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"I kill Gandalf."
Igor (while roleplaying Lord Of The Rings), Dork Tower

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:

  • Dork Tower once had a game based on Lord Of The Rings. The campaign opened with Gandalf being killed and gutted, Frodo beaten to death by Pippin... 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 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'.
  • 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.
    • It's actually possible to beat the main quest without doing any of the requirements. Some of the speedruns floating around of the game use this to finish a game normally taking hours upon hours in, literally, seven minutes.
    • Sadly, Morrowind's sequel Oblivion does not follow in the same vein as Morrowind; Important NPCs are simply "knocked out" briefly.
      • This Troper had a friend who played that game and had an important NPC knocked into a lava pit (or something like that). They where "knocked out" every time they woke up, and thus were effectively dead.
      • Granted, it's possible to fiddle with Oblivion's config document and return it to Morrowind Style (With the same you-killed-someone-important dialog, even).
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
      • Well, the DM does face a problem whenLegolas kills Gollum early on.
  • 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. A match This Troper saw live 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.
  • Holodeck simulations in Star Trek were often portrayed as futuristic LARP. As such characters (in the show that is) 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 as expected, Seven just 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 (actually 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", in which 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. Geordie storms off, and the next time they try a holo-novel, they accidentally ask the computer to create "an adversary capable of defeating Data", instead of one who could merely defeat Holmes - cue virtual-Moriarty.....
  • Non-gaming example: Meow.
  • The list of things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG.
  • 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).
  • 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, in fact, not a cheese shop. Alexei Sayle's response:"Well, that's that sketch knackered then, isn't it?"
  • 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).
  • Portal, or course.
    • Unless it's a Xanatos gambit.
  • 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 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, this enrages him to the point that it will initiate a Logic Bomb, upon which point the characters are given the opportunity to take down AM once and for all.