Dungeons and Dragons Players Discuss Improvised Moments of Play that Completely Changed the Course of their Long Running DND Campaign

Author image for Eleonora Bader
Eleonora Bader
Feb 21, 2024 1:00 PM EST

During my Dungeons and Dragons campaign there have been countless moments of improvisation that have totally reshaped the course of my adventures… and my fellow players, as well. For example, about a year ago, my party once had a tense encounter with a powerful sorcerer who held vital information about the whereabouts of an ancient artifact we needed to retrieve.

We confronted him, hearts ablaze with courage, but he cackled at us from his towering fortress and our carefully laid plans quickly unraveled when midway through our battle with him, our rogue slipped away into the shadows of a dimly lit chamber. To be honest, I had barely noticed he'd gone before he came back, flying over the tapestry of the sorcerer, disrupting his spellcasting long enough so we could tie him up with magical ropes that prevented him from casting any more spells.

So today you can read a DnD thread where players discuss improvised moments that completely changed the course of their long running DnD campaign. Next, here is a chemistry lab full of Breaking Bad memes.

Advertisement
  • 01
    What improvised moment completely changed the course of your long running campaign?
    via Canva
  • 02
    What improvised moment completely changed the course of your long running campaign?
    via u/drufball
  • 03
    For me, my players snuck into a goblin camp, k led the leader, and then hit double nat 20's on an advantage intimidation check. The goblins decided that the barbarian was their new warleader. For the rest of the campaign, they had an army of 50 goblins, which was usually epic, frequently required herding a horde of gremlins and teaching them manners (and to read), and sometimes gutwrenching as they tried to keep the little guys alive at higher levels!
    via u/drufball
  • 04
    IXMandalorianXI - 9 hr. ago DM "GM, what direction is that Tarrasque we accidentally let loose going?" "West" "Ok, we are no longer adventuring on the west side of the continent. Ever."
    via u/IXMandalorianXI
  • 05
    That was almost 5 years ago. And they still refuse to go anywhere past the Dwarven mountain range which separates the west section of my map. They have have abandoned entire quest lines to avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions. 308 Reply Share
    via u/IXMandalorianXI
  • 06
    jaredkent 8 hr. ago Hey... Eventually the tarrasque going west shows back up in the east. Unless your planet is flat. 158 Reply Share Random PosterOf Legend 8 hr. ago A planet that isn't flat? What absurdity! What would the firmament rest upon if not the mountains that border it? 74 Reply Share
    via u/jaredkent, u/RandomPosterOfLegend
  • 07
    Merfolkian 9 hr. ago edited 9 hr. ago . I rolled on the random travelling events board. Standard D100 stuff. I got on the Xanathar's Grassland Encounters: "A tornado that touches down 1d6 miles away, tearing up the land for 1 mile before it dissipates" Players grew curious as to why a tornado would randomly be tearing up the place in what I had described earlier as a 'serene and quiet day'. Cut to me about 20 sessions later borrowing from Princes of the Apocalypse with an Air Cult that spontaneo
    via u/Merfolkian
  • 08
    the big bad when my party failed to k..I them in the cave they were meant to d e in. Now there are storm clouds and living lightning bolts sieging towns from a nigh unreachable advantage point on a ruined Storm Giant Skycastle. Exceptionally amusing that rolling on that table in hindsight was a lot better than what I had originally with 'Dragon Cultists are running the governments'. 143 Reply Share
    via u/Merfolkian
  • 09
    drufball OP 8 hr. ago Anytime an adventure gets to "and then you go to the castle in the sky..." you know things are cookin A 58 V Reply Share Jawsinstl - 7 hr. ago but what if the dragon cultists are the ones running the government from the castle in the sky? A 15 Reply Share
    via u/drufball, u/Jawsinstl
  • 10
    Amrathe 7 hr. ago Running LMoP and one of my players makes mead in their spare time and another loves cooking/cocktails/etc. Decided for fun to say the inn in Phandalin served hard cider made from the apples at Edermath's orchard. They immediately wanted to visit him. The player that makes mead kept mentioning bees over and over to Edermath. I assumed they were wanting to role-play harvesting honey to make mead, so finally I was like sure Edermath gives you a sack of bees just to kinda move on.
    via u/Amrathe
  • 11
    was the Redbrands jumping the party. The moment the words, "give us your stuff" left my mouth I knew I had messed up. My player clutched their sack of bees and declared, "Not my big sack of money?!" And the other player shouted, "Your mother's ruby is in there! Oh no!" My Redbrands of course then had to confiscate and open the sack of bees. My party has called themselves The Bee-Holders ever since. A 36 Reply Share
    via u/Amrathe
  • 12
    bondjimbond - 8 hr. ago DM A player who missed a session entered the city alone with no money as a war was about to start. He asked if there was a job board, so I made up something reasonable and a couple of joke ones, including cat sitter at 2 cp per week. He saw that as a free place to stay and jumped on it. So he had to deal with a demon cat owned by a young watchman who going off to join the army, not realizing he's the true heir to the throne.
    via u/bondjimbond
  • 13
    That ended up becoming a major part of the plot, as the PCs deposed the evil king and installed this good guy watchman who didn't exist until a player though cat sitting would be an easy gig. Reply Share 101
    via u/bondjimbond
  • 14
    Rechan 10 hr. ago In the first session one of the PCs made a nat 20 swim check, and decided he was going to focus on becoming a sea god. And I faciltated this to an extent. 93 Reply Share drufball OP 9 hr. ago I'm getting solid "the Deep" vibes from The Boys... Reply Share 23
    via u/Rechan, u/drufball
  • 15
    IAmBrengo 9 hr. ago Our warlock d ed in a fight, failed all dath saves on top of that. He was upset cuz he really liked his character. When it came around to his turn again in combat, instead of being skipped, the DM roleplayed as his patron in the afterlife. He gave him a second chance with the trade of an even stricter pact. He came back to life as an undead warlock. 114 Reply Share
    via u/IAmBrengo
  • 16
    GambetTV 7 hr. ago DM All of them, really. This might be the result of me largely only running homebrew campaigns until the last year or so when I started running Curse of Strahd, my first module ever. But my general DM style is to do a decent amount of world building for a setting, and get to a point where I really understand my NPCs, and the NPCs have goals, some of which will help shape the overall
    via u/GambetTV
  • 17
    story of the campaign. But I don't really plot much out more than one session ahead. I might have a little nugget of an idea for the future, usually as the result of something someone does, but I always let those ideas stay vague until we come up upon the moment. That said, there have been lots of times where I thought I roughly knew where the story was going to go, only to be thoroughly proven wrong due to some player action. A few years ago I was running a low-ish magic campaign in the Stone A
    via u/GambetTV
  • 18
    come up with sort of an alternate physics system for how magic worked, so that we could still use the rules and game mechanics of D&D, but the lore-reason for why stuff worked was different. Instead of it being Mystra or the Weave or whatever, the idea was that Belief directly shaped magical energies. So the more people you could get to believe the same thing, the more that thing became reality.
    via u/GambetTV
  • 19
    One of my players played a practical joke on what was essentially a sleazy Bartender, and used a little magic to convince the Bartender that *he* in fact had magic, and that it was super easy to do. Well, keep in mind that my players were in the dark about the whole "Belief causes reality" thing in the beginning, so what they didn't realize is that this practical joke wound up turning this simple Bartender into one of the best magical users in the whole campaign, because he was convinced, and co
    via u/GambetTV
  • 20
    Holly Cupcakez 7 hr. ago We failed every check during a mid-canpaign fight where we were supposed to run away and regroup because the BBEG was going to monologue us about how we had no chance of beating him and our Fighter rolled a Nat 20 to headbutt him in the middle of his speech... Which resulted in us getting TPK'd because I had one spell left and Grease didn't do anything except make our coses really slippery after the fact.
    via u/HollyCupcakez
  • 21
    Cut to us IRL bummed about having to reroll our characters next session. Then in the next session, our DM told us to make a Will Save just as we were getting ready to present our new PC's. We did make those Will saves. Lo and behold, our old PC's are now undead that were previously enthralled to the BBEG we head-butted last session and have now broken free of his control. 20 years have passed in-game and we now have a new quest.
    via u/HollyCupcakez
  • 22
    Aesyric 7 hr. ago One of the members of our party is a time wizard, and his magic is against the laws of the universe. There is an organization of time cops who enforce that type of thing not be used, so the entire campaign we never spoke about it out loud unless we were in a private sanctum, made sure not to use the magic in front of people who could live to tell the tale, etc.
    via u/Aesyric
  • 23
    Eventually we find another player's long lost mother, and that player is comforting their mother by assuring her of our groups power so we can protect her, and absent-mindedly mention, while listing all of our feats, that the time wizard is able to revert any mistakes that may happen as though they didn't. This was not intentional, and none of us even recognized what had even happened until we turn towards the time wizard's player and his jaw is just on the floor
    via u/Aesyric
  • 24
    Now we've got time cops constantly chasing us, patrolling around our home city, and causing general trans-dimensional shenanigans 13 Reply Share
    via u/Aesyric
  • 25
    Flingar 10 hr. ago So early on in my campaign the party met this guy who owns a museum of magical artifacts who sent them on a quest to recover an incredibly dangerous relic that was stolen by bandits. They return it to him and it's revealed that this guy is actually a Warforged who's lived for hundreds of years, an extremely powerful Artificer, and sworn enemy of the BBEG and the dark god they serve.
    via u/Flingar
  • 26
    What does the party do with this information? F¹ king rob him for his bag of holding, burn down a local business to create a diversion, lie about all that to his face, and, in a later session, accidentally destroy it. There goes the most powerful ally you'll ever have in this campaign i guess
    via u/Flingar

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

fantasy rogue gaming reddit geeky castle nerdy tabletop games spells gaming fireball dnd players players wizard board games ttrpg homebrew dnd campaign dungeons and dragons
Scroll Down For The Next Article