Surprise!

I was running New York by Night, and one of the players was a good player, a guy I'd gamed with for years, which made what he did all the more surprising.

They were playing a coterie of young vampires in New York City following a shadow war in which the sect of vampires controlling the city had been driven out. The new Prince of New York had declared a moratorium on the creation of new Kindred. That was somewhat redundant, because the Prince's permission was already required in the first place by the Traditions, but he was underscoring the importance of not introducing any destabilizing elements while the victors established their power base.

So naturally, a bunch of up-and-comers decided to create childer in secret, and those childer were the players' characters. The Prince found out about them by and by, and he met with them in secret. At this meeting, he had them swear allegiance to him in exchange for their lives, because it was well within his right and his power to destroy them.

Of course, they needed to be introduced to Kindred society so everyone knew they weren't enemies, so the Prince organized a big Elysium event at Madison Square Garden. Almost every vampire in the city was there in addition to the PCs, and they were going to have to publicly present themselves to the Prince. The arrangement was that they could present themselves as unclaimed childer created during the war and beg for the Prince's mercy. This provided an opportunity for the Prince to appear powerful yet fair and also protected the PCs' sires from being outed as violators of the Prince's moratorium. Never mind why all that was important, just know that there were powerful fingers in the pie.

Clan Tremere planned to use Elysium to gain the Prince's favor and demonstrate their power by presenting the Prince with a gift: a Bone of Lies, basically a magical lie detector. This is obviously something very handy to have when you're responsible for maintaining the peace among the undead. However, shortly after they presented it to the Prince, it went missing. The Prince demanded the bone's return and ordered the Garden locked down until he had it. No one was leaving while the bone was missing, and this was more than just inconvenient for the assembled--it was downright dangerous.

The PCs saw this as an opportunity to get in good with...well, somebody. The Prince, the Tremere, the thief, whoever. They were very opportunistic about it. A high-ranking Toreador approached the Tremere PC and offered to give him the bone in exchange for the names of the coterie's sires. Tremere PC made the deal.

Simultaneously, the High Regent of Clan Tremere offered the Malkavian PC a replacement bone for a favor to be named later. Since the Regent's ass was also on the line for this (she being the one who created the bone in the first place), Malkavian PC thought this was a good deal, so he asked if he could talk it over with his coterie before committing. The Regent reluctantly agreed.

The PCs met up in a restroom to catch up in private. They immediately started arguing about which of the two deals to take, an argument made more pressing by the fact that Tremere PC had already divulged their sires' identities and had the Bone of Lies in his possession. You'd think that'd settle the matter, but everyone else was rightly concerned about why the High Regent hadn't made her offer to the Tremere PC since they're from the same clan, how the Toreador got his hands on the bone in the first place, etc.

At the height of the argument, Tremere PC decided he'd just flush the bone down the toilet.

This ridiculous move simultaneously crossed just about every party involved. It screwed his coterie into being forced to take the Regent's deal (and thus be beholden to Tremere PC's clan). It meant Tremere PC's betrayal of their sires' identities was for nothing. With the bone itself disposed of, the Prince lost just about any chance he had of figuring out who the actual thief had been. There was no conceivable advantage to this deeply dangerous move except that it allowed Tremere PC to feel in control of the situation, however briefly. To this day, I'm still not sure what he was thinking.