April Fool's Jokes on Your Players

[Locutus Zero]

Okay, I mainly made this thread so I could share the joke I played on my players, not that I expected any of them to fall for it.

I am DMing a 5th level 4E group. We have a few Google Waves we use to communicate. I updated one of our waves today with this:

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
I've been trying to work out your various characters' motivations, arcs, etc, and it's been very difficult. Everyone is going in a different direction, so in order to streamline things I've made a couple of changes to your characters. You can find the new characters I've built for you in the OCB, they are the last 5. I've already discussed the changes with some of you, but here are the reasons behind them: Essentials is clearly the future of D&D, so each of your characters has been rebuilt as an Essentials character. It will be important to the upcoming plot that all of you worship the Raven Queen, so I've made that change. Some characters were more OP than others, so this should ground everone and make things a little more realistic. Making everyone Lawful Good will assure that everyone is on the same page and remove most of the subtleties of character growth and interaction.

I feel I've stayed pretty true to each of your character concepts, but if there is anything you don't like, you are allowed to make one, and only one, change to your character.

If you have any questions, keep them to yourself.

The characters I made for them had terrible feats, completely useless ability scores, and humorous stats and descriptions. I made one guy 5 levels higher than the rest and turned a male tiefling into a female dragonborn.

Anyone else pull a prank on your players?

 

[Relique du Madde]

Nope. However, would it be a cruel prank if you ended up melding the Tomb of Horrors onto the dungeon you were sending your group into?

 

[Evilhalfling]

Road Trip

I left the State for a 4 day road-trip instead of running an expected game, even taking one of the players with me. I got 1 phone call and 1 e-mail asking me about tomorrow's game. "um guys? Im in Arizona."









....
Accidentally.
when a tiny nagging voice asks I am sure everyone was clear on the schedual, I need to pay more attention to it.

 

[nedjer]

I left the State for a 4 day road-trip instead of running an expected game, even taking one of the players with me. I got 1 phone call and 1 e-mail asking me about tomorrow's game. "um guys? Im in Arizona."
/QUOTE]

reminds me of the happy day we thought we'd pop round the corner for snacks and ended up at Glastonbury. Some of the guys left behind were still at the table when we got back - totally unconcerned by the absence, and more than happy at the tasty snacks. They hadn't gone out and were down to eating raw pasta with mustard when we came in

 

[RangerWickett]

We're playing Rogue Trader, and our current endeavor is collecting psyker brains to network into a computer to run a virtual reality battle simulator. It has been officially approved as NOT HERESY.

Unfortunately, a renegade psyker didn't like what we were up to, and she tried to destroy the ship. We killed her, and found that she was using a ritual from the Orkonomicon. Upon opening the book, a vortex appeared above us and sucked us thousands of years into the past -- and transformed us into orks.

After going on a quest as orks to find the Orkonomicon so we could get home -- which included us deciding that the only way to know for sure we had found the real book was to hunt and capture lots of ducks (because the book, see, is made of wood, and it's a witch-type book and what not, and witches, you see, you burn; and also, books they made of wood, which floats; and ducks they floats too, so if we find the book, and it weighs as much as a duck, it's a witch, which means it's the right book) -- we opened a portal and were sucked back to our ship.

At that point, the techpriests informed us that the VR simulation was complete, and that the psyker-brain computer functioned well, with the reasonably minor side effect of making people in the simulator think they were really there. We call that 'value added.'

Next week, we're taking Orbital Transport 815, which we're pretty sure won't crash on a mysterious tropical island.

 

[crazy_monkey1956]

I set up my daughter's My Little Pony toys on the game table before everyone arrived last night, pulled up that Ponyfinder thread here on EN World and told them we were going to try out the new MLP RPG.

 

[Nikosandros]

This would be better if you forced them to play MLP for a few hours before saying "April Fool!"

Yes, but if it turns out that the players like MLP better than the standard campaign, then the joke is on the GM...

 

[Nikosandros]

This year April the 1st was on a Friday, which is not a game day for me, but last year I was running my Temple of Elemental Evil AD&D campaign on April's Fool Day. The characters were 3rd-4th level.

We had the standard pre-session chat and then we started playing, resuming the action with the PCs taking care of various errands in the city of Verbobonc.

As they were walking down the street, the were suddenly attacked by a huge red dragon coming down from the sky. I played the combat to its quick and brutal resolution with a TPK before letting them on the joke...

 

[Havrik Stoneskimmer]

I am a player in an old-school Castles & Crusades game. We've spent 10 sessions exploring Stonehell Prison, but yesterday we suddenly found ourselves teleported to a barren wasteland and confronted by a six foot tall rifle-toting white rabbit. Yeah, an April Fools side trip to Gamma World!

We made it back to our familiar D&D land in the end, but several of the party members seem to have some unusual lingering effects from the strange radiation we were exposed to...

 

[Scott DeWar]

yeah, in gamma world if you cry havok, you may actually let loose the dogs of war!