In light of the cruelest DM thread, I would like to get the players side, what is the cruelest thing you have done to a DM?

I feel like just about everything I've done has been cruel to my DMs, one of them used to deliberately think up an adventure and then throw away all of his work and plan on the exact opposite of what he wanted to happen happening simply because my character would always lead everyone in the opposite direction.

And I'm sure I have a better example than this, but here's a recent one. Not super cruel, but I definitely acted against the DM's wishes:

I played a huge hulking brute, a fighter/rogue type, mostly a thug but also somewhat of a skill monkey. He was brash and usually used his fists in combat mostly because he didn't have the patience to bother drawing any of the 10 or so other weapons he had hanging off of him at all times. So we went to this elf city in order to find a temple nearby, and we're in the library and the elven librarian is being a dick, acting all superior, so I tell him let's take it outside. He laughs, I say I'll be waiting for the end of his shift, and I do. He comes outside and I'm on a bench waiting for him, and he laughs again and points up into the trees, where there are elven guards with bows or something (it's clear that the DM didn't want me to have my way), so I figure maybe I don't want to fight the whole city guard, and instead just follow this guy home so I know where to find him later. Then, later, when talking to the elf queen and asking for permission to enter the temple, my character pipes up and asks for permission to punch the librarian, just once, and the queen gets pissed and throws us out. So we get an escort to the edge of the elven lands to show us where the temple is, and then when we get to the edge the escort leaves us and tells us that the humans in the party, aka only myself and the DM's plot device NPC, are not to come back into the elven lands on pain of death. At which point the DM thinks he's got me, but I tell him that he does not, and my character's sole motivation in life is now to punch this librarian, and I guarantee that I will figure out a way.

So we continue through this temple, and when we get to the end of it, this angel who is guiding us on our quest through these temples comes down and offers a reward. At this point in the campaign, we had already started being suspicious of the angels, so the party didn't necessarily all want to take these rewards because we thought they were dangerous, but we didn't want the angels to know we thought that. So while accepting my reward, I asked if I could also use one of the other characters' rewards (since he wanted nothing to do with it), and asked to have three spells cast on me. The angel agrees, and my spells are "protection from arrows, teleport, and word of recall." He wonders why but agrees, asks me where I want to go, and I'm off.

I end up inside the elf librarian's house right in front of him, punch him the FUCK out, then teleport back with a grin on my face.

Mission accomplished.

I... you know the rings of protection wouldn't stack?

A 65 AC is achievable through some crazy character optimization, not some errant magical items.

The worst thing we ever did was to my roommate. It was his first time being a DM and I dont think another DM would have let this slide. Throughout the campaign we found this letters and notes from the main villian giving orders to his underlings. We finally found out it was an elder black dragon. He didnt kill us, but sent his daughter after us before he left. As we fought this black dragon I had an idea. I took cover and wrote a note to the rogue in the group, then gave him my pen and paper. One natural 20 forgery followed by a roll of 1 by the dragon, we made her think her daddy didnt love her anymore. It was at this point that our group started laughing, and our poor DM decided to roll a d6 to decide how she reacted. In the end she flew off and attacked her father, and got killed shortly after. He was pretty mad (both the elder dragon and the DM) and ended up killing our party. For some reason he won't DM for us anymore...

I wouldn't say cruel, but...

In a vampire LARP, I was the childe of the Prince. The coffee bar we played at was considered elysium. The storyteller had worked for a couple of months to set up a specific string of events that were to happen one night, including the appearance of a rather low-gen vamp (don't remember exactly what gen, but he could have taken any of us in an instant). Well long story short, the low-gen shows up, gets mouthy, provokes another vamp who tells him to piss off. The low-gen strikes the other vamp. I stepped up to the low-gen, looked him straight in the eye and said "You have violated elysium, I claim your life". With the Prince backing me, the storyteller (who was also playing the low-gen) decided that to follow protocol, the low-gen would allow himself to be staked and left out for sunrise the next day. He said "No one is above the law".

The storyteller pulled me off to the side afterward, told me that he hadn't expected anyone to get up in the low-gens face, then asked me to not come back. I learned later that the game dissolved 3 weeks later due to conflicts between the players and the storyteller.

edit: a couple of spelling fixes

I managed to steal my first campaign from another DM. He had hosted for two weeks and it was an utterly abysmal campaign (although this was only my second game at the time, so I had little point for reference)

After two sessions we had managed to kill exactly four goblins and had accomplished next to nothing. I made a suggestion that he try to outline a story rather than have us run aimlessly through town and sewers and he remarked that if I thought I could do a better job, then I should run the campaign.

I told him to roll stats. Expecting the newbie to fail, he did.

That campaign went on for something like four months and ultimately resulted in the party's coup and reestablishment of the kingdom government, with each player commanding his or her own army (the final battle used the miniature handbook rules for massive battles and was indeed, incredibly epic). The old DM admitted his failings and continued to be there every night until the campaigns conclusion.

We were playing one of the Star Wars games (either RCR or Saga, I forget which) and we had to infiltrate a base. Our group preferred stealth and the like, and we had an awesome computer hacker. However, we had no information on the base and no information on any of the employees (hence, no way to forge documents to sneak on base or the like).

So, after some hard thinking and surveillance, we decided to follow someone who had clearance home and get into a minor fender-bender, so that we could exchange insurance information - this gave us enough info to start a snowball effect.

So, yeah, I'm sure our GM was hoping to force us into assaulting the base - the worst we did was smash a car.

[Mike, Underbheit, Pete and Rusty are playing Dungeons and Dragons]

Underbheit: OK, my barbarian swings his +3 battle axe.

Sorayama: No. The Leslie Golem's skin is like rock.

Pete White: "What the hell's a Leslie golem?"

Sorayama: "A very powerful creature that looks just like Leslie Cohen."

Pete White: "Oh for Pete ... for my sake"

Rusty: Looks like Leslie Cohen, huh? Well then my wizard seduces her.

Sorayama: What? You can't do that

Rusty: Sure I can. I have like 25 charisma points. I want to seduce her.

Sorayama: No, don't! It's Leslie.

[The die rolls and Sorayama screams. The flashback breaks out into the present]

Dr. Venture: Oh, c'mon! You're going to kill me because I had fake sex on graph paper with a girl who barely even spoke to you in real life?

They named their shuttle "It's one of ours, sir!"

I've done this sort of thing to my GM twice.

At the end of a years-long weekly campaign, my group and I finally met the Demon King. My GM is well-known for coming up with his own monsters, so we knew that whatever we were really up against, it wasn't in the books. He's also well-known for not really being able to scale the game at high levels -- he scales to the combat monster of the group, which means that everyone else has to take massive defensive bonuses just to stay alive for more than two rounds.

I'm playing a druid that I've taken all the way from level 1 to level 18 -- and the way our GM hands out XP, that takes years in real-time -- that I've kept a pure druid. She's not all that powerful compared to the rest of the party, since anything she can transform into (yes, including dragons) would just get eaten by the GM's custom monsters.

This does not deter us in the slightest.

We walk into the Demon King's demesne, and are immediately set upon by custom-made evil from every angle at once. I'm reduced to a second-rate healer from round two onwards, barely keeping our magic-users from falling over. There's also a custom-made ritual cast in the room, turning all healing magic into damage spells, causing us to go through potions at an unprecedented rate. Then the GM introduces the Demon King's "puppies". Two horrific custom-made monsters with an armor class of un-fucking-believable, with massive amounts of damage resistance to boot. Needless to say, our best attacks are bouncing off these things. The battle begins to look grim when one of the mages flings a minor spell at one of the beasties, asks for the spell resistance roll, and the GM says, "No roll; these don't have spell resistance." The slaughter continues.

I digest this information in silence. This GM puts spell resistances on everything. I cannot fathom how he has failed to make these puppies completely invulnerable, but I'm not about to waste the breakthrough he's just handed us. On my next turn, I announce that I am casting Waterball on the nearest puppy. Waterball does subdual damage that doesn't count until the creature's hit points are equal to or less than the amount of subdual damage on the creature. The puppies have more than 500 hit points. The GM snickers, tells me to roll damage, and I come up with 22 points of subdual damage. Everyone glares at me for wasting a turn that could have healed someone, and the slaughter re-commences.

My turn comes around again. The puppy has lined up our best fighter for a very tasty puppy-snack, and is preparing to feast. I look the GM dead in the eye, and announce I walk up to the puppy, beep it on the nose, and cast a touch-attack spell. He has me roll the attack (much easier to roll), I make it, and he asks me which spell I'm using.

"Harm."

The room falls dead silent.

I let the GM roll the d4 that will tell him how many hit points the poor little puppy will get to keep. He rolls a 3. I smile and say, "That's a lot less than 22, isn't it?"

The GM sighs, agrees that 3 is less than 22, and announces that the puppy, which had not a scratch on it, falls over. The group proceeds to beat the other puppy into submission, followed by a epic trouncing and shaming of the Demon King himself.

The GM has not once forgotten to include spell resistances for all custom-made monsters that are well above any rolls I can make since that fight.

He's ALSO well-known for targeting the more fragile characters. In the adventure following the years-long epic battle against the Demon King, I set out to make him regret that with every fight. In this new adventure, he made the mistake of telling us that our characters were important to the storyline and were descendants of the previous adventurers. With this information in hand, I created an arcane spellcaster with no defenses and no hit points. It quite literally took five levels and two magical artifacts to get her into two-digit hit points.

I didn't play her stupid or suicidal. She stayed out of melee, she didn't go looking for trouble, and she definitely did not try to get the attention of the monsters in the middle of the fights. All the same, she usually ended up in negative hit points at least twice per battle. It took close to a year, but finally the GM pulled me aside and asking if I wanted to retire her, since I was dying so much. I looked at him in feigned shock and said, "But I'm having so much fun role-playing with her. A high-class courtesan with a little bit of magic, kidnapped and forced to trudge through the countryside? She's a blast!" He was forced to agree, since my role-playing had brought about some perfectly-tuned turning points in the game. Then he asked if I wanted anything about the game to change.

I pondered. I knew he was waiting for me to say "Stop killing my character twice a session," but that would have ruined my plans. Instead, I asked if he could please enforce the rules of attacks of opportunity. He had been ignoring them because they seemed poorly-written, so his monsters could abandon the melee combatants and pound me to a pulp without a second thought.

It took a few sessions, but he quickly realized that trying to break away from our melee people resulted in his monsters getting the everliving snot beaten out of them. He tried to compensate by doubling their hit points, but the rest of the group called him out on that one when one fight lasted for two months (that's eight sessions of five-or-six hours of play).

I still game with this GM, because his stories are epic, involving, and really a joy to play. I've proved to myself that I can work around his more egregious habits and even get some of my own back, so I don't mind his railroading techniques. I'm there to help build an engaging story, not "win", so I don't mind it when bad things happen to my characters (in fact, some of the time, I suggest the dastardly things myself!).

Have to admit a lot of these are fault from the DM's lack of experience. Of course everyone is a newb at some point.

My first game I had created a level 25 tri-keen pyromancer that was going to taunt and chase the party the entire game as sort of an evil foil. His stats were insane. He was fast and had an insane jump and climb wielded four weapons could kill the entire party in one move if they failed their throws. Idea was he would force them to hand over artifacts and documents they recovered in their travels.

Come the big reveal of him finally as he attacks them at their inn.

Little did I know the trap outside the window the parties necromancer placed could paralyze. Little did I expect I would roll a 1. So this very powerful thri-keen falls two stories and they run down to it. Then the dwarf attempts a cu de grace. She dealt over 50 damage... Fort save... I rolled a 1.

The necromancer even kept the body for use later. Fortunately I didn't give it any equipment above +3 yet as I was expecting it to get stronger with them. But as well as them getting some awesome swag I gave them an insta-level because the experience chart can't satisfy a level 6 party killing a level 25 creature.

Well out DM always gave us a choice between preserving and destroying things. A lot of the monsters and locations were based off of his favorite things in movies and tv. We pretty much destroyed everything he loved and salted the earth it landed on.

In my first and only dnd campaign, our characters over the course of a few months went from 1 to 20, gaining a level or two after each session.

I played a shadow dancer/rogue but I never got to do anything fun because the guy DMing also played a Paladin--and his RL demeanor matched his character. I could hide in plain sight, pick pocket anything, but the two pallies in the group always had their eye on me and never let me get away with anything.

Nevertheless, towards the end of the campaign I had all this cash and loot, and nothing to spend it on. The DM said we could purchase anything from the item tables though... so I bought about 200 balls of force.

In our final fight, we're confronting a necromancer and a horde of undead baddies. We're surrounded on all sides and our only hope is to kill the necromancer so we won't get overrun. And while our paladins are in melee combat with the necromancer, I let off 3 balls of force at them. They all pass their saves, the necro doesn't. Now he's trapped inside the ball of force.

The DM said, "roll the die for whatever those things do. Okay, 12 turns he's trapped in there."

"Not turns," I replied. "Minutes."

I ended up making some force bubble stairs above the mayhem where me and the squishiers waited it out, but the two pallies waded through undead for 12 minutes without even having their armor scratched.

In a Star Wars Saga Edition campaign, our party was tasked with destroying a ferocious 1000 year old, massive Dianoga . We were on a boat in the sewers approaching it. The session ended there and the GM gave us time to consider our next move before we left and met again next week.

That was a bad idea as we scoured through the rule books and devised a plan to use some explosive charges that the GM had given us as loot from completing a previous encounter. We managed to craft a scheme based on the size of the boat and the rules regarding how far apart they had to be to allow for the maximum damage roll from each charge. It would allow each of the party to place 1 charge and detonate it without accidentally detonating the other charges.

The session started, we all rolled better initiative than the Dianoga. Each of us successfully rolled to setup our charges. The GM was confused. Next, all of us but the brave JEDI in the party bailed out and swam away. The JEDI move the boat towards the Dianoga. Confused, the GM has the Dianoga lash out at one of our party. Poor damage, we're ok. Top of the round, we delay until after the JEDI. Upon closing in, he force pushed the boat under the water towards the Dianoga's gaping maw. The rest of us take defense. Still confused, the GM used the Dianoga's turn to try and attack one of the party that bailed out of the boat...he MISSED! The JEDI is up again. He swims away from the Dianoga, and detonates his charge. Meanwhile we take the rest of our turns and also detonate our charges. BOOM goes the dynamite.

We each of us (5) rolled something like 12d6 damage against it. For effect, all of us just tossed 12d6 at once...much to the dismay of the GM. It died instantly.

One of my other good ones didn't so much piss of the DM as force him to make some quick changes and wonder how the hell I pulled this one off

I was playing in a Marvel Vs Capcom based BESM d20 game. I was playing a capcom character and just having fun with it. Sabertooth decided to jump our group to capture and take one of my buddies (who was playing a mutant) in for experiments as part of the weapon x project. Of course combat broke out and sabertooth was supposed to clean house and lead to the next part of the story. However through sheer luck he couldn't hit my character, but I was rolling well enough to keep hitting him back and manged a few crtis, well fast forward through combat and I knocked him down the side of a small cliff but he still got up for more, so somewhere I decided that jumping off a cliff and delivering a Shoryuken to Sabertooth's face would be a good idea. We had to pause combat and discuss if this would work since the Shoryuken is a jumping move, the final word between players and GM was that it would work because i was in motion due to gravity. So we jump back into it and I not only hit, but I crit and delt extra damage because of the distance I fell. I only knocked him unconcious but it was enough to let us run away. This was a common theme for the whole game and Sabertooth became a sort of nemesis for my character because every time he showed up I suddenly became a total bad ass

Monk with vow of poverty in a treasure-light campaign. The DM had never heard of vow of poverty before and was counting on the treasure-light aspect to balance the (intended) relatively low power of the game.

Not me, but a friend in the same campaign.

We were in a tournament setting, with a huge gold reward in the end (and of course, hidden intrigue and people with various motives in the tournament!). Our group's cleric had made it to the finals round of the magic-user's bracket, and was facing off against a potent summoner who was gearing up to be a major threat, and not just in the tournament.

In the very first round of combat, our cleric gathers up a Maximized Inflict Serious Wounds, and charges in for the touch. *He fucking *double-criticals. The DM had to leave the room and stomp around angrily after having his "big boss" mage taken to -42 HP in the first round of combat.

My wife pulled a good one in a Shadowrun campaign. Our DM had a pair of really powerful villains that he planned on making our recurring nemeses. My honey was playing a sassy Irish sniper chick, and we were to make a hand-off with a shady demonic fellow whom we were investigating. We thought things might go south, so we had her take up a rooftop position next to the park where we were meeting.

In Shadowrun, you can increase the damage your weapon does by taking aim, 1 die for every round you aim. So our nemeses come out as this guy's escorts, and our sniper spends about 10 rounds lining up her shot just perfectly on one of them.

The moment the fit hit the shan, one of these lovingly crafted characters' heads became a fine red and gray mist on the lawn in one shot.

At least it gave the other nemesis a reason to dislike us.

This one's gonna take a while to tell...

So way back when, we played in a homebrew setting that was basically a mix of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It was loosely based on Phantasy Star I think, but had several important changes. The party consisted of: Me, playing a Drelen (extremely powerful psionic race with a near hivemind) Psion; Andrew: Playing a Proto-Human (humans with massive cybernetic enhancements, completely unable to use psionic powers) mercenary/fighter sorta dude; Mike: Playing a human military officer I believe; Adam: Playing a human mercenary/pilot; and Kaiden, our resident DMPC who could do basically everything as long as the plot required it.

So anyway, in Andrew's backstory he had put in a little line or two about how his character used to be a SPAAAAACE PIRATE, ARRRRRRR. Nobody really thought anything about it, since the GM started us off doing mercenary work for one of the Corporations that ran everything. We spent the first few sessions investigating these weird alien monstrosities that had invaded a factory or something. Eventually we finished up and went back to the Corp to get our reward, whereupon Andrew demands, out of nowhere, to be given a ship. Everyone besides him and Adam (secretly playing his former first mate) are totally shocked, including the GM. After some argument (both IC and OOC), we manage to get the ship (I actually forget if we stole it or they gave it to us, though I think it was the latter). Anyway, Andrew announces that he's going back into Space Piracy (Arrrrrrr) and that we're gonna be his crew. Since nobody has any better ideas for this campaign, we all jump on board with his plan. The GM is left floundering as we hire the rest of our crew and take to the stars, leaving behind his lovingly crafted plot.

Andrew revealed that his character's ambition was to become the "Pirate King" (yo ho ho he took a bite of gum-gum). To that end, he had hidden his former ship in the asteroid belt where most pirates took refuge. We took our brand new cruiser out to his ship and then essentially cannibalized it, bolting its weapon systems and armor to our ship while tossing anything that wasn't important. Now our ship may have looked like frankenstein's monster, but it had weapons and armor waaaaaay above its weight class, making it insanely strong.

Now, I'll give our GM props, he tried hard to get us back on track. The first thing we found on our space piracy runs was an abandoned ship that had been attacked by the same weird alien monsters that had invaded the factory at the beginning. Unfortunately for him, instead of actually investigating, we used the ship as a chance to dump off his DMPC/plot device character and leave him to die.

At this point, he is absolutely without direction. We have effectively derailed this campaign to the point where it would be more accurate to say that Andrew (now our uncontested party leader) is running it. Anyway, he pulls one last trick to try and get us "back on the rails," as it were. When we dock in a notorious pirate port, it is discovered that the monster things had planted spores on our ship and grown some weird hive thing in our cargo deck. We hired some people to go in and clean it out, which they did, but they couldn't remove the hive thing. It is at this point that the game is wrecked beyond repair.

I mentioned my character previously as a powerful psionic. Now in the homebrew system the GM had created, psionics were allowed to specialize in a "discipline." My character had specialized in Telepathy, basically mind control. Thanks to my super min-maxing, he was essentially able to do make anyone do anything (a fact we had abused previously for various means). Both my character and I personally, however, were mostly quiet and non-obtrusive, leading the GM to mostly forget that I was there a lot of the time, including when he put an alien hive on our ship. Big mistake. My character walked into the cargo bay it was held in and used his telepathy to discover that what we had growing here was basically a baby overmind. I wasted no time in mind controlling the shit out of that. Now, not only did we have one of the most powerful ships in space, we had a basically infinite army of alien monsters.

Shortly thereafter the game collapsed as we tried to unite the pirates under Andrew's leadership as the Pirate King.

Goddamn I loved that game.

I was playing a murderous archer, my sister was playing an insane wizard, and no one else in the party was doing much to keep the two of us in check. We were especially bad at boats; for some reason, whenever we went on a boat, every NPC on it wound up dead or a hostage.

At one point our group was working with orcs to defeat a major demon. The orc leaders sent us with a bunch of orc minions across land, with the promise that there would be a boat waiting for us when we got to the shore. I didn't actually want to work with orcs, and was agitating everyone else to simply kill the orcs now and use the boat without them, but the others calmed me down. Calmed me down until the insane wizard randomly licked one of the orcs, that is. The orc reacted threateningly, of course, so I shot him, all hell broke loose, and in a few rounds there were piles of dead orc minions everywhere with my character wearing a shit eating grin.

We get to the shore and discover the boat waiting for us was a longboat. We had needed the orc minions to row the boat.

I'm not actually sure who was being cruel here, but everyone was dying of laughter.

A dm I played with drove a player to pull a knife and try to stab another player. not in D&D but in real life. I cant fully remember the details that made him snap but he grabbed a knife from a knife stand and ran tword the other person. lucky the other person was trained in self defense, he disarmed the knife wielder and then proceed to pin him to the ground. needles to say we kicked the knife wielding guy out.