GM Mistakes

[erhershman]

Okay, new survey question which I hope will spark some humorous answers: What is the biggest GM mistake you've ever made when running an RPG?

Mine was going 3 episodes before remembering to explain to the players how courage points worked. And nobody ever asked me, so naturally I didn't remember...

[Anarchy Bob]

Mistakes? I never make mistakes!

Seriously though, don't know if that qualifies as my greatest mistake, but here's one i remember.

I took place about 10 years ago, while we were playing through CM1, Test of the Warlords. For those who don't know, it's an original DnD module for characters level 15-25. Basically, every player is granted a piece of land by the monarch of some frontier area.

We played every night that none of us had any homework, and i ran marathon sessions during the weekends. I think i had something like 6 players, all the npcs from the books and i added the pre-generated pcs from the module to the mix. There was some deep roleplaying from some players, which was kinda new to us. (Being like 12 and all that.)

The comes the final battle after a few weeks. A rival nation invades, allies are called on, spies and traitors make their moves. So we assemble the forces, calculate their battle values and i have each player tell me their battle plans.

Then we roll for results. And i kinda decided the outcome of the war based on those few results. Forgetting completetly that armies aren't destroyed after one skirmish. After that final session, i couldn't figure out what went wrong when i saw my players were kinda disapointed. Then it damned on me.

Then again, i don't see those guys anymore and i'm probably the only one who remembers so.

[First of Two]

Not exactly a mistake, just something that irked my players...

They travelled through a wormhole to a small globular cluster, (where two ancient civilizations fought a war with planetary engineering on a colossal scale) taking heavy damage in the journey.

I wanted the to explore the cluster, but they were sticking close to the wormhole's edge, trying to fix the ship just enough to go back through (not a curious bunch, my crew.)

So I start telling them their sensors are getting odd readings from a few nearby systems. (But I didn't bother to figure out just WHAT the oddities were."

"What kind of readings?"

"Well, they're off.. sort of anomalous."

"What do they say?"

"You can't tell for sure, your sensor acuity is down to 30% from the damage."

"Well, what does it LOOK like they're saying."

"um... they're anomalies."

"So... we're dealing with anomalous anomalies???"

"Er.. let's end here for the night."

Well, some of them let me have it afterwards, but then it became sort of a running joke within the group, so it didn't end too badly. I'm still gaming with the best gamer in that group, so I still hear "anomalous anomalies?" from time to time... and I always make sure to 'name' my stellar phenomena.

[tonyg]

Biggest? Hmm, tough call. One BIG mistake was when I forgot about the possibleuses of tech and wound up writing an intersting subplot for an adventure that the players conviently bypassed via transporter.

How the $%&! could I forget about the tranporter?

[Phoenix]

Easy, not setting a point limit for abilities in a Champions game...It became one big arms race.

[Robbert Raets]

Originally posted by Phoenix
.....It became one big arms race.

They all played Briks?

[Phoenix]

And one psychotic mentalist with a 20d6 Ego Attack

[SIR SIG]

Champions was a good game, HKA's were a personal favorite

[Ineti]

It's bad form for a GM to admit making mistakes.

I don't remember any show-stopping errors, though when the players ask me questions that I swear are way, way, waaaaaay out in left field, I tend to give vague answers. Which just makes them question more. I'm tempted to make a "Under Construction" sign and just flash that when they stump me.

[Phoenix]

Originally posted by SIR SIG
Champions was a good game, HKA's were a personal favorite

What do you mean "WAS"!!!!! It still is.

[Tarbas]

It was two years ago, the third episode of my still running campaign "Alpha Squad".
I wanted to introduce a new recurring NPC, the son of Harry Fenton Mudd. He sneaked into one of my players room and stole some things. The problem was that one of my players just raised a force field in the room and imprisoned Mudd. We only played for 23 Minutes and the game seemed to be already over.
I was so angry about that, that I just let Mudd escape. The problem was, how...? I had no answer, he just disappeard and my players kept asking, searching and argh! My nerves were on the edge.

My last words were: "Fine, ok I was wrong, it was my mistake! I hope you are happy now" Then I went to bed

[LizardQueen]

OK, I've only ever run one game (I'm usually a player), so I don't have many. But here is one:

The players were Maquis trying to blow up an armory. I made the assumption that the players would try to sneak in; instead they decided to con the guards. The guards I hadn't even come up with names for. The conversation went something like this:

Player: "...Tell you what. We've got so many cases of kanar, and it's all insured. It's possible we could have some "breakage", and if you were to end up with a few cases, who would know? Listen, what is your name, anyway?"

Nameless Cardassian guard: "Umm...Bob."

[erhershman]

Okay, I just made another mistake last night. The PC ship is the USS Lakota, under the command of Captain Ericka Benteen. One catch though: I was reading a biography of her on the PC game Starship Creator, and it turns out she was courtmartialed after she attacked the USS Defiant, demoted to commander temporarily, and removed to command of the USS Appalachia.
It's a good thing my players don't know that, because otherwise my players would be acting sort of like Star Trek fans over canon changes in Enterprise.

[Capt.Hunter]

Umm, you do know that the PC games are not considered canon? Only the shows and the movies are actually canon, Paramount-produced documents are semi-canon, etc. If the PC games count as canon then Starfleet has Borg-killing personal weaponry, the Sovereign-Class has Corbomite Reflectors and there's a shp out there with Holo-masking technology crewed by the Starfleet equivalent of the average Shadowrun team...