Comments on: Oops! How to Gracefully Recover from a DM Mistake

By: theSnark

theSnark — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:41:37 +0000

It wasn’t the real monster; it was just an illusion!(or clone or whatever) *gasp!* The real monster is still loose in the dungeon!

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:16:28 +0000

Ha, I recently started DMing my first campaign in 5 years (haven’t played in that long either, so the rules were all nice and fuzzy). One of my group is a rules lawyer, but frequently gets the rules wrong, and he convinced the rest of the party that a platinum piece was worth 100 gold, rather than 10 gold.

I couldn’t figure it out, because the loot that I gave them wasn’t supposed to be so rediculous. I let it slide, thinking that not much could come from it. I was very wrong. The whole group ended up buying level 20 equipment at level 7. Being a guy with a heart, and knowing that I was running a super-campaign anyway, I let them keep their equipment.

I eventually balanced this folly out with some traps that destroyed random magic items (I wrote up a list of their items, put it on a table, and assigned number to each item, made them roll a d20 to see what item got destroyed and a will save to try to keep their items.)

So, after a few level bumps and some of those items disappearing, the party is well-balanced(ish) again, and they can actually have a challenge against whatever they are facing. Good times.

By: Snakeyes

Snakeyes — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:51:34 +0000

I was DMing with the new dragons, they were fighting a green one if I remember correctly. It went down super quick, the whole time I was wondering why it was so easy. When they killed it I realized it gets an attack of opportunity everytime someone starts their turn adjacent to it>.< oh well.

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:38:22 +0000

I have been running a group of 11th level characters. They got there with the deck of many things, but they wanted to play with it so i let them. Needless to say a few weren’t heard from again.
But i digress. After i took the deck away from my player with a gambling problem i gave them the choice of whether or not to run into Tarrasque. I dumbed it down of course. He only had 1 attack per round. Where i messed up though was forgetting regeneration and the killing blow that came from the wizard i decided not to bite in half. He flew up Tarrasque’s nose and in a few rounds cut and blasted his way to the brain. If you’re not familiar with Frostburn theres a spell called flesh to ice which turns a medium creature into ice, no saving throw, just ice. We all reasoned that the brain was roughly medium in size. So, tarrasque’s brain froze and he died.

I didn’t give them xp for it because we all agreed it was just a What if fight and it had been dumbed down alot.

They each found a major magic item in his snot though.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:19:28 +0000

@ Hmott : I keep racking my brains, but I can’t remember any funny story that involved the DM making a mistake. Except that once the party noticed a trap, but during the fight I (the DM) forgot about it and sent one of the monsters through there. When the players pointed it out, I figured it deserved to fall into the trap, so it died (it was a minion).

Doesn’t seem all that funny told like this, but it was funny at the time :). Actually, that was the time they were fighting kruthiks and I forgot about their aura that deals damage each turn to anyone standing too close… In my defense, I will point out that it was about 4 in the morning and I was tired :).