As a player, I was (and am) heavily into the philosophy of, whenever possible, NOT doing what the Big Bad wants you to. He sets up a funhouse maze especially for your benefit, then you should always look for by-passes and Fire Exits. Strolling in thriough the front entrance is last on the list. That is kind of what happened here.

From my recall, Mike’s first inkling that things were about to go sideways came when our group was standing in the maze’s foyer. Tempest chose to deal with the security camera by “mooning” it. Even given the Player’s prior history, I suspect this caught Mike just a tad by surprise, and *might* have slightly affected his ability to react to subsequent events.

As this little show was going on, Backlash found a wall socket. However, he did not “go in” immediately – he first chose to use one of his other abilities, that of draining / absorbing electrical power. This power was pushed to the max, causing major blackouts throughout the base (a trick he had done a few times elsewhere). BL wound up literally overflowing with electrical energy, and chose to deal with this excess very simply. He fired it off in one humungous energy blast, directed into the aforementioned maze.

Mike was … mildly perturbed by this development, and started leafing through his Great Big Folder Of Death Traps, trying to work out how much damage I had done. Final analysis was that I had blown a locomotive-sized hole pretty much all the way through his maze.

Next step. I was (pleasantly) surprised by how well things had gone at that stage. But, we knew that this Magneto was a bad bad dude, powerful enough to take on the whole team at once, so I figured there was no time to lose. BL merged with (what was left of) the base’s electrical system, which was heroically trying to come back online at that point. Picked up on where Magneto was almost immediately.

Keep in mind that (as was said previously) Magneto was a Bad Bad Dude power-wise. If he had a chance to lock-on BL, then BL would be toast, so I opted for an immediate all-or-nothing attack. The way I figured it at the time, I might get lucky and at least back-foot the guy until my team-mates caught up and weighed in as well. If my attack was ineffective for whatever reason, well, we were in deep doo-doo anyhow.

Instead, Backlash KO’d the guy. Yeah, I was pretty surprised myself. For a little bit, I expected Magneto to bounce upright and say something like “Is that ALL you’ve got?”. Or maybe this was a robot duplicate, and the real deal was about to make his Grand Entrance.

Nope to both of those.

That was a long time ago. These days, I only remind Mike about it maybe 3-4 times a year. Great times.

I learned from the encounter in so many ways that it was still worthwhile, and it by no means got the team out of the woods in the context of the wider plot. And it is so rare that the players get to put one over me so completely (twice in what is now approaching 30 years) that even when I thought of something similar, I decided to let them have their 15 seconds of glory.

Or am I the only one sadistic enough to turn player’s decisions against them?

Instead of focusing on just one mistake, I’ve decided to address five of the most common mistakes which take place at the table.

http://advancedgaming-theory.blogspot.com/2009/09/blog-carnival-mistakes-me-never.html

Oh, and that Ops Plans Guy? He’s a major ideas motor for the group, and one I love to encourage, cause I’m better at spotting opportunities for potential fun encounters than his… because I know all the secrets of the campaign, of course! :)

Thanks for sharing those painful memories. ;)
Sean Holland´s last blog ..New Spell – Missile Attack Spell

This has only happened to me once, but as you can tell, it made an impression!

Luckily for me, in the short time I have been GM’ing my players have only ever made things much more difficult for themselves, much to my amusement. I have even designed encounters with an obvious easy solution just to see if the players try it out, but they always say ‘that would be too easy’ and do it the hard way without even trying… Since they have survived doing things the hard way (so far…), to this day they think their solutions were the proper ones and they avoided falling into my ‘traps’. Though I guess if I were ever hit with something like your story, I would “consult my notes” for about 2-3 min max, and during that time try to create a logical trap the villain could have implemented to counter that on the spot (only if the villain was expecting that particular hero though). If I couldn’t come up with anything, then the victory and bragging rights go to the player…