. The Construct ground most of the party down to their deaths, and the remainder were captured by the enemy, which inadvertently ended that campaign, despite there being ready hooks for another band of adventurers motivated to rescue those captured.
Answer: morale checks. Look it up. You can basically railroad a party into running if that's what you think should happen.
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Um... HOW did he get that spell at 6th level? He's got to be 17th level MINIMUM to cast it. There are no feats or spells that let you cast spells from a higher level (yes, they can make it so you're able to cast spells you ARE eligible for as if you were a higher-level caster - e.g., longer duration, more HD damage, etc. - but nothing gives you spells that are exclusively for higher-level casters).
One cure for suspiciously high rolls: make players make rolls out in the open.
All players should roll out in the open. I've played in games and watched people fudge die rolls and have suspected others of doing it in games that I've run. If there are books or something in the way, have them relocated. Elements of chance are built into the game for a reason, otherwise I've got a new game called "Just do whatever you want to and you always succeed"
As for GM screw ups, I can think of one or two.
In a WEG Star Wars campaign I was running, I made the mistake of giving the characters a crate of thermal detonators, which two of the characters decided to tote with them back to their ship, but got caught in a fire fight on the way back. A blaster bolt ended up killing the party and taking a nice sized chunk out of a Star Destroyer with them. The lesson I learned from this: never hand out more than one or two thermal detonators at a time.
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The lesson I learned from this: never hand out more than one or two thermal detonators at a time.
In my best Invader Zim voice: "'Never'?? Or 'always'!?
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For me, my biggest "screw-up" was during a WEG Star Wars game. One of my players wanted to play a character who had heightened senses, like bullet time. Every time he was in combat he got a +1D to Dexterity, +1D Perception, and +1D to Strength.
Needless to say, he was a combat monster. Anything that could cause him problems was enough to kill any other PC.
I was in high school at that time, so I didn't know any better >_<
-EF