"I kill Gandalf."
The
Game Master has created an epic plot that spans time, space and dimensions. Its scope is exceeded only by its elegance, its elegance only bettered by its plot, its plot only bested by its setting, and the whole thing is held together by a compelling supporting cast of NPCs. The campaign is 'perfect'.
...at least, that's what the
Game Master thinks. Meanwhile, the players have decided that the huge scope has made the world shallow, it's only "elegant" if you like a
Cliche Storm, the plot was lifted straight from the
third remake of something, the
characters are either cookie-cutter stereotypes or
Mary Sues who make the
players feel like the supporting cast, and the setting looks like it came from
Manos: The Hands of Fate, with the serial numbers filed off. It's about halfway through the campaign, and the players have decided that everything is only going to get worse. The time has come to strike a blow for freedom, for better plots, and against this idiotic
Game Master. The players go
Off The Rails.
This can take many forms, but at its core, one (or more) players disrupts the Game Master's carefully-crafted plot by killing an important NPC, revealing an important secret, or just refusing to go where the plot demands they should go. Or maybe they just switch sides.
If the
Game Master is inflexible, either the GM ignores all actions that disrupt his plot aka
Railroading , or
Rocks Fall Everyone Dies. Or pauses the game to confer with his players about them ruining the adventure. A more creative
Game Master, on the other hand, will take this player revolt and run with it, spinning a new plot out of the threads of the player's actions. Of course, good
Game Masters rarely have their players revolt on them in the first place. A party going thoroughly and maliciously
Off The Rails is often a herald of the end of the gaming group, or at least the end of one person's tenure as
Game Master. Alternately, if there's just one player who's dissatisfied and he keeps grabbing the throttle and gunning the train, that player's character may be subject to
a lightning bolt on a cloudless day, or
sudden violent chest pains, or a
drive-by mauling by the tarrasque that leaves everyone else untouched
. (Or the other characters may just kill him or her.)
This trope is effectively the player's version of
Rocks Fall Everyone Dies. Compare
Total Party Kill, where the game-ending disaster comes from incompetence rather than malice or loss of control over the game. Note that this doesn't apply when
there were no rails to begin with.
Occasionally, the train can be put back on track (
any track) with a little help from
Schrodingers Gun and copious amounts of
improvising. The winners in this situation are usually all involved.
Note that as a tabletop roleplaying game trope, most of the examples can be found in the
Troper Tales page.
Examples:
Web Comics
- Dork Tower once had a game based on Lord Of The Rings. The campaign opened with Merry killing and gutting Gandalf, Pippin beating Frodo to death... they were planning to institute a military draft in the Shire when the GM went catatonic.
- Another Dork Tower strip had the poor GM crying to a friend about how his characters had not only derailed his adventure by killing everyone, they had also summoned Elder Gods to destroy the game universe. They had been playing Bunnies & Burrows (a GURPS game where all the characters are normal, mundane rabbits.
- The webcomic Darths and Droids imagines Star Wars as a tabletop RPG in a universe where the films never existed. The entire plot of all six movies comes about because "Qui-Gon" and "Obi-Wan" go Off The Rails during the first five minutes of Episode I.
- Another example happened offsccreen in a fantasy campaign they played between the first and second movie, when the characters let their Munchkin be killed by the main villain, left him dead, and after they killed the villain resurrected him and joined his side.
- By contrast, the webcomic that inspired Darths and Droids, DM Of The Rings, features a scenario where every single attempt by the players at getting Off The Rails is met by either failure or cruel retaliation on the part of the railroading GM.
- The DM does face a problem when Legolas kills Gollum early on. And later on they even get to kill Gríma and Saruman.
Literature
- The book 'The Munchkin's Guide to Power Gaming' features another hypothetical example, in which a GM wants the players to go into a dungeon, but 'all they want to do is find out what's down the road from the dungeon entrance'.
Video Games
- Morrowind readily allows the player to break the main quest by killing any of dozens of plot-significant NPCs, and from there just troll around endlessly in the Wide Open Sandbox. There is, however, still a "back-path" to finishing the main quest if you decide to save the world after you've done everything else.
- Sadly, Morrowind's sequel Oblivion does not follow in the same vein as Morrowind; important NPCs are simply "knocked out" briefly.
- Note that if you choose to do the assassin missions, you're eventually contracted to kill a plot-important character. That's a Wide Open Sandbox for you, folks.
- Not necessarily an example, but there are instances in old Super Robot Wars games where you could do this, either by defeating all enemies at a level currently before reinforcements arrived (they would come on a specific turn and not earlier, so if you cleared the level before then, you'd just skip those fights).
- Many games also have bosses who will unleash particularly unpleasant abilities, almost always including restoring their health to full, when they're hurt badly enough. However, the earlier ones can't handle said bosses being killed instead of dropped to low health, and they simply die early despite having the ability to restore themselves.
- Portal, of course.
- Unless it's a Xanatos gambit.
- The game I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream makes this an intentional example. AM, the maniacal AI that puts the characters into each situations expects the characters to give into their weaknesses. If the players proceed to conquer their Fatal Flaws and prove AM wrong, then this enrages him so much that it will initiate a Logic Bomb; then the characters are given the opportunity to take down AM once and for all.
- It's a Running Gag in Nippon Ichi games that, if you try to go Off The Rails by winning a Hopeless Boss Fight, the world often gets destroyed. Since you kind of need the world to continue the story, you have to start all over again.
- Fallout 3's plot involves talking to about a dozen NP Cs, each directing you to the next NPC, until you meet the one person who can unlock the door to the Citadel. A faster way involves trading your only weapon for lots of ammo crates (each filled with 1 bullet) and building a big staircase out of them to get past the locked door.
- You can also accidentally skip the first main plot quest or two if you go to Rivet City early, instead of Megaton and then Downtown. All you have to do is talk to the wrong person.
Tabletop Games
- There are a great deal of stories of clueless players derailing Shadowrun games available at The C.L.U.E. Files. Fine reading for anybody who enjoys dumb player stories.
- A legendary example is the story of Noh. A DM had his players, on a spiritual quest, encounter what he thought would be a simple virtue challenge: a powerful magic rapier and magic chain shirt on a pedestal, guarded by a little girl (actually a spiritual construct). The little girl could only say two things: "No" or- if a "No" answer would be misleading- "Please do not take these items". The party spent fifteen minutes talking to her, assuming she'd suffered trauma of some sort. Then the bard played a song to see if he could get a reaction from her. He rolled high, so the DM let the little girl shed a single tear. The party's response: they fell in love with her on the spot, declaring her the cutest thing ever and deciding to keep her. The little girl kept trying to go back to the items, so the party went back and took them too. The DM, conceding defeat, arranged for her to gain a mind of her own, and the party made her their mascot, naming her Noh (as that was her response when asked what her name was).
- What happens when a player decides to tell the GM's Marty Stu to talk to the gun? Read the saga of "Fuck you, Strake!"
- The RPG Spirit Of The Century makes a point of encouraging the GM to run with any derailments by making highway systems rather than railroads and paving as they go. On the other hand, it does allow you to offer Players rewards for having their character perform actions suggested by the GM, so long as it has something to do with the character's Aspects, which the Players choose to begin with.
- Inherent in Paranoia to such a degree that many G Ms recommend not installing the rails in the first place. (Especially since by the first 'station', everyone will probably be dead.)
Anime and Manga
Live Action TV
- Live Action example: This Robot Wars fight. A 4-way free-for-all begins with House Robot Shunt getting flipped onto its side in the first five seconds of the match. Hilarity Ensues from there. Outrageous stuff from the fight includes the Refbot falling into the Pit Of Doom, the OTHER House Robot getting caught in a 4-on-1, and a washing machine landing in the middle of the arena. Yes, that last one is true. The result is eventually decided when two robots suicide into the pit, leaving what's left to move on. "What's left" being "Not much".
- Weaklings. Another match involved a one-on-one fight between two robots. One won almost immediately, flipped both House Robots and was only caught out by the Flipper randomly going off midmatch.
- What about the numerous times when Razer celebrated winning a match by trying to destroy one or both of the House Robots? It managed it in the Southern Annihilator. Poor Matilda...
- Holodeck simulations in Star Trek were often portrayed as futuristic LARP. As such, characters (In Universe) would occasionally go Off The Rails by doing things that seemed logical to them but didn't make sense within the simulation. In the Voyager episode "Night", Tom Paris has Seven of Nine play a Damsel In Distress in his Captain Proton simulation who gets captured by Satan's Robot. Instead of following the plot, Seven takes the most logical route, opens a convenient hatch on the robot, and pulls out its wiring.
- It goes really Off The Rails in Bride of Chaotica! when photonic aliens mistake it for reality and declare war on Chaotica.
- Likewise when Seven uses the Leonardo da Vinci holoprogram for a little time to herself.
Janeway: "Master da Vinci doesn’t like visitors after midnight."
Seven: “He protested. I deactivated him.”
- In the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Qpid", Q drops Picard in the middle of a Robin Hood fantasy-world and tells the captain that if he doesn't rescue Maid Marion (who is his Love Interest, Vash), she's going to be executed by Sir Guy of Gisbourne. Both Q and Picard are quite surprised when the eminently practical Vash agrees to marry Sir Guy, as it makes more sense than some stupidly heroic rescue plan.
- Another Star Trek The Next Generation example: in the episode "Elementary My Dear Data", mere minutes after Geordie and Data enter a Sherlock Holmes holo-novel, the plot begins when a man supposedly attacked turns up with a policeman. Data at once solves the entire case (which is supposed to be the length of a full novel or a film) by firing a short barrage of questions at the man and ripping open his jacket to reveal evidence that he is a counter-agent. He was remembering how the original novel went. Unfortunately, he had read all the original novels. Geordie storms off. The next time goes no better because the computer attempts to simply pastiche elements from the novels, and (let's repeat) Data had read them all. The next time they try a holo-novel, they accidentally ask the computer to create "an adversary capable of defeating Data". Cue virtual!Moriarty.....
- In The Young Ones, an attempt to parody the Monty Python cheese shop sketch is immediately brought to a halt when the shopkeeper notes that the shop is not a cheese shop. Alexei Sayle's response:
"Well, that's that sketch knackered then, isn't it?"
- Television example: One sketch on At Last the 1948 Show involves an educational segment where four actors teach basic English vocabulary, and one distraught, underpaid actor (played by John Cleese) derails the segment completely by inserting bogus words into his lines, vandalizing the set and pouring scalding hot tea on the heads of his co-actors.
- TV Example: Good News Week. The show was supposed to go from 8:30 to 9:30, but they always ended up getting distracted by a humourous aside or five. Now it's supposed to go until 9:45, and usually finishes around 10:05. Wanna know why?
Web Original
