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Not mine but our DM had his favorite DMNPC that was going to save us and show us the way. Some sort of knight errant: chainmail, longswoard and board. Very honorable goodguy. This was back in AD&D 1e, we were using a critical and fumble chart out of Dragon magazine.
Very first combat, very first swing his DMNPC fumbles.
So he rolls on the fumble chart, which is a d100.
He rolls very high, 98 or something, which is "roll on critical hit chart"
"oh no!" the DM says.
Then he rolls on the critical hit chart. What does he roll? A 100.
The result is "decapitation"
"oh no!" the DM exclaims again.
We all died laughing as the headless DMNPC flops around on the ground, having decapitated himself.
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We were playing a friend's very first dungeon. So, of course, when we found our way into a tunnel behind the throne room, the cleric just cast Transmute Stone To Mud and there was the boss. So the bad guy is some kind of fighter/wizard hybrid. He casts fly and moves into the air so he can better rain down spells upon us. The dwarf fighter gets fly and charges him through the air.
He hits with the dwarven waraxe. Crit. Confirmed. Roll Damage (2d6+10, x3) was 5 6 6 5 6 6 = 34 + 30 = 64. Fort save against massive damage: rolled a 2.
We killed the boss on the first round of combat after exploring only a fifth of the whole dungeon. The friend never GM'ed again.
Remember kids, the boss is where you want him to be when you want him to be there. If the players break into an area early, the boss just happens to be elsewhere.
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Crit with a shuriken, two 20s and high enough to confirm again (there was a house rule that a 20 confirmation roll increases multiplier by 1 if you can confirm it).
It was a small shuriken on a dex/wis monk, so the crit did 1*3. Fantastic.
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Confirmed crit with sneak attack (which I forgot and the DM rolls in the next post) for 4 points total damage.
There is nothing quite so bad as getting a crit on a powerful foe, thinking it will turn the tide of battle, and then rolling the minimum possible damage. I've seen it maybe three times in fifteen years. Sucks every time.
Confirmed crit with sneak attack (which I forgot and the DM rolls in the next post) for 4 points total damage.
Oof! Did you skillfully excise his benign tumor, or something?
Yeah, my first post took 'worst' from the GM's point of view. As a player, I've definitely critted with snake eyes now and then and it is absolute sadness.
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Not worst crit, but weirdest. It was a 1st ed game, attacked a guy with a longbow, nat 20. Rolled again, another 20. DM rolls on custom chart (as he did for dual 20s), rolls "severed left big toe". Damage was enough to one-shot him. I shot him in the foot and he died. O.o
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My bard/witch had gotten in the way of the battle, a mook attacked him and he dropped. I had regeneration up and running, though. Immediately the round afterward, another PC, who had turned invisible, crits him. Roll on a table, and it turns out that he takes an eye out. My friend stays invisible, though.
So the bad guy drops me, suddenly loses an eye, and watches me, through an agonizing haze, get back up again. "You shouldn't have killed me," I replied, "I see you're in pain."
Over the next couple rounds I explain to him that I can come back to life, and each time, it costs an eye. The secret? It doesn't have to be my eye.
He eventually fell in battle but stabilized. We all know One-Eye is still out there with a rumor.
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Worst crit has to be one of my favorites.
I'm playing with a bunch of new players on the classic Godsmouth Heresy. We had a fighter, wizard, cleric, and rogue made for us by the GM, who happened to be my brother. I took the cleric, a Dwarf. I'd played Godsmouth before, so I knew what was coming, but kept my mouth shut.
We eventually got to a part where we had to face a bloated zombie that, when delt slashing or piercing damage or killed, released a cloud of Cha draining dust.
We took turns entering the room, all stabbing or slashing at it except for me, since I had a warhammer.
We manage to get it out into the hall, the new players all but give up attacking it since they didn't want their Cha to drop. Being a Dwarf, I didn't care.
I swing with my warhammer, shouting at the top of my lungs "I'm a Dwaaaaaarf!!!", crit, confirm, max damage of something like 26, get enclouded with the dust, crit again on the fort save.
When the new guys asked "How did you do that!?" I simply replied in character. "I'm a Dwarf."
I have since been denied playing with new players ever since.
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I'm running Skull and Shackles, we're in book 2 now.
Note, what follows is technically a spoiler...but for an NPC that is nothing more than a random encounter, who also happens to have a name.
Crew lost, but managed to escape after killing his minions and doing a chunk of damage to him, and also burning the sails of his ship a bit to make it harder to follow. A string of bad rolls (I don't think anyone on the PC side rolled above an 8 that encounter) and their Captain standing too close to the edge of the boat (Shield Slam is funny) did them in.
They heal up, sell some of their plunder, and decide "It's rematch time".
I shrug, and say they find Gortus after a while, with his slaves rowing the boat.
They hop up on board the ship, roll Initiative, and Gortus wins Initiative. Off to a bad start.
Gortus saunters up to the Captain and swings his sword, and rolls a 17. Now, what I haven't mentioned yet is the sword they give him, in the book, that I didn't bother to change: A +1 Keen Falcata. At level 5 or so.
So he rolls to confirm. Confirms, drops Captain Cyrdic in a single blow.
Combat goes on, rolls back around to Gortus' Initiative again.
He swings his Falcata again, hitting the Goblin Vivisectionist right in the face. Another crit threat, another confirm. This one is an outright kill. Poor Slickjaw goes from unharmed to -24 in a single swipe. Gortus smacks his shield into the Barbarian for good measure.
Fight continues. Only 2 crew members left, Ace the Bladebound Magus, and Jrahk the Barbarian. They manage to get him down low on HP (and kill his two remaining minions), but his turn comes around in Round 3.
Roll Falcata. Crit threat. Confirm.
Jrahk the Barbarian fals, dead.
It is at this point the Magus is like "Well. S@#@." and I have pity on the poor bastards, their crew coming to the rescue (Sandra Quinn just barely making the caster level check necessary to use a Scroll of Breath of Life I deducted the price of from their party fund. Jrahk lost a leg in exchange.), and knocking Gortus out. Barely. Between the Ranger, Ghast (yes, they recruited a Ghast...they have Int scores I couldn't figure out why he was supposed to be mindlessly attacking when a deal could be hashed out once his hunger was sated), Fighter, and Bard, they subdue the guy.
After losing 3 party members in 3 rounds.
TL;DR: Not so much a crit...
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Oh wait! I just remembered a better one!
During a PFS game, I forget the actual adventure, we encountered a large pipe organ.
Next to this pipe organ, a small doll whispers to our Cleric, who had the highest Charisma, to play the organ.
Cleric rolled a 20 on a perform Organ roll. Player said his character played the organ at his church.
GM had no idea what to do. Normally, the roll would be crap and the doll would attack, but this time, combat was completely avoided and the doll was left in tears at the beautiful organ music.
One time me and my party were fighting a wound worm. I swear my paladin hit 7 crits with a 17-20x2. It was pretty crazy
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We were sneaking around a castle once and the archer ranger tried to kill off a guard quickly and quietly from range. At first everyone was super pumped when he got a crit, confident the guard would not live long enough to sound the alarm, only to remember that the ranger had a Thundering bow.
Ooops.
No single crit has been awful, but my character in one game has had terrible luck with getting hit by criticals. The GM has swapped dice several times to no avail. I think right now is crit-to-battle ratio is at least 1:1, and we've had a dozen or more encounters. In the first fight alone, we were facing a trio of dire wolves, and in the course of a 4-round fight he ate 2 or 3 crits.
Luckily I built him to be almost unkillable, so he's still alive (although he's made use of Diehard a few times).
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In one of our games we were in a canoes tracking down this "lake monster" that we got wind of that was causing trouble amongst the locals. We got news it had a lair and it was pointed to us on a map. We decided we would canoe so far and the portage onto land so we could try and sneak around it. This particular GM always has (and I mean always has) the party get ambushed no matter what steps they take to protect themselves or trap their foe. So the "lake monser" turns out to be a giant lake turtle and surprise gets us in the canoe miles from its lair. x3 crit on surprise round and one shots our level 2 druid.
The only funny part of the story was the rest of the party lived and we got to tell our frineds about how this lake turtle did in our druid friend. The player always gets mad becuse it was such a non heroic death.
We're level 5 adventurers, resting in Magnimar. We walk into a bar, and after one of the players mentioned to the DM that we hadn't fought anything in 3 sessions, we meet a burly gang of orcs giving us the stink eye. We approach, they challenge us to a duel, 5 on 5, we agree. We get teleported to an interdimensional arena, turns out these guys are the reigning champions of this tournament, crowds have assembled and we're staring across the field at the Orcs.
I forget the specifics of the fight, but they had some magic users and bruisers, so we killed 3 quickly without issue, but the last 2 were difficult and our magus was taking a beating. I rush up to help him with a healing touch, he Crit 1's his big blast attack, fumble deck says he fires in a random direction. We roll for it, and it ends up being right where my PC is. We figure we'll be fair and make him have to roll to hit me, I'm feeling confident as I have pretty good AC. He rolls his attack, Natural 20. Confirms with a Natural 20. I'm reduced to a pile of ash, and he's standing with 9hp within charging distance of an angry Orc Barbarian.
We were sneaking around a castle once and the archer ranger tried to kill off a guard quickly and quietly from range. At first everyone was super pumped when he got a crit, confident the guard would not live long enough to sound the alarm, only to remember that the ranger had a Thundering bow.
Ooops.
Why would a crack of thunder alert anyone? It's a naturally occurring sound in the world that can be simply explained away as "a storm must be near."
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So what I'm getting from this thread is that I'm completely justified in thinking Fumble decks/tables are basically the dumbest s*!& in existence.
I was GMing a 1e campaign in about 1983. New player joins, bringing a 3rd level fighter, as the party is returning from a dungeon with a member on the brink of death from mummy rot or something like that. So they need to get him to the temple of [LG goddess] before he dies.
At the town gate, an elegant but extremely officious official in a tall hat stops them, and demands that they turn in all their weapons, pay a toll and so forth. PCs argue; official won't take no for an answer and draws his shiny sword with the gold hilt and eagles and whatnot.
New PC thinks, 'To hell with this, he started it,' and draws his sword too. Initiative is rolled. PC wins, swings, crit. I was running a system that was statistically equivalent to all weapons being about 20/x3, but better against poor armour. The official was unarmoured. He dies instantly.
The PC's first kill: a 4th level paladin.
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I was GM'ing Skull and Shackles, and the party was fighting the final boss. I'll make this spoiler-free :)
The party's rogue wins initiative, jumps in invisibly to sneak attack the boss, does pretty well.
The boss goes second, has 3 attacks and has only the rogue in range. First attack deals crap for damage. Second is about average. Third attack criticals with a x4 weapon that also does additional problems on a crit, rolls nearly max damage. Rogue drops to -10.
Minions go third and have absolutely nobody else in range to target, and are well-known evil bastards.
The party all agrees what would logically happen next. I hand the player the NPC cleric that had been going with them.
My half orc inquisitor could never roll in crit threat range against anything that wasn't immune to crits. Seriously, from 1-15 the only thing he ever crit without a coup-de-gras was a freaking vargouille when the party was like 12th level.
We had a campaign where each player had two PCs. One guy we'll call JR was running a Fighter and a Wizard. We were having a big fight in a temple when JR decided to have his Fighter run over and attack some cool new foe while leaving his Wizard adjacent to a blinded half-orc guard with 1 hit point. The half-orc attacked the Wizard and scored a crit, doing impressive damage. On his next turn people expected JR to recall his Fighter to kill the half-orc or maybe have his Wizard drop him with Magic Missile. Instead both PCs concentrated on "the bigger threat". Then the blind half-orc with 1 hit point critted again. I think the Wizard went down. I know that everybody had a good laugh.
Our party was camping out for the night inside a makeshift earth-igloo (created by our elven earth wizard). The group's knightly fighter had taken it upon herself to be the wizard's bodyguard due to owing a debt to the wizard. While the party is sleeping, the wizard heard something outside the igloo and decides to wake her bodyguard to go investigate. So now the bodyguard has to get up and don her armor. Impatiently the wizard decides to just take a peek outside while her meatshield...er bodyguard is getting dressed. Orc ambush waiting for the first person to come out of the igloo. The attack roll is a crit that would've instantly killed the wizard if she wasn't carrying an artifact that let her make a deal with some infernal powers right then.
In another campaign, the players were going to talk to a local teacher at the the magic academy in town. When they arrived, they were met with a rather ill-tempered greeter (a teenage fetchling girl that appeared to be a student) that turned them away and told them that the person they wanted to speak to was not there. Not willing to let it go, they kept watch on the place during the day and realized they saw no adults enter or exit the buildings. Deciding that something was up and that the greeter they met must be evil (because apparently smart@$$ = evil?) they concoct a plan to break open the front doors, toss in a silenced object so the greeter can't cast spells and then rush in. They fling open the doors and toss in a silence spell just before the neutral good cleric rushes in and attacks the girl with his sword--rolling a crit and almost max damage on the teenaged NPC who didn't even get a chance to scream in terror due to the silence as she was literally cut in half.
After actually investigating the situation, they found out that the girl they just killed wasn't even the girl they met earlier in the day, but one of a set of twins that alternated standing at the front door and they were both just trying to keep the school running smoothly and prevent any outside suspicion when they noticed their teachers going missing.
I'll jump on this thread.
In our campaign, I'm using the critical fumble deck. It is only required it you confirm your failure with a one on the die. As the gm, I roll more dice, so naturally I crit more.
The PCs are sixty feet up on ten foot wide scaffolding, fighting off ninjas.
The monk says: I'm going to try to disarm the ninja.
GM: that will provoke.
Rolls a one
Rolls another one
Grabs the fumble deck, draws.
GM: You fail to disarm the ninja. When you reach put you hand to grab his wakizashi, the ninja retches back, throwing his sword fifteen feet southeast. There is no weapon to disarm. Anything else?
Monk: So I disarmed him? Cool.
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Playing in Carrion Crown AP, the very first session of the first book.
Combat ensues and my Dwarf Barbarian rushes the ring leader to deliver a punch. Well, I rolled 4 20s in a row. I think the best description of the event was a 3'11" Dwarf covered in long hair charged and Falcon-punched some poor peasant right in the junk. I'm glad the DM let me pull back on damage enough not to kill the poor bloke but combat ended immediately after that punch.
Using the old 1e "Good Hits and Bad Misses" fumble chart; saw a PC get "critical hit, self" and decapitate herself.
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One more story, this one actually quite funny and not very good for the party or player.
I was co-GMing a homebrew my brother normally hosted. I played both my character and the NPCs. As such, I knew where an ambush of bandits was coming from, but couldn't say.
Combat ensues after we refuse to pay 5 gold apiece (25 gold total).
The bandits had rapiers. They crit. Twice in the same turn. On my character.
I ended up killing my own character with two bandits.
I have yet to build another Magus, as my previous 2 Magi were also killed off.
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Here are just two of the criticals done in the last Rolemaster game I GMed.
Force of blow focused on foe’s groin,
severely damaging reproductive organs.
Shock kills foe four rounds later.
+ 11 Hits, SUP
Heat fuses together foe’s lips. Foe cannot
speak…or scream. (-10 enemy morale)
+ 2 Hits, -50, Ftg(-10), SUP
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I offer the other hand of this..
During a fight against an earth elemental, the party had hot dice and rolled about 9 natural twenties between the five of them, over the course of a six round fight.
Against an earth elemental. So.. Immune to crits.
Similarly, a paladin (whose player has bad luck) kept rolling 20s against the gelatinous cubes he had to fight at one point. To the point where he rolled three twenties on three consecutive rounds all for naught against the oozes.
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I'm playing the only martial in a homebrew. First round, casters buff me with enlarge, bull's, and Greater magic weapon. I swing and do damage, combat goes. I finally critical after nearly dying three times. Do upwards of 60 damage. GM looks at his health chart, looks up "He freaking explodes." Enemy had 0 hp before the crit.
This isn't mine, but a friend of mine had a for pal sword and when they went to fight a colossal red dragon, the final villian, he won initiative and charged.
Natural 20.
"Okay, yeah, but you can't confirm it!" Said the DM.
19 on the dice. The dragon is beheaded.
The DM was PO'd because he'd spent four hours on the encounter.
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That's when you have the dragon's headless corpse laugh and go "EXACTLY AS PLANNED MUHAHAHAHAHA!" and rise again as a Ravener or something.
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Playing a blackened aasimar life oracle with 7 Str in a PFS scenario. I am blacking and non-proficient in shield bashes, but I don't want to waste a spell for the single monster we had encountered. I decide to shield bash, and announce I need a 20 to hit. Roll and nat 20. Announce I need a nat 20 to confirm. Roll and another nat 20. I roll the damage 2d4 - 4. 1 + 1 - 4 = -2 = 1pt of non-lethal damage.
Did I mention the monster was a skeleton and that undead cannot suffer non-lethal damage?
I can see the skeleton's head spinning around like the Stalphose from Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker when you hit them with a boomerang.
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This happened in PFS:The fighter in the group got mad at someone in the fight and kept swinging, doing barely any damage to it[kept rolling 1's, 2's and 3's], as the bard kept throwing darts around with a 5Str. Finally, the fighter gets one good hit, and the guy he's fighting is still standing, so the bard then steals the show by flinging a crit, confirmed by a crit, doing 2d2-5, a whopping 1 point of nonlethal damage, and the guy splats down, unconscious.
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Oh wait! I just remembered a better one!
During a PFS game, I forget the actual adventure, we encountered a large pipe organ.
Next to this pipe organ, a small doll whispers to our Cleric, who had the highest Charisma, to play the organ.
Cleric rolled a 20 on a perform Organ roll. Player said his character played the organ at his church.
GM had no idea what to do. Normally, the roll would be crap and the doll would attack, but this time, combat was completely avoided and the doll was left in tears at the beautiful organ music.
I remember this Scenario (though strangely, I too forget its name)! I played my Sorcerer in it. My understanding, based on what our DM said after the fight in response to my asking about it, was that it wanted you to play forever, and would inevitably attack you once you stopped.
Why would a crack of thunder alert anyone? It's a naturally occurring sound in the world that can be simply explained away as "a storm must be near."We were sneaking around a castle once and the archer ranger tried to kill off a guard quickly and quietly from range. At first everyone was super pumped when he got a crit, confident the guard would not live long enough to sound the alarm, only to remember that the ranger had a Thundering bow.
Ooops.
That was what I was thinking - granted, I can think of two rationalizations: 1) It's in a place where it never storms that way, and 2) the rule of "you have to admit it's funnier that way."
Also: I'd be remiss if I didn't share this story on this thread.