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We've all been in one, or, from the GM's perspective, created one. A situation so dire that it seems like the players will need every good roll, every skill, every spell and item and ability they've got just to survive. An encounter of tremendous proportions, in other words.
So my question is, does anyone have any examples? What's the toughest situation your GM has ever put you in? GMs, what's the toughest situation you've ever devised. How'd you (or your players) survive? Did they? Thought?
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We fought the encounter's BBEG first. You see, he was hanging out at the top of the tower and our GM at the time hadn't planned for us to go that particular route. I mean, what did he thinks we were gonna do with the flying carpets?
We just barely survived and headed downstairs.
Then we met the Dragon...
It was touch and go. :)
This is going to be fairly long, so I'll spoiler-tag it for you:
The adventure started off with all of our characters hanging out in our town (which we had all spent lots of time and effort, in game and out of game, fleshing out over the course of the campaign- one character owned the local bar, my character (a Cleric) had a mansion given to him by his church, another character had an old house he inherited that turned out to have an ancient wizard's laboratory beneath it, and yet another character had spent the past few months training the city guard to better defend itself against invaders).
Well, one day, my character's cohort- a bodyguard given to him by his church- turned on him. It turned out the church had sent him as a spy, and he was given his final order to execute me for committing what they considered heresy (which, I can only assume, was part of the plot of this particular adventure- I never did find out). I survived (only because my cohort didn't have the heart to carry through with it, and faked killing me at the last moment so he could hide me away) and we hid in the sewers for... some reason. When we emerged, it was raining- black rain. Black rain that inhibited spellcasting (especially divine). Next thing we knew, the sky opened up and demons of all kinds were pouring into our town, led by some massive, fifty-foot-tall, twelve-armed snake creature wielding a colossal axe in each hand.
We fled, and gathered as many civilians as we could into the bar for safety. While there, it turned out that certain civilians had been given a drug that turned them into demons- including one of the PCs- and a fight broke out, resulting in mass panic and many people killed. We, the heroes, braved the black storm and headed out to meet our destiny. We were assaulted by invisible, incorporeal demons that used hit-and-run tactics (and, on average, I was able to csuccessfully cast spells about one in every four times I tried- so I was useless). These demons dealt ability damage AND negative levels with each hit.
In just a few rounds, the party was almost dead, and we hadn't dealt a significant hit on anything we had been trying to fight. The whole time, we, the players, were looking at the DM, saying, "What the crap is going on?"
She'd simply grin evilly and say, "Don't worry, it'll all be over soon."
Keep in mind, she was known for being a brutal DM, but she never did anything malicious or with the intend to kill us- she just ran enemies very intelligently. But all of us were completely dumbfounded and had no idea how we were supposed to move forward except by willingly letting ourselves die!
Long story short, in the end, I was able to get one spell off- a Teleport spell- and I teleported all of us to the wizard's laboratory below my teammate's home. We regrouped there, knowing full well that the entire town above was likely being destroyed, its citizens being subjugated by the giant demon snake overlords. After resting, we popped back up to town, and saw our fears realized- the citizens were being rounded up by hundreds of demons. The city was lost. There was nothing any of us knew to do.
So... we left. There was no reason to stay except to get ourselves killed- one player, the owner of the home with the wizard's lab, decided that his character (a lawful good dwarf) wouldn't let himself leave the town. So he stayed behind (likely died and/or was enslaved) and the rest of us left.
While on the run, some inevitables (a Marut and a Kolyarut) showed up and tried to kill me and my cohort for failing to follow our church's orders. We continued fleeing (even hiding on a pocket dimension for a while), but by the next session, the entire group was so upset from the entire ordeal that we were never able to get the campaign going again. This DM literally destroyed the campaign, and we never did figure out what the heck she had planned to begin with.