See the Live Trolls!

What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve ever tried to talk your DM or GM into during a table-top role-playing game?

Waaay back in the day, after the Panic, but before we’d decided to shift our focus to beer and girls, we ran kind of run-of-the-mill adventures. Goblins, hobgoblins, dwarves and dragons. We had a pretty limited cinematic library from which to draw, and things weren’t so “nuanced.”
Of course, we still managed to find plenty of fun and intrigue in these tropes, but every now and then, one of the players’ twisted minds would hit upon something just truly egregious.
At the session, I tell of here, that the player was me.

The challenge set was nothing terribly original or intriguing; trolls beset the local village, but trolls were a serious menace to low-level adventurers back then. Our brave lads should have had no measure of the danger in those years, having never officially encountered trolls in the game. However, we did have instances of what we call “metagaming” today. Back then, we just called it cheating. T’was a serious offense to have a personal copy of the Monster Manual or the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Because of, shall we say, offhand knowledge, our group approached the scenario with due trepidation.In ponderance of what to do, my assassin character came up with a solution of dubious merit. I put forth the following…trolls were truly dangerous, but what about sated trolls? After an offer of great reward from the local constabulary for handling the problem, I mulled on a less-than-traditional approach. I suggested that our party scout the troll hole and then let it be known that we had well and truly routed the beasts, so much so that we had captive specimens for the locals to see for themselves! I proposed that we string “See the Live Trolls” signs from the village out to the troll caverns and of course, set up a carnival booth to collect an exhibition fee at its entrance. Even my fellow adventurers were appalled when I suggested that we would just collect a small fee and send the villagers on in; wonders to see! I further explained that we would keep up the charade until the trolls were full-on villager vittles and actually came out to see what the hell was going on, at which point we would well and duly slay the vile creatures and put some remnant on the actual display.

Naturally the DM said that that would never work. “Wouldn’t it though?” I rejoined and then told the story of P.T. Barnum and his “See the Egress!” hornswaggle. When his sideshows became too popular and he needed to move people through more quickly, he added signs pointing to the end of the exhibit that read simply that, and the people were too stupid to know that “egress” meant “exit” and hurried along.
Mulling this, he was forced to admit that, yes, gawd dammit, it would work, and he proceeded to add serious questions about alignment. I proceeded to explain that while technically reprehensible, the plan would remove both the onerous creatures in question AND a good number of useless idiots from the village, a double boon.
While it totally would have worked, we left this plan on the drawing room floor just because of the extra work that the DM would have had to put in with planning out how the party would have been hunted down by damn near everybody for the rest of the campaign!
So, tell us now, what was the most outrageous thing you wasted your DM or GM’s time on, and how did it fare?

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