7 Ways D&D Players Destroy Their DM's Plans

hello Jonny kdeeny here full-time beard haver and part-time DM for the outside Xbox and outside extra Dungeons & Dragons crew running tabletop campaigns for this lot has taken a terrible toll on me I'm only 14 years old and I'm determined that the hardships that I as a Dungeon Master have endured not be suffered by any of you to that end and to celebrate the launch of brand-new tabletop youtube channel dice breaker run by me here are seven ways your players will try to derail you DMS be wary of the following you managed to get sort of a negative print of the UM of the invoice and basically it doesn't have any identifying names or marks or anything it just says collection docks three a.m. come alone brackets be prepared to make many trips guys yeah yeah combined with Corazon x' clues this makes me think that we need to go to the docks tonight so you might remember in bad chair day at the end of the adventure I admitted that I had never been derailed quite so badly for quite so long by the ox venturers and the reason for that was they went off on a 40 to 45 minute tangent that I hadn't planned for and to be honest with you part of this was my fault because they were looking for evidence of where these evil chairs had come from and I think it was Dobb found a piece of parchment that talked about meeting at the docks and it was something like be prepared to make several trips which was just an off-the-cuff joke about there being lots of furniture so they needed to ferry lots of it back and forth but they took that to mean that there was going to be a meeting at the docks that night and they were like well we've got to go check this out rough to the docks right dog with your clues yeah yeah yeah 3:00 a.m. at the docks so you think we should go there now and just like wait oh we should spring a trap we should not not be there we conspicuous we should be hiding on rooftops no there's no way for me to be like no you're just chasing like a complete red herring here all I wanted was to go and talk to some furniture manufacturers and they just didn't even when I mean in order to get them to realize I had to ship Khorasan out to sea with Marilyn and have them jump in the ocean to realize that hey maybe all of this is just not cure you get right well I guess I'm heading back to shore Marilyn you're on the lift is there any advantage to Mara we're now being on the boat or should you'd like hook it back to land what do you think do you mean I feel like I feel like the Bose bit red herring yeah so I mean it was for me that was the most panic-inducing live show we've done because we had a countdown clock on there on the stage and I remember looking at it and thinking great we're at square one but we're half an hour down and I don't know how to speed this up so yeah that was a test the lesson I learned from bad chair day was to be more specific in the information I leave around the world not give ideas for things that have to be illustrated in order for the players to understand wrong just gonna drop them ask for a second here you have never derailed me that hard like no offense to obviously any of the players but you always just you you try and pitch something about their level of intelligence yeah what what happened it was that bloody bottle of thing I drank it now I'm a chicken i down them I don't getting kicked and I don't know what this tiefling is doing that's holding me very tightly I'm doing it can you can you loosen the grip on it a little bit Oh I used to being a chicken during the very first docs venture the spicy rat caper that were supposed to be lots of people in the town who'd been affected by EM channels miracle elixir so I wanted them to visit several houses of different sort of social levels in order to realize that this was a problem affecting everybody and they really needed to track down who was responsible and sort of is like a tiny clue that I honestly didn't think they'd pick up on I let a rat scurry out of the room in the very first bedroom they went into with the very very posh people so as he opens the door you see quite a kind of fine bedroom clearly the Mayweather's are doing all right for themselves there's there's lots of sort of fine drapery and things like that so slightly onto that a rat just kind of runs out and skitters dama down the corridor obviously these being Dungeons and Dragons players they just fixated solely on that like there was a rat here it's vitally important we find it my son's been taken I don't I don't care about vermin but we feel that the rat may have seen something what if the rat was here when your son was taken the mind the way is not here anyway we've we convinced this rat he's in on it so obviously Andy was like I'm gonna go catch that rodent I've made it a difficult check because it had some time to escape and it's hard to catch a rat with your bare hand what's your modifier on intelligence for if that was the jab the hook was Ellen starting to talk to this rat which I was sort of prepared for but I wasn't prepared for her to give us a long list of questions followed by and are you the missing boy was there anything that came through the window did anything leave the window were there was them one person and I were also asked around are you him just in case you change the rat looks to you and says yes so it's him it's the boy so let's get to head about twenty minutes which in and of itself isn't really a problem for a DM because you can just make something else lasts a bit longer or they'll definitely find time to faff in like a bit you didn't anticipate but it's just the feeling of not being quite ready it's like that feeling where you're about to leave the house and somebody walks in and you'd be like you good to go when like you're brushing your teeth or like having a way I think that was mostly a panic and I remember we sort of had a little bit of a filming break at some point I remember Andy being like dude do we need to go back and pretend that didn't happen if I completely screwed this quest no it's like no no I am just now on my heart rate is about 120 BPM what did I learn from that it would be keep your cool and always try and have in mind what what's gonna happen a bit further down the line because if they manage to just like neatly excise a chunk of your quest you weren't anticipating you're gonna have to catch up and just the the key there is not to panic which I learned the hard way it's it's puppy it's it it's people having ales in pints and quarts and over in the corner is a man in a very like pristine linen suit with a sort of hat with sort of a domed top and a wide brim he's drinking quite heavily from a bottle of brandy and he has a raggedy sign in front of him that simply says adventurers wanted so NPCs are one of the most important tools a DM has because they are the only way really to give the players of or steer when they need it and to give them information and give them adversaries and things like that but the problem with putting a piece on the board is that other people can interact with it and the Hawks venturers have done some really horrible things to my NPCs in the past Alfred stranged I did not have it coming I should introduce myself Raymond my name is I'm Alfred Alfred Alfred Strange tight um I fancy myself a bit of an adventurer myself but escort mission [Music] Alfred strange side was meant to be this kind of quite tall sort of live like adventurer type who sort of like runs around it's like this is fascinating and he was supposed to be sort of going off and zipping about the place because he's so excited as its academic basically he was meant to be initiating bits the the action by being like look at this this is fascinating you might have missed this minor detail so then what they did was they strapped him to dub his face was this doesn't seem entirely safe God has fashioned a Papoose bouncing along a mother kangaroo yeah he is it to be fair he is having a great time they already says this is incredibly exciting so he couldn't really move around and obviously I could be like oh look at this but by that point they'd started to patronize him so heavily and to be fair to them I thought that was very funny so I started leaning into it he is a torch [Laughter] I think the exact quote was what have you done to my lovely NPC because he had been transfigured into this hairy toddler who was just getting really upset because obviously he was arguing with the pirate who didn't want to give him a fair share of the money I'm turning the quest around 80/20 so that one I mean strange tide was more fun than it was harrowing for me I mean it was still like quite a significant derailment during a session that it was like our first dungeon crawl and I was a little bit nervous about running it but that's kind of nothing compared to the times when they take a really minor NPC what's going on in here and he is the the quintessential like burly paunchy like just not really taking care of himself prison guard who then meant to just be done within one second and they pumped them into like the like right on the stage and make them really really significant this doesn't have to be the end for you come with us no don't what no I know there's good in you jailer I just met see in your eyes I want to do this what's your name by the way seeing as we're gonna be spending some time together probably a good and interesting well-thought-out name I expect Christopher Engelbert the 17th he was meant to be a guard with a key he was meant to get knocked out and he was meant to have his pockets picked and instead he was given this weird motivational speech and thrust into the limelight your new life begins today Christopher you can dream the impossible you can do it we're here to help that happen to the point where he was like crucial to the final confrontation and I'm there being like I don't know who this guy is frantically trying to flesh out a character I guess what I learned there was just not to leave myself exposed and put flimsy characters in front of them if I'm going to give the octave venture as a chance to interact with somebody I need to know their family history I need to know their national insurance number just absolutely everything needs to be right at the tips of my fingers otherwise you just get a situation where they're they're basically requesting features like they should have a really long name with lots of syllables it's just not fair at all yeah I just don't want to railroad people like that if you like no no I need this and bc2 going back to go back to being really obscure that kind of like it feels like I'm forcing your hand yeah I think if I'd taken that guard away you would have gone looking for another one look the quest would have taken so much longer where did you get all of the stone it's skeletons yes where'd you guys get the stone for them in their orphanage skeletons what are you like skeletons vixx Town Hall you guys are hilarious so one of the funny things about doing the Ox venture live shows is that I need to watch them all back in order to remember what happened because I know this has happened to the players as well like when you're up there it's such an adrenaline rush it goes by like that and you don't know what you said so in order to kind of try and keep the future bits fairly consistent I've watched them back so I can keep up with what it was we were doing when we all temporarily delved into a fugue state together and with the loophole skeletons one my favorite moment because I always have a moment where I'm like I can see something that I don't think anyone else is going to spot because they don't know what I was thinking at the time there is a moment during that ox venture when I am bricking it because the trick with the skeletons the 60 who serve Ethel for if the Builder is that they will do whatever task is you give them but they will do it at kind of a terrible cost that you don't really see coming it's kind of like the monkey poor thing where it grants your wishes but it can be terrible so we need you to fix this building okay they dismantle the orphanage to do it put the orphanage back together let's use the orphans as mortar stone did you use stone boss from quarry what about the mortar is it orphans you've got to tell us if it is orphans [Laughter] basically they were always going to do something terrible they've dismantled the orphanage and they're about to put it back together but Luke starts saying without harming anybody or anything skeletons we need you to and it was that specificity that he basically he'd solved the puzzle before we've managed to get another punch line out of it and I was panicking skeletons without hurting or disadvantaging anyone why don't you continue to do a fantastic job by building an orphanage out of this stone and you can just see me kind of staring at the table like how do I get out of this I mean selfishly I was like I really want to match these orphans up because I think it'll be so for me and luckily everyone else sort of saved me because they went back and forth a bit more being like no we should do this no we should do this so I was then able to be like what is the plan and job was like just rebuild the orphanage and he didn't give me that specificity a second time so I was like yes that's my in let's kill some children I would like you please to build the orphanage first if that's if that's cool you guys do great job just build the orphanage please and get build orphanage yes yes cool all right dub is 100% responsible yes at first his intentions were pure which I kind of feel describes the Ox venturers as a whole pretty well I think if somebody was planning to do a similar thing and kind of have you know a loophole something or have an external entity with caveats I think the best way to do it is just to try and think of a second way it works if they accidentally cut off one thing by being very specific something else happens I guess if if Luke had been really specific maybe I would have had the skeletons like some of the skeletons explode or something you know just trying to find some ways to redirect their behavior or make what they said not matter if the beasts intelligence is four or higher the spell fails and our Bears intelligence is three Oh what I have to make a wisdom saving throw or be chart the the L bear thing about running a very time-sensitive campaign like the Ox venture especially when it's a live show is that combat always takes forever and so I kind of try and keep it to one maybe two brief combat encounters per episode and generally it makes sense for the combat encounter to be sort of a boss battle and you expect this to be like that okay here we go it's knives out time this is going to be really messy a gargantuan mechanical stag beetle oh my gosh starts to stomp its way in unless you're running a game for the Ox venturers in which case they will find some way to just derail the boss fight and circumnavigate it entirely standing over a very large cauldron stirring vigorously is a gnome I move in to grab and restrain the druid okay from behind him 1:18 yeah you were you grappled that the heck out of when they first came up against em to nail and they just picked him up pinned his arms I was desperately I was I was looking up entangled to try and use you know his vines to to capture everyone and and start the fight proper and then I realized that he needs to have his hands-free to do it and I thought oh so then I looked at his other spells and it's true of every single one of them so they had just inadvertently completely rendered him powerless and there was nothing I could do seal so the they al bear I'm going to try and cast animal friendship I just didn't expect them to walk up and be like hi cutie but that's exactly what happened and technically actually I broke the rules because the tame beasts spell shouldn't work on monsters but at that point it was such a brilliant plan I thought I just want to roll with this I'm gonna roll this one in the open all right dong-chul that's a six oh my god what do you say to the owl bear hey buddy it was my own weakness that I was like I like this plan and I want to reward it and I think it'll be funny that it happened but it was just another time I thought this is it they've got round an encounter I had planned my main takeaway from them avoiding boss battles it's kind of twofold as like number one sometimes you will just be robbed of a boss battle and that's okay it happens just just deal with it they'll feel like absolute heroes because they manage to get around the big evil without taking a single point of damage and they've still saved the day so you know that's good for them a guess and the other one is actually a tip I learned from my very first gem if you want your players to have an easy fight and feel like badasses give them one big thing to fight if you actually want to mess them up give them lots of little things to fight because the idea is it's kind of like a swarm if you give them more things to have to deal with then they can actually deal with in like the one attack or two attacks they're permitted in a turn they're gonna start taking hit and they're gonna get really scared I kind of feel like that worked in a skeleton fight all these dice roll oh you take 13 points of death of a total of 18 yes you're not going yeah good I guess yeah you you clump over to the pirate skiff followed by some you know like a trail of squid sort of following you on there occasionally there's a whales of breach ask the whale to just fully breach into the ship that's what I was wondering yeah let's not damage the ship hey guys unbalance it and make everyone lose their footing so yeah if we get in the way as we were approaching that there was something being able to retaliate the can fire one of the special things about DNA that makes it really fun for people to play is that you get lots of options with magic which is great but it also means I've got lots of things to bear in mind when I want something to go smoothly and not get completely like sent off on some random other path and I think there's no better example of this in practice then that time they used a whale to ram a ship obviously Merrill one can communicate with animals and she can sort of send out this this message and become friends with them the call that you put out into the water is answered by like a few Humboldt squid and they're like really nasty they're a little weird let's say a couple of sharks there's so much you can sense that the whale you tried to reach out to is like like I get it yeah I mentioned the whale is sort of being out there but not being near enough to the shore to be able to help because I thought it was funny and that was my downfall because it meant they had a whale they can later weaponize yeah I'll be like don't hurt yourself go nudge it give him a nudge there babe I'm at that point again I couldn't exactly say no and put the whale back in the jar like it was it was out of the lamp there was nothing I could do except let them use it suddenly you see if you're watching the ship the sails kind of jugger and whole kind of rock scene you see the people on top deck struggle to keep their feet as the whale just kind of like beneath the waterline just smashes into the boat it led to the to be fair the question I've never had to ask myself before which is how much damage does a whale do exactly it was a trying day at the office if there was one thing I would say to aspiring diems who want to neutralize this possibility it's not to learn all the spells cuz it will just drive you bonkers and you'll end up hating the game and you won't want to run it just get to know your players and what they're like so if for example there's a reason I don't leave red explosive barrels littered all over get because these people work in video games all the time of course they're gonna put them to use so just try and give them options that they will naturally gravitate towards as and when you want them to use those options and just be wary of throwing things in that are like wide open for abuse because you think it's good flavor test as otherwise you're just gonna be in for a world of hurt while still ringing the bell yeah there's six six noise coming what a play armor yep grease is still looking good yeah the grease is in play okay because anyone have any other traps or anything we can set down before they do okay I have a special spell called spike growth which basically means that I can create a spike trap that they will take damage if they walk over it so just after the grease okay down maybe they'll slide right into it like between 20 foot radius I'm gonna cast spike growth so I don't really think anybody around the table expected maryland's meat grinder that now infamous incident to be quite as deadly as it was because the plan was a good one grease on the way in at the point of ingress where these paladin's are gonna be coming in and then Oh a spike trap that sounds like it might be useful because like how they're gonna slide into it and that's gonna be great what we didn't realize was just how much damage it does per five foot they were covering we got three yeah I'm four yeah yeah three years one okay all right the guys are scary now Marilyn and I thought well I'm gonna go with this I've made the saving roles for the the paladin's they screwed them up and then I just rolled arbitrarily to see how far into the trap they got carried by the grease this guy goes okay it's six feet so that's so just another 2d this is a meat grinder it turned out far enough to mince the ball today and it was it was great fun I think we were all of us this is the one example of everyone being around the table just swept away by the force of the derailment together and having a great time with it but it's the first time I feel like it's gone completely not wrong but in a very on the same page [Laughter] pretty much I don't want to say it was a lovely moment because egg but threw up but it was still it was definitely a standout moment for me because that combat encounter was planned to be kind of a little siege I really like giving every now and then my players like a building that they're in that they have a few minutes to prepare because there's going to be an assault that's not something that that tends to happen when combat breaks out in D&D it's more like everyone in the room draws their sword so to be fair I can't fault them for coming up with this plan it was great and exactly kind of what I wanted them to do I just I guess I didn't realize that the comic was gonna be over quite so quickly but in many ways that's kind of the tale away from this for any other dm's wanting to give the players opportunities to set traps or prepare or just in combat in general and that's not to get too attached to the scenario and to the idea of it being this heroic back and forth where people are fighting on the ramparts and others are sort of brawling in the dirt or whatever because sometimes it's gonna go wrong and it's gonna be hilarious and it makes for a really memorable moment and again I'm not saying everyone felt good about it but it was definitely a thing and sometimes that's what you need to make sort of the best and longest lasting memories when you're playing a game like D&D ya know I it's kind of a very old trope and I kind of hate it when I see t-shirts being like I'm the dungeon master what I say goes or you know your fate is in my hands that's kind of it's a not true because as I've hopefully shown over the last few minutes that things will go wrong for the DM and if they're trying to wrench control of that back that's you're not really sharing the whole point of this is it's a collaborative storytelling exercise and if you're not all collaborating to tell the story then kind of what's the point you know even if it's a story where everyone's covered in minced up paladin but you know sometimes it happens you can't make a good adventure or the help breaking of hugh paladin gets across degrees runs five-foot into it but when you start to fight for out of the radius alright so that was seven ways your players will derail you I hope you found it useful or at least mildly entertaining if you enjoyed it I'm gonna be doing lots more videos on how to get started in pen and paper role-playing over on dice breaker that's youtube.com forward slash dice breaker so do give that a look and by the magic of the YouTube back-end or possibly just magic I don't really know how this works there's a link to dice breaker right there so I'll wait here and just click that thank you

Channel: Outside Xtra

Views: 1,658,034

Rating: 4.9368305 out of 5

Keywords: Ellen Rose, Luke Westaway, Outside Xtra, outsidextra, outside xbox, outsidexbox, johnny chiodini, eurogamer, dicebreaker, dice breaker, dm, dungeons and dragons, dnd, dungeons & dragons, how to dm, dungeon master, dungeons and dragons gameplay, gameplay, bard, paladin, rules, spells, funny, dnd stories, stories, funny videos, oxventure, oxventurers

Id: nuTWiKyJ6sI

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/unequalcheese]

Absolutely lovely video. I was rewatching old D&D episodes and this was such a good piece of commentary! Johnny is awesome...

[u/3rudite]

JOHNNYYYYYY!!!!!

[u/haykat]

Such a great video! I did wonder how he justified the orphan paste, can’t wait to see what he makes on his new channel

[u/Garth45]

Looking forward to Johhny's channel!

[u/Robinothoodie]

This started me binging the series. So glad I finally checked it out