This is the tale of two game sessions which probably qualify as my worst gaming experience ever. Ever. I was the DM. The highlights of the party's actions include:- Discovering a "To Do" list which consisted of: " ", "Diary", "Travel Logs", and "Potatoes"; concluding that this must mean that is going to be assassinated (what?); and spending two days keeping a secret watch over him to prevent the assassination.- They eventually conclude that the person the "To Do" list belonged to was probably not going to assassinate (particularly since they had been hired to *find* the person the list belonged to). They then conclude (conrrectly) that they should go and talk to to find out if he spoke with the guy they were trying to find.- But rather than simply talking to him, they approach him under the guise of hiring him for some fake business. Not a bad plan...- ...except they decide to execute it by hiring a DIFFERENT person for their fake business in the hopes that this will elicit 's attention. It doesn't.- So they go to him and ask him if he's concerned that they've hired his competitor to do their fake business with. He's not.- And thus, having never asked him about the guy they're trying to find, they conclude that he must not know anything about the guy they're trying to find. (They proceed to spend a couple of days turning the fake business they invented for their pointless ruse into real business, just to make sure their "tracks are covered".)- They are attacked by an assassin who shoots one of them with a dart reading, "One day to live." They all correctly interpret this as a threat: That the guy hit with the dart will be killed within the day. So, that night, they decide to take safety in numbers. They all stay together in the common room of their inn... except the guy who was hit by the dart. He goes upstairs, by himself, and falls asleep. No one goes with him. He gets killed in his sleep after failing a Listen check. They are all shocked that this could have happened. (What makes this funnier is that the PC was a wizard whose familiar could have kept watch... except that he *explicitly* had his familiar drink itself into unconsciousness before going upstairs to bed.)- They then concluded that the guy they had been hired to find MUST have been the one to kill their companion. (After all, he'd been plotting to kill ! He must be guilty!)- The next day, the entire party is ambushed by six assassins. They kill the assassins and search five of the bodies. They decideto search the body of the assassin who threw the dart at them the day before. Despite the fact that they've correctly identified this assassin as the leader of the group. (They just got bored of searching bodies.)- I'm forced to intervene at this point because between these shenanigans and other, lesser shenanigans, they would have successfully managed to miss or ignore all the clues in the adventure. So slip of paper they would have found on the leader of the assassins is instead found on one of the other assassins. The slip of paper includes an address, today's date, and a time.- They decide to investigate the address... but they wait until two hours AFTER the time shown on the slip of paper. (Thereby missing the meeting they were supposed to observe.)- After seeing nothing out of the ordinary, they put the tavern under watch... for a couple of hours. Then they get bored and go back to their inn.- The entire party goes back to the tavern the next morning, finding it closed. They break in and ambush the barkeep, attempting to murder him in his sleep. The bar was named the Old Adventurer's Tavern. The barkeep, who is a former adventurer as advertised, grabs his two-handed sword and proceeds to gut their fighter.- The rest of the group escapes and hide in an abandoned warehouse (which they had purchased as part of their plan to make their fake business a reality). They have no way to raise their comrade (having already gone deeply into debt to get the wizard raised), so they dump his body in the corner.- I take pity on them once again. The new character for the player of the fighter is introduced: He's actually got his own reasons to be suspicious of the character the PCshave noticed at the tavern if they had bothered to show up on time, so he's been keeping him under observation for awhile. He saw him hire the assassins, but he only just managed to track the PCs down to this warehouse they recently purchased!- "Ah ha!" they say. "We should tail this guy! He'll lead us back to his base and we'll probably find the guy we're looking for there!" And you know what? They're absolutely right! Hooray! All they've got to do is tail this guy back to his hideout and then we'll have a fairly straight-forward dungeon crawl and we'll get out of this adventure.- So they tail him. The tailing sequence is scripted: He visits three locations (which become important later in the campaign if the PCs follow-up and investigate them) and then heads to his hide-out. The PCs tail him to the three locations and then, as he's leaving the third one, one of the PCs walks up to him and guts him with his sword....I kid you not.The pain continued for a few more hours as I tried to find various ways to stop the campaign from turning into a shipwreck before it even begun, while the players found all kinds of ingenious ways to shoot themselves in the foot over and over and over again. And then we have the big wrap-up to the comedy of errors:- The halfling rogue, injured and down to 1 hit point, crosses paths with the cultists as they're kidnapping another person. (This was contrived, but it was another attempt to give them a lead after they had exhausted the dozens of legitimate leads in the adventure.) He's following them back to their hideout. Yay again! We can see the finish line!- He decides to shoot his crossbow at them... Sonuvabitch. One 1st level rogue with 1 hit point vs. 6 cultists. Even I can't torque that one into something workable.- So... uhh... they're looking for sacrifices. Yeah, that's it. So they revive him INSIDE THIER HIDEOUT. Brilliant. And there's the guy he's looking for! They're both trussed up right in front of the blood-stained altar!- So he escapes his bonds (as I knew he would) and he frees the guy they've been trying to save... and then he stuffs him into the hollow altar. "Stay here, I'll be back with help!"Boggles the freakin' mind.He does manage to escape (barely) and alerts the city guard, who completes the dungeon crawl portion of the dungeon for the PCs while they stand around outside the lair.Justin Alexander Bacon