RPGMemes

My first round as a new DM:

The group wakes up in the hold of a ship, all tied up. They piece together that they each individually (they didn't know each other before) must have been drugged when they were out drinking. They all found that somebody tattooed a symbol onto their necks

The plan was to have some guards talk to each other, giving the players some exposition. Then they'd be shipped to a harbour, unloaded there and then put into an arena where they'd be used as gladiators. From there the story was supposed to go that they'd win their freedom through winning in the arena and so on.

So what actually happened was that the rogue managed to open up their chains, and before the guards could say or do something, the mage stunned them and the rest of the group totally wrecked these poor guards. I told them that the deck was full of fighters and crew. That's when the orc barbarian had the bright idea to knock a hole into the hull of the ship to escape that way. You know, a ship on the sea. And he knocked that hole below the water line. In a storm.

Consequently, the story pivoted to trying to beach that sinking ship in the middle of a storm while the fighters on the deck were trying to get rid of them.

It was a fun round and ended with them just about managing to kill the guards and beach the ship. As a punishment for ruining my story, I kept teasing the significance of the tattoo, without ever revealing its meaning throughout the whole campaing :)