GM: The Prophetess of Kell reads your omens and says that each of your number is destined to find one of the Signets of Power and be a Champion of Light in the coming Holy Wars. Once all of you have the Signets the Champions of Darkness will be released, and the fate of the world shall be decided.
Player [Out Of Character]: Champion of Light huh? So that explains all the stupid stuff going on lately. I ask the Prophetess where my Signet is to be found....
GM [as Prophetess]: Ritualist Timon, your Signet may be found in the ruins of the Tower of Theurgy, guarded by wards only your hand may breach.
Player [In Character]: Tower of Theurgy huh? I pull out my map and a compass. I draw a 10-mile radius circle on the map, centered on the Tower of Theurgy.
GM [looking confused]: Okay....
Player: I then ritually Geas myself to never set foot within the area represented on the map, lest I instantly die.
GM: WHAT????
Player [addressing the Prophetess]: Looks like the war has been called off...
Obi-Wan: We're messing up the GM's plans again. He probably had this whole city mapped out.
GM: No, you guys have been great for my improvisation. I've learnt not to plan ahead more than ten minutes.
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
NP Cs. 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: 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
GameMasters rarely have their players revolt on them. 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 a 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.
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 which follow will be
personal anecdotes.
Examples:
- Dork Tower once had a game based on Lord Of The Rings. The campaign opened with one of the players saying "I kill Gandalf."
- 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 NP Cs are simply "knocked out" briefly.
- 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.
- 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 GM.
- 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.
- Non-gaming example: Meow.
- The list of things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG.
