People manipulate because it gets a desired result. Whether it's cheating, stealing, misleading, or killing, the GM can use any sob story or hard luck story to trap a player. Except when it doesn't work.

Share a time when a player (or even a GM) saw through a sob story or an attempt at empathy from the other party in game, and the attempt fell flat.

Does an impassioned plea from one party member to another about not blowing up the plane because he didn’t get enough vacation time only to fail and have that party members detonate a superweapon to kill everyone and end the campaign count?

Pathfinder group finds themselves in a mental asylum that's been overrun with monsters and cultists. They know that there are doppelgangers around, so when they come across an "old woman with a broken leg", NOBODY is buying it.

I played that one. Fuck those things.

They tried the wounded bird Gambit on us too, and our crazy alchemist just chucked a bomb.

Enemy generals reveal that the big motivation for their plan is that the King we work for tried to have their boss, his little brother, murdered out of jealousy and that the King is really evil.

We simply pointed out this didn't make them and their actions LESS evil, and that we'd just investigate and clear out the King after stopping their plan for genocide.

Bonus, this was apparently a twist made up because the GM got annoyed that I wanted to know the actual motivations of the enemies we kept fighting, and all it did was dig him intoa hole of needing to have us fight the King now.

Not sure if it counts, but was playing a campaign where we came across a priest who's son had been bitten by a vampire. We discovered the priest had been keeping his son locked up in the basement while trying to find a cure.

My response was to ask the rest of the party which one of us was going to knock the priest unconscious before the rest of us went downstairs to kill the new vampire.

I was honestly surprise when the rest of the party refused this plan...

It seems while the party was playing good characters, I was the only one playing the pragmatic-good alignment.

I had a similar situation. Killed the father, put down the vampire, torched the house to prevent the town from turning into a panicked mob trying to hunt down any more secret vampires.

I was Lawful Evil.

I mean, the cure for Vampirism *starts* with killing the vampire. Then you use Resurrection.

I guess a village priest might not be powerful enough for the second part.