I have told the story of our greatest role playing failure several times but it is such a wonderful story I will tell it once again.
So the GM (not me, I am innocent of this one!) is trying to bring the party together. It is a spacemaster game and my character is an insurgent against an evil empire. As I wander around the town other members of my team of dropping out of radio contact as if they are being picked off. Then I notice I am being tailed so I end up leading them to a cafe, lots of witnesses around should they try and make a move against me. Much to my surprise my tail sits down opposite me at my table. We are eyeing each other, full of distrust. I take my auto blaster out of its holster and it is aimed at this person under the table. Unknown to me the person opposite has done pretty much the same thing.
The tension builds….
A third person enters the cafe, walks up to our table and says “Hello” and the PCs all shoot each other and all roll fatal criticals. End of game.
Amazing but not in a good way, but it is a good story.
Nice!
Ours was a first level Dervish, whose first act in his first ever battle was to try to cast a spell that was too high a level for him. He rolled and extraordinary spell failure, then open ended multiple times, and destroyed his own brain due to a massive internalization of power.
In other words, he pulled a Del Grande.
The most recent failure, if you can fit it into the theme of this thread, came from the failure of the players to roll any type of Lie Perception or Interrogation skill at all on the group of people they came across. The party was sent from City A to Village B to find out why the trade carts had stopped arriving. Along the road they came across three people coming from the Village B. The party immediately assumed they were villagers trying to find out what happened to the other villagers. The party immediately welcomed them into the ranks and shared all their information with them. For the next five sessions, the party couldn’t figure out why everyone was dying off or why the ‘bad guys’ were always one step ahead of them.
They were telling the three bad guys every move they were making and what all their tactics were. The three bad guys were relaying that info back to their leaders or purposely misdirecting the party to other locations. I couldn’t have written it better myself! It changed the entire dynamic of the campaign I was running. It turned into a far better adventure than I had planned. They eventually found out when they hit Trade Port C to attack the bad guys and to liberate the trapped villagers. Everyone took up positions for the first round, all with surprise and back attacks. Imagine their surprise when three players took arrows to the back by the three NPCs who had been travelling with them for the past week.