In the spirit of telling the stories of how your players throw wrenches into your plots. How do you, the GM, throw wrenches back at your players in the same manner?

For instance, both my female players have female characters. I've since had them be hit on while at a ball, also forcing them to have to dress fancy, no armor or weapons that they are used to carrying and wearing. This makes for some comical dialog between the women and who ever is trying to court them at the time.

Now there are rewards for going through with this. While my female commander may not know it, but she's agreed to a date aboard a Marauder corvette, little does she know, the Zygerian that is taking her will have the ship cleared of crew, so that it will only be herself, and him aboard, allowing her the prime opportunity to "acquire" the vessel for her own use.

So what wrenches have you GM's thrown at your players, comical or otherwise?

In my first session of FFG, one of my players who was playing a Wookie, was being accosted by a minion thug group. He decided he wanted to scare them off with a Wookie roar (didn't want to fight them). It wasn't a hard check, but I did upgrade it with a Destiny Point, just to see what would happen (we were still testing out the mechanics). He rolled a Despair, so I had his roar work REALLY well, and instead of just scaring off the thugs, he made EVERYONE on that city block go into a panic, screaming "RUUUN!! IT'S A RABID WOOKIE! FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES!!" Which made the player give me a priceless "um...oops" expression. I then had the panicked people call the actual security for the city, and they proceeded to beat the crap out of the Wookie

In another session, I set up the scene to make them see a pending human sacrifice, and they, being heroes of course, stepped in to try and stop it, and save the victim. Problem is, it wasn't a simple sacrifice, and them stopping it, actually ended up unleashing a powerful evil sith ghost, which was the main antagonist for the campaign.

Another time, this was mostly out of spite to a player who kept predicting what would happen ahead of time. Seriously any scenario that you would describe to set the stage, he would interrupt and say something like "Ok so we will probably encounter *insert typical monster for that biome* " to the party. And, seriously people DONT DO THIS. It's really fu**ing annoying to the GM when you do this. It's about as annoying as if you were in a movie theater and someone yelled out what was about to happen, right before a tense scene. Just don't.

Anyway, they were sailing across an ocean, and I was going to have a kraken attack. So as I'm setting up the ship, and describing the ocean that day, this player goes "Ok so, we'll either be attacked by kraken, or pirates." Completely blowing my reveal. So, I decided to describe a ship approaching them under black sails, and right before the pirates attacked, a kraken popped up and ate the pirate ship, then proceeded to attack the party. Not much of a wrench, but it was an attempt.

5 hours ago, KungFuFerret said:

Another time, this was mostly out of spite to a player who kept predicting what would happen ahead of time. Seriously any scenario that you would describe to set the stage, he would interrupt and say something like "Ok so we will probably encounter *insert typical monster for that biome* " to the party. And, seriously people DONT DO THIS. It's really fu**ing annoying to the GM when you do this. It's about as annoying as if you were in a movie theater and someone yelled out what was about to happen, right before a tense scene. Just don't.

Two of my players are lifelong RP-ers and one of them does this constantly. It really keeps me on my toes because I have to come up with variations he hasn't seen before.

In one case, I set up a villain who easily could have become a recurring nemesis NPC. In their first meeting, a classic tense social encounter, that same player said "I'm just gonna shoot him in the face." So I let him. I could have used any number of ways to cheat the NPC out of the line of fire, but I let my player blast the big bad immediately. He had no idea how to handle the situation after that as a GM has never let it happen before.

I fooled the same player using parts of the published adventure with the droids taking over the mine. All evidence pointed to a droid uprising and he was all locked and loaded. Turns out the droids were helping the miners fight a different threat. He only managed to blast one battle droid before they figured out the twist.

15 minutes ago, rogue_09 said:

Two of my players are lifelong RP-ers and one of them does this constantly. It really keeps me on my toes because I have to come up with variations he hasn't seen before.

I don't consider it "keeping me on my toes" as someone who has no self-control of their mouth, blurting out stuff ahead of time and spoiling any mood setting. I mean, to me it's akin to someone who was in the theater watching Empire Strikes Back for the first time, and like 1 minute before it's revealed in the movie, just blurting out loud "He's his father!"

It's just common courtesy to the GM I feel, to not burst his theatrical bubble, by blurting out in an out of character fashion, what he bets you are going to do. It pulls people out of the mood you might be trying to set, potentially derails the train of thought of the GM for the outburst, and essentially provides nothing to the situation other than for that player to be smug and go "hah! I knew it!" Yes, you did. Good for you, having a fu**ing cookie and shut the fu** up already. Can I get back to trying to tell my story now? Or do you have more meta statements you feel you have to blurt out for no beneficial reason?

8 hours ago, KungFuFerret said:

Another time, this was mostly out of spite to a player who kept predicting what would happen ahead of time. Seriously any scenario that you would describe to set the stage, he would interrupt and say something like "Ok so we will probably encounter *insert typical monster for that biome* " to the party. And, seriously people DONT DO THIS. It's really fu**ing annoying to the GM when you do this. It's about as annoying as if you were in a movie theater and someone yelled out what was about to happen, right before a tense scene. Just don't.

Well, in that case the only suggestion I would make is to politely and calmly tell them to stop it as it is distracting, thus taking you out of your narrative groove. Most problems can be solved by basic communication with players.

...If they persist after this however and continue to pester you with this, DESPITE politely asking them to stop and talking it out, don't despair. This is an opportunity: Throw unorthodox creatures or encounters at them every single time this stupid bugger comments on what will likely be fought. Using your example with the boat, he predicted a kraken would attack the boat? Instead have it that part way through the trip the lower decks have been flooded due to the lower floor seemingly being corroded. The party goes to investigate, they'll find the water has become oddly acidic...which will lead into the party encountering or Escaping from a green dragon that's decided to rip their ship apart (Fun fact, did you know Green dragons are capable of breathing under water AND using their dragon breath while submerged?). Even then you don't need to be deadly with it, could simply be a case of he predicts a monster and they encounter something mundane or really low level like kobolds or even just cross paths with a black cat that does absolutely nothing to the party save meow or hiss. Or they encounter nothing after you make them paranoid of something happening. Granted, the more powerful the beastie the more likely the party will quickly connect the dots to "OK, every time this person tries to predict what comes up bad/weird stuff happens."

Naturally, if they start saying "*Insert creature here* shouldn't be in this environment!" Just smile and say "Yeah, that IS pretty weird isn't it?"

Like I said though, only use this if talking it out fails. One shouldn't be spiteful needlessly. But if you gotta be spiteful, I've learned you might as well do it in interesting and fun ways.

On 11/17/2017 at 6:10 AM, Kiowa706 said:

wrenches

I think you mean "hydrospanners"

On 11/17/2017 at 5:08 PM, ExileofEnya said:

Like I said though, only use this if talking it out fails. One shouldn't be spiteful needlessly. But if you gotta be spiteful, I've learned you might as well do it in interesting and fun ways.

This. I don't have players that do the whole ruin the mood thing. Although we do use the "storm troopers kick in the door" line constantly, and occasionally they actually have, much to my players surprise. I like to toss things at my players, random stormtroopers, a Force sensitive ship that haunts the trade lanes that they had a chance to destroy, but noped the double hockey stick **** out of dodge instead. I'd rather deal with players this way than to confront them about it. If it continues to occur after a while of these surprises then I'd have a sit down with the player.