Can anybody find the work that this example is referring to? It does not have a work page and I could not find it anywhere because it has such a generic name.
The players manage to very quickly break their first quest during one of the early episodes of Role Play. Having retrieved a magical glass orb and an Infinity –1 Sword they attempt to have them identified before returning them to the quest giver. Since formal identification turned out to be too expensive one player decided to learn more about the orb by dropping it on the ground to see if it smashes. It did. Having failed the quest the players decided that they might as well ignore the quest giver and wander off with the powerful weapon. The GM sends an assassin after the party who seemed to be powerful enough to have killed them all in a fair fight, but they somehow manage to trip her and then pin her underneath an unconscious party member whilst impaling her through the arm. The following week the GM gave up on heavily planned quests and kept preparations brief since it was clear that his players were too unpredictable to railroad.
Hide / Show RepliesNever mind. the person who wrote that example has corrected it. It does have a work page. The link to it here was just wrong. It was linked to webvideo instead of podcast.
I just commented out several examples that didn't fit with this trope. A fanfiction diverging from the original story is not an example of Off The Rails. Off The Rails is when characters take actions that break a planned out story and it usually requires that their be a Game Master or some other force planning out the story that the characters are defying. Off the rails also does not refer to over the top craziness.
Edited by legendaryweredragon