So in this story, our party has recently just managed to succeed on their quest and are ready to move on to the next, the quest was intense and difficult and had all the party members drained of their resources.
You see the party has been traveling the world through a ship and when heading to this area for the questline they were shipwrecked so they were forced to do their stuff in this area before doing anything else.
An important NPC says this “alright, now with no more distractions I can finally rebuild you guy’s ship and probably even make it better as a reward, construction will finish in about a month or 2.”
some player: “cool, so since we have absolutely nothing, can we buy stuff in this place before we head out?”
Me the GM: “sure, but uhh… You guys are kind of… Broke. Can’t you guys just wait? I mean you guys are still in perfect condition anyway and you guys can probably just find newer stuff for your inventory along the adventure! Please? You guys have been fine so far without having to do any sidequesting so far. Lets not break the flow here, you guys literally have a few special equipments still.”
another player: “HAH NOPE not gonna risk it after that incident which I shall not speak off, how can we get money?”
this player: “how about if we murder stuff?”
GM: “no, that’s literally what you guys just did, there is nothing left to kill aside from the people you risked your lives trying to save.”
a player: “so… What do we do now?”
GM: “… Get a job?”
this player: “are you kidding? the only job we do here is murder!”
then the wizard had this amazing idea.
a player: “hey, how about if we sell candies in town? I can use my creation spell to make lots of candies for us to sell.”
GM: “… Sure, I’ll allow it, roll for it.”
so the wizard with a creation score of I think it was 6, rolled their dice to invoke Genesis and they got…
a 46… Great, now they have dozens of candies to sell, but there was still the problem of persuading people to buy these things,
they succeeded to sell half of the candies they made, the party got quite the amount of cash for their efforts. But they wanted more, seeing the potential for money and the fact that they still had some time left before setting sail…
They decided to go gambling. Yes gambling.
They went to a casino and we played real life craps with our real life dice and they won big time…
some player: “wait, aren’t our characters like, under-aged teenage school kid minors? Are we gonna get in trouble with the police?”
and then I sat there with the derpiest smile since at this point they were just the richest kids in town and that was not good for me so when I heard them say that I just said…
GM: Sure, the police kick open the casino door and are now out to arrest you because… Illegal gambling or something?"
Police: “STAHP RIGHT THERE, YOU’RE UNDER ARREST FOR GAMBLING AS A MINOR, WERE GONNA CONFISCATE ALL OF YOUR WINNINGS NOW!”
So a chase scene ensues, our characters didn’t really have any good ground vehicles for escape apart from that one… caravan they had lying around just there for some reason. So yes, our party was running away from the police, with all their police cars using… A wagon… Now the horses running the wagon must have a rocket booster of some sort because SOMEHOW, they were able to run away successfully and get away with all their earned money, so I decided I’d make some stuff up about how they lost some of their earnings by accidentally dropping them from the chase.
The ship was successfully rebuilt and the party was ready to leave, knowing that they are apparently wanted for doing under-aged gambling decide to get out of this place as quickly as they can.
And from that point onward, the campaign became as absurdist as this derailing session and that made things significantly more fun for us, they never got to spend their money though so in the end…
a player: “you know, we never really actually spent any of these didn’t we huh?”
GM: “yup.”
a player" “and the next destination is gonna be another country with a different currency huh?”
GM: “pretty much.”
some player: “so all of those things that we did back there, from the saving the people from the evil gangsters to the candy selling to the gambling, they were all for nothing?”
GM: “… yup.”
everyone at the table including me: “*siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.”
In the end all that ever mattered was that we had fun during that session, it was a great and pleasant break from what has mostly been just a campaign of just plot exposition and then combat and then plot exposition and then combat along with a few puzzles maybe. So that was that. the end.