Role Playing Game: The Prison Incident

Some times players can be perfectly in-character and still royally screw over a mission. This game that I ran as a guest-GM demonstrates this well.

The System: BESM-d20, a fairly versatile system (from a defunct publisher) that really ought to have been polished a bit more.

The Setting: Loosely based on the manga Fairy Tail, the game takes place in an alternate history Europe where magical guilds have formed to handle major crises. The player characters are all members of a guild known as the Pathfinders in the Italian city-state of Venezia.

The PCs:
Iona – The main GM's character, Iona is a sword-wielding Magical Girl and daughter of the now-deceased guild master Roy Lombardi.

Nyxz – The guild Bookkeeper and medic, Nyxz's primary combat ability is putting up force fields for the rest of the team.

Domon – Son of a famous pirate-catcher, Domon is a swordsman with a love of strategy, though he usually thinks so far ahead of the given situation that he misses should-be-obvious details.

Aria – A scholarly wind mage of high birth and haughty demeanor.

Henry/True Justice – A janitor with a cosmic entity obsessed with justice bonded to his soul.

Jake – A cross between Harry Dresden and Doctor Who, basically.

Tarragon – A metallic golem that Henry built while trying to build a toaster. Tarragon is convinced that he is actually an entity older than time itself and that Henry just 'discovered' him.

The Set-Up:
We open in a black dream space, via which a criminal known as Charles (dun dun dunnnn) appears to the heroes and informs them that a group of his followers who were caught years ago are sentenced to be executed in three days. Due to an oath they took, they're bound from using magic at a spiritual level. Therefore, Charles is going to switch the heroes' minds with those of his followers. If they can break out within the three days, he'll switch their bodies back. If not, then his criminals get to keep the Heroes' bodies.

What happened:
All was going well at first. The players got a feel for the rhythm of the prison. They learned from a current inmate and former guard that a sedative was placed in the food served at the evening meal to make the inmates more docile and tired at night. They began to concoct a plan to switch the prisoners' meals with the guards' meals and try to escape while the guards were asleep. Unfortunately, communication wasn't the best between the characters. Henry, trapped in the body of Harley Quinn expy, found that he could still transform into Justice. He used this fact to prove to a guard named Michaels that he wasn't really the criminal and attempted to set up a deal in which they would meet with warden, and he would help them get the entire ordeal straightened out.

This would have been completely anti-climactic, so I decided on the fly that the warden was an utter prick fanatically obsessed with keeping people prisoners inside. The warden (a powerful psychic) telepathically planned with someone to betray the heroes and keep them inside. Michaels psychically overheard the warden's plan and tried to slip the information to Henry that night. Unfortunately, Henry had decided to eat the sedative-laced meal and was fast asleep.

On the second day, the group finally conferred and they decided to go with Henry's plan. They had decided to fast forward straight to the next day, at which point Henry would have found a note on the floor of his cell about the Warden's betrayal. Unfortunately, the player in charge of Henry decided he wanted to play the evening meal segment to confer with Michaels and make sure the deal was still on. Michaels was psychically attacked by the Warden to prevent him from spilling the proverbial beans.

Now, I supposed that the players would regroup and come up with a new plan to escape. Instead, Henry transforms into Justice in the middle of the prison's cafeteria, in full view of a hundred prisoners and multiple guards. Of course panic promptly ensues and the guards begin shooting at Justice. Justice flies outside and presumes he can fly up to the Warden's office and kill him or something (none of the players had bothered to inquire about it, but the prison had multiple Anti-Air guns on the roof of its wards to shoot down incoming aircraft and hostile dragons).

At this point, I was just about ready to have the AA guns just kill Justice for being an idiot. Meanwhile, I had twenty guards (all level 9) rush into the cafe to try and bring things back into order.

Jake's player didn't get the hint; he steps forward to fight the guards (he's a level 12 at this point, mind you, facing twenty level 9s.). Thanks to several factors—his attacking being a soul attack, and a natural 20, primarily—he rolled enough damage on his attack that it killed all 20 guards in one shot. At first I tried to save the scenario by dividing the damage between the twenty guards, so that it would do about 3 a piece.

But the player protested, so I decided I'd let the cards fall where they may; the guards' heads all went explodey, making Jake a mass murderer.

After that we sort of wound down, but the implication being that Jake's mass murder would compel Justice to kill him. This might break the entire campaign, but with some of the players busy IRL, we've not had a chance to finish the session yet.

So yeah. The moral of this story is, never make expectations, your players will always defy them.