Forums » RP Discussion » Share your funniest stories of Plot Derailment!

((Woof! If I put this in the wrong thread then feel free to move it!))

I'm sure that any experienced Roleplayer out there will have had this happen at least once where a player would accidentally derail the plot(Even I used to do this by accident back then, although I'm usually more considerate of the roleplay even as a villan) but despite what hapens.... These Derailments can actually create some Funny and Memorable moments!

Whether your perfectly made plot has been Derailed by players, or you've been the player who did the Derailing, I'd love to hear of your experiences!

Note 1: This is meant to be about Funny stories, anything that portrays a particular topic or user in a negative way (Or just something negative) it probably shouldn't be posted to avoid hurting others feelings.

Note 2: (Only applies to anyone in any of my roleplays) this doesn't mean any of you have derailed my plots, I've never had an issue from any of you guys and I really like roleplaying with you!!

Alright, sit down as I regail you with the tale of Doorslayer.

It was many years ago now, I was a student at university. We were members of the Roleplay Society which is totally a real thing (lol).
One of my friends decided he wished to run a game, Demon the Awakening.

Now, I don't actually know much about Demon as a setting, but the way he had it running was that all of our characters were random people, just doing our random jobs, living our random normal boring lives when something happened, some catastrophic event and next thing we knew, we were hauling ourselves out of something that should have killed us without a scratch on us.

So,

My character was a fry cook named Joe.
He dug himself out of the rubble that was his cafe after a semi truck hit it or something. I can't remember the exact details.

Also in this group was a cop , a dweeby teenager who'd joined a cult, a cultist who ran said cult of personality (Who shall from this point be known as Paul) and someone else but I can't remember who they were.

Now..

the game began promisingly enough. Big action, drama, blah blah blah. "bad things" were happening around the city, everyone was a bit freaked out.

Anyway, stuff happened, characters got together and following this wierd guy who was supposed to be helping them with the "wierd things" that were going on to a warehouse, the group settled in for the night.

Or... would have.

were it not for Paul.

Now, this was a generic warehouse full of random things. Shelves of tools and supplies, I think it was mostly industrial like tool shed kinda stuff. Pretty boring, pretty generic, nothing to write home about.
We'd gain access through an unlocked side door, we had some keys which allowed us to get into the office and into the cellar which for some reason this warehouse had.

So, creepy wierd guy cultist kid had befriended took cultist kid aside. Cultist kid had discovered he had magical powers okay? I dunno he could do something with plants. Creepy wierdo was all "ooo I can show you more about this!" So while he learned about his magic powers, Cop and fry cook were just kinda chilling after a pretty stressful day.

Anyhoo.

When we entered the warehouse the GM mentioned the general layout. There's an office over there, there's shelves all along here, opposite you there is a large roller door for getting vehicals or machinery in and out.

Paul fixated on this door.

"Can I open it?" He asked excitedly. He wanted to bring his van in from outside, which to be fair, was a fairly reasonable thing to want to do.

"it's padlocked shut" the gm told him.

So he tried every single key, but nope, no key fitted.

The door was irrelivant, we didn't need the door open. But Paul wasn't about to be defeated. he wanted that door open now, he was going to GET it open.

He tried to pry the padlock off with a crowbar, but he botched the roll and broke the lock completely.

By this point the GM is just humouring his ridiculousness and hoping he just gives up already.

But noo, this is Paul, he won't give up.

He drove a forklift through the door, but by this point the GM is done with his nonsense, he's derailed the game with this nonsense for a whole session and he's tired of it. No, he thinks, you aren't opening this door, stop it. Get back to the plot moron. So the forklift prongs go through the door and it ends up embedded there. Stuck. Door still closed.

Paul is undetered. He collected ingredients to make an explosive. We talked him out of this. Or rather, the cultist kid did. Sensible kid.

Creepy wierdo left to do something. He went downstairs.

Cultist kid decided to go exploring, he went down into the cellar to see what his friend was doing.

The cellar was uh... full of uh.. corpses so uh... yeah... horror show.

this was creepy wierdo's warehouse, creepy weirdos corpses... Creepy weirdo was uh.. eating some skin. AIEEEEE

Cultist kid FREAKED OUT as you know, you would.

He ran, screamed "there's corpses in the basement! there's corpses in the basement! He's a monster!" and wierdo attacked with a gun.

Cop got shot in the firefight.

Fry Cook turned into the angel of death due to a stress response becuase uh.. I don't actually know, we didn't get that far. Anyway, wierdo ran off, cultist chased after him.
Cop was bleeding out on the floor, Fry cook couldn't touch him without you know.. killing him. Was freaking out a bit.

Paul was outside trying to figure out if he could drive his van through the door.

So he did.

The door held. He dented his van and the door a bit.

So he wandered off to the store to hire an arc welder. Oblivious to the chaos that had just gone down.

Someone who'd heard gunshots had already called cops.
Sirens approached.

Fry Cook ran before anyone could get there because he was NOT explaining the corpse basement or the whole monster thing.

So cop gets stretchered out and the corpses are found and swat arrives to secure the scene.

While this is happening, Paul returns with his newly aquired arc welder and sets about welding through the door.

Of course the police notice this and wait, guns raised, for whoever that is to be finished.

So, the door is cut through, it falls inward dramatically and Paul strides forward, victorious! he has defeated the door!

aaand is met with several dozen armed police.

Oh...

dear.

at this point the game fell apart because well, how do you bounce back from 3 sessions of door slaying?

But from that point on Paul was known as Doorslayer.

And dang was it funny.

I’ll start this off with a disclaimer that my GM is absolutely amazing at thinking on his feet, so how much of this he anticipated and had plans for I have no idea.

My current D&D campaign is a high-power campaign in a heavily homebrewed setting. It’s not for everyone, but I’m enjoying it immensely. The premise is that we’re members of a royal order of griffin riders serving as personal bodyguards to the prince of the sky elves, who is the main party NPC. We have a druid, a cleric, a warlock, monk, and me, the sorcerer. Later in the campaign the prince’s place in our party got replaced by his daughter (princess of the dark elven kingdom), a rogue. The prince is a homebrewed melee class that takes elements from fighters and paladins, I believe (though I could be wrong).

Over the course of the campaign, we witnessed the prince do a couple of nasty things, to the point where an archangel (another player who ended up leaving) was sent to watch him and make sure he behaved. Then we helped the prince become crowned as the divine emperor of an ancient empire that hadn’t existed for a few thousand years, and he immediately set about rebuilding said empire. This is when the monk, who’d never liked the prince/emperor or anything to do with gods, and my character, who was worried that he would be a warmongering tyrant, started to have doubts.

We had a few roleplaying-heavy sessions that devolved into each PC’s backstory, in which—among other things—the monk accepted the mantle of his long-lost father as a legendary assassin (a Dread Pirate Roberts-type figure) with the responsibility of killing those heroes and villains who gained too much power and/or abused it, and he and I immediately had the idea of this meaning he would end up killing the emperor. It started as an OOC joke, but he quickly grew serious about it as a potentially very bloody war began to brew between the empire and the orc-infested human kingdom to the south.

Throughout the campaign there had been references to an ancient blight that affected food and crops, which we learned was caused by a twice-fallen goddess. At one point, as the preparations for war were ramping up, that goddess sent a horrific monster called an Abhorwretch to kill the emperor. The party all scrambled to get to it, but before we managed to arrive it had dealt the emperor a fatal wound, though it was eventually slain. As the empress and the princess mourned him and our party freaked out, the gods of the empire appeared before us and offered us a choice. They could revive him as a demigod, or accept him into the pantheon as a god of war, order, and justice. All of us but the cleric voted demigod, because we’d seen his brand of justice and didn’t want him as an immortal leader of the empire.

The next morning he was back, but not as a demigod. He was now divine, meaning the gods had lied to us. The monk was so ticked off that he left breakfast to pack up and leave, because his character hated anything to do with the gods. My character, who is generally a friendly sort and was almost as ticked off as he was, went to find him, but not before the new god had a chat with him where they threatened to send each other to hell. It was more awesome than that, but I’m trying to summarize a lot of gameplay so bear with me. By the time my character got there, the monk had made up his mind: this new god had to die. My own character expressed her concerns about his particular ideas of justice and his view that to ensure peace is to prepare for war, and now her worry that he would be an immortal emperor of an empire she didn’t really want to be formed for her own reasons. The monk convinced my character to join his crusade. We’ve been plotting ever since, and it’s been incredibly fun!

TL;DR In my current D&D campaign, my character and one other are on a secret crusade to kill a god who used to be the party NPC. Currently working on recruiting a third party member, but no promises yet.

I was once in a one off game where we had woken in a hospital after a localized event (not that we knew it was just in the city when we started) had turned everyone into zombies. After wondering round the hospital for a bit we came across a group of army men. We found the sources of the problem and where taken there during this my character some how acquired a couple of white phosphorus grenades. Anyway we battle our way down to the big boss guy who paralised us into place. I fluked out and man to get my character free enough to preform one simple action.

You know what is really simple trowing and object; like say a grenade.

Needless to say the grenade land right at the big bad feet and we got to watch as the GM tore up the 2 page long villan monologue he had written.

Good Times