what creative solution have you thought  of that actually worked, or what outside of the box thinking got you out of a sticky situation? 

I had a player that decided to take a Warforged down an "emotionally" stunted development path.  During the adventure, the party fights off a horde of zombies and other creatures in a farmhouse, and discover a 9 year old girl in the attic, hiding and very traumatized.   The party is far from town, and can't drop her off so she tags along as an NPC with her saviors.  He then starts to harass the girl about the fate of her parents.  It was starting to make the other players in the room uncomfortable.

So during an investigation of a nearby prison, the needling continues and a skeleton in a cell is pointed at, and the warforged says "That might be your daddy."  At that point, I decided she snaps, and she lashes out, and he in tern casts ray of frost and drops her.   IRL the party members are looking at the player like he's gone insane and the discomfort had reached a new level.  After we broke for the evening, I thought about how I could put some sanity back into the game.  So I decided to do something different.

I invited my daughter to play in the session and I had her play that NPC temporarily, and made her a low level ranger so she could be a part of the game.  And I sat her at the table directly across from the warforged player, and then announced that she would be joining us for a while.  The idea is that now there was a real girl, not a fictional one that would be insulted. 

The change was dramatic, now that the girl was physically in the game, and not a random NPC of the GM.   The warforged story evolved in a healthy manner and the tension dropped.  The bonus was, my daughter never left the campaign and is now a regular player. 

I was complemented on the psychology of the play afterwards by several of the other players, two of which were the parents of the warforged player.

1. We were trying to take down a cult, so naturally, we were trying to determine where the leader was located. Meanwhile, our party's rogue ditched us with a book that contained vital information. So we had to track her down. An NPC told us she knew someone who could tell us where the rogue was. After we obtained his services and found our rogue, I realized we could ask him where the cult leader we were hunting was. We didn't know for sure whether he might be affiliated with the cult in any way, so I used Alter Self to change from a young male human wizard to an old dwarven woman and asked him where the cult leader was. It worked. That night, the cult leader was dead (although we almost were TPK'ed).

2. In the same campaign, there was a racist police chief intent on genocide against one of the city's races. So we were going to take him down. Trouble was, during the day he was in the police headquarters and we would have been too heavily outnumbered, and we didn't know where he slept. So using my familiar, I scouted the building and located a gap in the building that was likely a secret room. So I flew onto the roof, used my transmutation ability to make a peephole (the DM allowed me to change the steel to glass because I'd made the mistake of thinking it was possible but he admired my creativity when he realized it wasn't officially so), and confirmed it was his sleeping quarters. So we planned to use potions of flying that I made to reach the roof at night, convert part of the ceiling to wood, smash through it, and end the police chief. Unfortunately, more pressing matters (IE, the impending end of the world) kept us from executing that plan, and the police chief killed most of his targets by the time we returned. At least I avenged them, though, entering his room with Dimension Door and finishing him off with a few lightning bolts (and subsequently a number of his subordinates who'd helped him).

3. In a different campaign where I play a homebrew ranger, I have an ability that allows me to make an attack against anyone who misses me with an attack as a reaction. So I was fighting a monster in a heavily obscured area, where all attacks had disadvantage. I ran away from it, provoking an opportunity attack, and then attacking it. The DM had forgotten I could do that, so he was taken by surprise. 

4. In this second campaign, the head of the city senate asked us to select the new leader of the Adventurer's Guild, and requested we choose her husband. So we went to talk to him (although we knew she was trying to just gain control of the Adventurer's Guild). He then told us that she planned to assimilate an external group of people with their own way of life, and he requested that we help him and protect them by kidnapping her and bringing her to him. My character wanted to protect those people (he'd grown up with them), so he was happy to do that if it would help, but he still asked the man, "How do we know that this isn't an elaborate loyalty test you two cooked up?" The DM was stumped.

Quote from Kieth_Shadow_cloak >>

what creative solution have you thought  of that actually worked, or what outside of the box thinking got you out of a sticky situation? 

4e D&D was a *very* rules based system, but this actually made it easier for me to be creative, since I could just re-flavor the description of a regular attack to accomplish just about any stunt... no DM permission needed (since I  just used the same rules/damage as a normal attack). Examples:

1. Release a herd of horses from a stable to stampede through my opponent? Normal attack.
2. Jury rig a clockwork statue to attack an opponent? Normal attack.
3. Use a giant metal sphere as a hamster ball to run over an opponent? Normal attack.

When I was DMing, I had a player who asked, when I was describing the room they were about to have a fight in, if there were any chandeliers that could be brought down. It was cool enough-- and in character enough for her swashbuckling ranger-- that I allowed it that once, since the room would need sufficient lighting and the goblins were centered in the room, where it would be. I had to pause and figure out the size and weight of it for damage, but it was fun.

This session I lassoed a beast and captured it, so basically I took it from almost full health to neutralizing the threat non-lethally.

Two of our party decided to pee on a fire elemental.

It helped.

1) As a champion fighter, I pulled a tapestry off a wall and threw it over a zombie beholder, momentarily blinding it. Pay attention to your DM's descriptions of the environment; it helps a lot!

2) As a sorcerer, I was allowed to dump spell slots and sorcery points to overload a magic capacitor, frying a BBEG and myself to death. Got revivified afterwards, so it was completely worth it.

3) As a wizard, party got thrown into jail. I watched the guard lock everyone up in individual cells and made keys with prestidigitation once he left. Had the keen mind and observant feats.

I gave a fighter in my party a bag of holding, and the fighter was playing around with it. Two other players were swimming in a pond when the fighter swallowed up all of the water, and the players into the bag. One of the characters almost drowned in the bag before the fighter would let them out. He then decided it would be a good idea to hide people in the bag to surprise the enemy and it worked.

I made my rogue convince a group of enemies in a dungeon that we were cave inspectors and because of that, we were allowed to go where we pleased with escort throughout the dungeon. I think I gave my DM a headache that day too. 

In recent memory, my Half-Elf Bard's party was intercepted by three Harpies at a river with a stone bridge crossing.  The harpies charmed three of the travelers but my Half-Elf being resistant to the charms was free to act.  He ran across the bridge to approach the harpies and from a distance attempted to persuade them to stop what they were doing and engage in a discussion about the beautiful harmonies they favored and how they wove that into a spell-like effect on others.  Meanwhile a rogue and paladin hacked one of them to death and the other two flew away.  The DM laughed but never allowed me to make a persuasion check.

Quote from MusicScout >>

In recent memory, my Half-Elf Bard's party was intercepted by three Harpies at a river with a stone bridge crossing.  The harpies charmed three of the travelers but my Half-Elf being resistant to the charms was free to act.  He ran across the bridge to approach the harpies and from a distance attempted to persuade them to stop what they were doing and engage in a discussion about the beautiful harmonies they favored and how they wove that into a spell-like effect on others.  Meanwhile a rogue and paladin hacked one of them to death and the other two flew away.  The DM laughed but never allowed me to make a persuasion check.

 Did you actually learn anything from it? If you’re a College of Lore bard you might get to learn how to make that song and get that power of the harpy. For a crazy thing one of my characters did, one of them summoned an air elemental but didn’t go through anything to control it, so it killed almost everything.

my group were playing into the abyss and there was a nalfeshnee so the rogue/bloodhunter and monk/druid shoved it into a lava pit when it said to surrender they crit on the strength check even though they both had -1 strength

nalfeshnee died

DragonB-23, Unfortunately we were level 1 at that time traveling to our first town when this happened.  I became CoL Bard later,we've never discussed if I gained any Lore or experience.  I did amuse the DM as a Bard trying to use his best ability to deal with a situation.  My best hope was to distract the harpies.  Actually gaining something or having a conversation with them would have been super awesome.  

My Storm Sorceror got enveloped by a nerfed Shambling Mound. I managed to explode it from the inside by repeatedly casting Thunderwave. Even better, the only reason I was able to pull that stunt off is that I kept rolling really good Con saves.

I was in a 2nd Edition game when we got attacked by an Iron Golem.  The party wizard used a scroll of Disintegrate on the floor beneath it, dropping it all the way to the next lowest level.

The group was trying to break into a building to steal a notebook with plans for a crime.  The adventure expected you to attack the chaotic evil criminals and storm the warehouse.  My bard decided to:

1. Get a city watchman drunk and steal their uniform.
2. Walk up to the warehouse in uniform, knock on the door, and declared: "Coin your boss owes my boss ain't been paid this month.  Watcha gonna do about it?"
3. I rolled a 20 on a deception check and the guards apparently rolled really bad on their insight check.
4. I was invited in, the criminals served me a beer from a barrel while they were trying to find out about what was happening, and had me wait.
5. I told them: "Don't matter for the coin.  Get your boss to contact my boss and get it straight." And got up to leave.
6. I went over to the beer barrel and was able to put a pretty powerful magic diuretic-like substance (Kept that after we used it on an owlbear at low level.) in it.  - I liked that Bards had a good amount of skill points and everything was a class skill.
7. Came back to the party and told them to wait an hour while I put he uniform back on the guard.
8. When we went in we took them by surprise as about a 3rd of were in line to go to the bathroom.  The rest had either vacated their bowels already and were Shaken or not affected at all.

To be honest though, I was not sure what to do once I got in.  The beer barrel being there was just a little piece the DM put in for flavor.  I just grabbed it an ran.

Our party found ourselves in possession of A Deck Of Many Things. The first card drawn was vizier, and our DM was nice, so allowed this question.

"What's the order of cards in the deck."

I feel like we stretched the rules a little, but it ended up very useful.