What Happens When Your Players Don’t Listen

Most gamers know the tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. It’s been retold by multiple geek comics (most notably Knights of the Dinner Table), and often told as a “this happened to my friend” story.

Ready? Good.

I had a very similar situation happen about a couple of years ago in my group.

We were running our way through Thunderspire Labyrinth. The heroes were about halfway through the overall adventure, as I recall, and had been stabbing, smashing and fireballing their way through a hobgoblin fortress deep below the earth in search of captured slaves missing from the nearby towns around Thunderspire.

Now, Bryan was playing as two characters, a brother and sister dwarf pair. The brother was a paladin, his sister a cleric. He was pretty good at it too. They were devout in their faith to Moradin, and were always there for the party when needed (even if the cleric spent a little too much time healing the paladin and not enough healing the rest of the party).

The group came upon a door, and heard voices on the other side. The dwarves took point, kicking in the door and charging in. The room was a kitchen, and two humans in ragged clothing looked up very pathetically. For a moment, there was a flash of hope on their faces.

Then the dwarves struck them down, killing them.

The rest of the group was outraged.

“What are you doing?!” asked Bridget.

“Did you just do what I think you did?” chuckled Dave.

“Good job, man,” said the (questionably chaotic evil) Dale.

I simply sat there with a confused look on my face.

Bryan was confused. “They only had one hit point? They’re minions?”

“Yes, they’re minions,” I said, incredulously. “They were innocent civilians, slaves to the hobgoblins. And you just killed them in cold blood.”

Now, apparently, Bryan hadn’t heard me mention that they looked sad and pathetic, and assumed they were evildoers, if they were in the Hobgoblin stronghold. Perhaps he assumed the slaves would all be down in prison cells or something.

Whatever the case, we allowed him to recant his previous action so he didn’t kill those poor people.

But he never lived it down.

“I thought they were the bad guys,” he often muttered under his breath.