So last session I was playing in I got the honor of finally putting my bard to rest in a manner that I could be truly proud of.
The Opposition
Howdy: The BBEG, he was a huge three legged gunslinging turret of death with a giant laser rifle, missiles, an 80ft move speed and was a super super CR inappropriate encounter simply by himself
Doody: His tough as nails robot sidekick. A melee bruiser through and through, he hit with enough of a wallop that he could create cone attacks from smacking the ground.
Other Robots: Yeah, they're not that important to the story, just know that there were about six of them and they were specifically designed as an assassination force, so imagine robot ninja mooks
The A-Team
Willifred: Human fighter, looks like Ryan Gosling but is a brutal loan shark. Very much an Evil BSF and liked to get on Sven's case for always looking for a safe spot to fight from.
Renalin: Half-Elf monk, Wuxia as can be due to a healthy dose of DM fiat (basically any acrobatic stunt was free game, regardless of whether or not the acrobatics skill could even cover some of the more crazy things she came up with). Her colleague Grook -a Half-Orc monk- was supposed to be guarding the exit to the mansion we were infiltrating and letting us know if anyone was coming.
Grook: The aforementioned Half-Orc monk, he was definitely not guarding his post as we found out rather quickly
DRAX-1473: Along with Howdy and Doody, one of three sentient robots created by Harold DaVinci, one of the founders of the capital city and whose house we were currently raiding. DRAX joined up with us to destroy some of the corruption in the capital, specialized in assassination like the mooks we were fighting (indeed DRAX was a rogue working towards the assassin PRC).
And lastly Sven: Human bard, played by me. Had a penchant for trying to come up with overly complex battle plans that never came to fruition until after all the enemies were taken care of. Also liked mixing explosives whenever he had the chance.
After successfully grabbing the McGuffin everyone but Grook was heading over to the balcony on the second floor of the mansion to rappel down and make our great escape when suddenly we hear voices come from the other side of the mansion. Howdy and Doody break down the door and come after us, ordering us to stop in the name of the law. Naturally we panic, but being the semi-seasoned adventurers that we are, we decide that we can take on the opposition and leave no witnesses behind in our crime (I swear, we weren't actually an evil team, horror campaigns make you do things you aren't proud of) and begin to prep for battle. Being almost entirely melee we start to approach the staircase so we can engage with our enemies when Howdy unleashes a giant laser blast from his rifle, blowing up a massive chunk of the landing we're on and one of the staircases leading up to the landing. Even being twenty feet away from the blast and making my reflex save, I still take enough damage to bring me down to 2 HP. It's at this point that I realize that someone isn't making it out of here alive, so I set out to make sure that Howdy focuses all his attention on me so that he'd ignore my teammates and pray that the dice would be on my side for long enough to ensure everyone else's survival.
I lure Howdy underneath a giant chandelier hanging from the roof and shoot an arrow with a vial alchemists fire basically duct-taped to the side at the chandelier, causing the arrow to explode on contact and dropping the chandelier on Howdy. While he's still entangled I climb back up the stairs and grease them (man I love that spell) only to find him climb up the wall instead. So I grease the wall, causing him to fall back dowm, then quickly retreat to what's left of the balcony and then mirror image myself before repelling down the rope and hiding out just beneath the balcony where I get to work prepping explosives around the perimeter of the underside of the balcony.
Meanwhile, Doody is having a field day with the rest of the party (sans rogue, who escaped as soon as possible), thrashing them around and being an awesome engine of melee destruction. Everyone is getting thrown around as they're desperately scrambling for the exit.
Once Howdy get's back on his feet he leaps up onto the balcony (a solid 20ft up from the ground floor) and guns down the mirror images, buying me enough time to go and set the fuses on everything. As the bombs go off I scream "SEE, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I HAVE ENOUGH TIME SAVE YOUR SORRY @$$ES!!!" and both Sven and Howdy die in a massive fiery explosion, of which the other PCs escape in the cloud of ash created.
So, on that note, what are some of the more epic, or at least memorable, PC deaths that you've had at your tables?
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I stopped playing an assassin in ADnD, DM had him come back in a session i wasn't present to harass the party. He was tortured and had a glowing hot iron shove down his throat as the cleric was told to heal him...
This is from 3.5. I was playing a Goliath Barbarian with a huge battle axe and really god grappling skills. The only real minus to my glorious goliath of death was his low intelligence and constant seek of a challenge.
Anyway our party is just strolling through a forest, going towards a bridge guarded by some goblin. Our aim was to pass the bridge alive.
The bridge is a fortified one with tall battlements on both sides. Our party gets it's fighting buts on and starts taking out the first goblins guarding the battlements. My goliath, in his infinite wisdom decides he will just rush in and kill a few goblins. Boring combat ensues, where I chop 3 goblins in half in one swing, because of me being enlarged and having monkey grip + a huge battle axe and ridiculous strength from being a barbarian.
WE clear out the first company of goblins pretty fast and start crossing the bridge. Arrows start raining down on us from the other battlements but we make a run for the other side.Only to be met by another company of goblins, this time trained goblins marching in a phalanx formation. Our team's fighter and cleric go in to fight them while I stay back. My goliath senses tingling.
And I was right, they had what to be tingling for. Out from behind the battlements a dragon rises up. Our whole party collectively craps their pants because we are at lvl 10 only and this is not a small dragon. It's not a full blown grown-up dragon either, but still more than a lvl 10 party can take on. I have to distract the dragon from my party members, cause otherwise they will get screwed. I decide to throw my 2 throw-able axes at it. One skims over it's head and the other hits it in the chest but does no damage. It is enough to catch it's attention anyway.
I run to the begging of the bridge and wait for the dragon to come to me. It lands and roars a mighty roar, but I am not afraid, this is but one more creature to put into my "Gloriously Defeated Creatures" book
Again, in my infinite wisdom, I decide to do something very logical in this scenario. I grapple the dragon. This grappling goes on for 5 rounds, my dice keeping me in. I had some very lucky rolls. I start to notice that this isn't going to really work and I should figure out a better plan.
At this point my party has finished off all the remaining goblins and is telling me they are coming to help. I see them on the other side of the bridge. I know this dragon will be more than we can handle at this point so I decide I have to take it down myself. I leave the grapple, again thank you dice gods, with minimal damage taken and ask our cleric to give me strength and the blessing of Pelor (at this point I have saved him 2 so he feels he owes me, and rp how he would justify this move to the dm). Anyway, I get the extra buffs from the cleric. I am now an enormous goliath wielding a giant battle axe facing off with a big dragon.
I tell my party to not come help me, I will take care of this. I raise my axe over my head, let out a bellowing yell of rage and smash it down onto the bridge, destroying the bridge. Luckily I had hit it hard enough that a piece of the battlement had fallen of and o top of the dragon.
We are now both falling into the ravine. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. The bridge is over a "bottomless" ravine. I roll a few more good dice, and I push myself of one of the falling rock, towards the dragon. Then, of course, I grapple it again. We both fall to our deaths in a writhing, screaming, roaring and glorious ball of death.
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My fiancee's very first time playing a tabletop RPG was about 7 years ago in 3.5, when she was just my prospective girlfriend. She jumped into a campaign we'd been running for a while to replace one of our players who had moved away. She wanted to pay an assassin or thief type character and ended up settling on a Lurk (a psionic skill-monkey class). She took to it right away and was running along walls to avoid pressure plates, marking traps with chalk so the group knew where not to step, severing trip wires, etc.
Things are going pretty great until the party, somewhat wounded, gets bottlenecked in a narrow tunnel after chasing some fleeing kobolds. There's a heavy door in front of them and a large block of stone has sealed the way they came in. Figuring there's nowhere to go but forward, she flings open the door, only to see a massive orange dragon waiting on the other side who breathes a sticky blast of goo all over the party. The party's "wizard" (a dragonfire adept) warns them that in about 6 seconds that goo will detonate, blasting whomever is covered in it and everyone else within about 10 feet to smithereens. All the other party members start trying to get the goo off, either by rubbing it with sand from the floor or by risking severe physical harm and dashing past the dragon to dunk themselves in the underground lake. My fiancee hurls herself into the middle of the largest group of kobold minions so that when she blows up she can take as many of them with her as possible. That was the moment when we knew she was going to fit right in, and the moment when I penciled in a rod of resurrection with a single charge in it to the dragon's loot.
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We are now both falling into the ravine. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. The bridge is over a "bottomless" ravine. I roll a few more good dice, and I push myself of one of the falling rock, towards the dragon. Then, of course, I grapple it again. We both fall to our deaths in a writhing, screaming, roaring and glorious ball of death.
While awesomely epic, you realize you can't fall to your death in a bottomless ravine right?
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We are now both falling into the ravine. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. The bridge is over a "bottomless" ravine. I roll a few more good dice, and I push myself of one of the falling rock, towards the dragon. Then, of course, I grapple it again. We both fall to our deaths in a writhing, screaming, roaring and glorious ball of death.While awesomely epic, you realize you can't fall to your death in a bottomless ravine right?
Eventually you will die of dehydration or starvation.
A 2e game where the players are attempting to end the depredations of a cult dedicated to one of the lesser goddess' of the Drow. The Paladin, who'd lost his armor in an earlier incident, turned and faced the avatar of the goddess to buy time for the rest of the players to escape the shrine where she had her lair, which they'd set afire.
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I dont know about epic, but I had a character die one his first session.
He was a Wild Rager Barbarian 2/Druid 4, and we had just gone to investigate a cave, only to find a crazed old man(a wizard) and his fast zombie troll, which popped out of vegetation to catch me flat-footed.
after two rounds of taking on the troll alone, and going to 16 Hp while raging, I took it down(4 hits with a greataxe while raging and using Power Attack will do that. 88 damage!) I stepped up to the mage during a full-attack and tried to get him with my gore(Lesser Fiend Totem), missing.
On the Wizard's next turn, he took one look at me, all bloody and torn up from beating his troll, that he risked everything and started casting a spell. Cast defensively? Check. Missed my AoO because it was a ranged attack? Check.
Enervation struck me square in the chest, and I took the full 4 levels the spell could deal, making me lose 20 HP, fall unconscious, lose my 12 HP from raging, and go to -18 of 16.
Somewhere in the Mwangi Expanse, an ankylosaurus roams around wearing +1 Chain Barding. :)
Eventually you will die of dehydration or starvation.We are now both falling into the ravine. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. The bridge is over a "bottomless" ravine. I roll a few more good dice, and I push myself of one of the falling rock, towards the dragon. Then, of course, I grapple it again. We both fall to our deaths in a writhing, screaming, roaring and glorious ball of death.While awesomely epic, you realize you can't fall to your death in a bottomless ravine right?
Falling to your death and dying while falling are not the same thing. Falling to your death kinda implies the sudden stop.
In forgotten realms, we started once at small forgotten continent hidden into pocket plane, which was actually created for someones prison. The population were human only, but they had racial modifiers debending on their social class.
I had female fighter/ranger. We were travelling over desert and found 'mile marker'. At somepoint someone touched it and in next second (from my character view) he and everyone else but me had couple of levels and huge treasure of good and magical stuff, most of it did not exist even in our wildest tales. And they all told that it was ancient teleport railroad over desert, which had station in every halfday of travel and they were lucky that they ended into some forgotten vault. They also told that it was wery simply to use, though it was potentially wery dangerous. They said that vault was empty, but they had not picked anything for me. They also knew that it would take month to cross the desert.
Well, we were saving the world and had to hurry, but it seemed it wouldn't take time to look for little and I also wanted to gain something. I touched the pole and I had to select any of stations. No idea what was where, I selected end of line and arrived into our destination, alone. Then I had to throw natural 1 in Perception, Initiative and Fortitude. I was paralyzed and swallowed alive by luckiest one hitpoint monster ever, didn't get to see what and it wasn't there anymore when my brave companions arrived month later.
I have to add that my character had hitpoints and resistances to stay alive and probably conscious for days.
That... seems like a douche move on the part of the GM.
Yea...bad gm move is bad?
Also on the part of the other players, for apparently choosing to leave you behind (were you not there for a session or something? I hate GMs and/or groups who, when a player has to miss a session for some reason, suddenly decide that character simply doesn't exist for a session and thus they don't get any XP, or loot, or anything. Or did they just decide "we're gonna leave her behind and go on our own" for some inexplicable reason?) and not at least grabbing you a few things while they were there.
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Could be worse...I died in my sleep when i missed a game day.
... wooooooow.
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five months ago I had joined in a kingmaker campaign with one of my closest friends. We had a good party balance going, most of the fights in the campaign were pretty straightforward and could be solved with little planning. A good portion of our group was optimized to a degree that our DM had some difficulty in challenging. We were enjoying ourselves quite a bit, albeit curbstomping the whole way through.
Our DM's response to our characters was to unleash this beast of an ogre magi to challenge us.
A play-by-play:
In our first encounter myself (human conjurer) and Chen (human crane-style monk) were separated from the rest of the party when Dale showed up to lay the smack down on us. Summoned creatures, fists, not even spells could touch him. Chen ended up dying after suffering two non-negated crits and dropped like a sack of potatoes, after which Dale disappeared and ran away. I vowed revenge.
The next time we found Dale Chen was ressed and had stole his heirloom katana(in a previous session. long story) which he replaced with an even better weapon (a naginata). The fight was in an indoor area and was going pretty well (I landed two enervations on Dale) and Chen had him on the ropes. Then he disappears again. I cast glitterdust. Does nothing. So my character pondered how he could have gotten away without going invisible. Then it hit me, that is to say Dale hit me, with a x4 crit to the noggin which gave me more time to think as my gray matter covered the interior of the room. He had the luxury of a Cloak of Etherealness to have the element of surprise. Luckily he was at low hit points and dropped shortly after.
So from this day forward whenever I win a fight against an ogre magi, I can sleep soundly knowing it wasn't Dale.
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I have a number of great deaths over the years... Paranoia RPG was responsible for many of them.
In one instance I seem to remember being the only one to defeat some giant monster. It involved rocket boots, being eaten, and of course my cone rifle with atomic weapon rounds... It was gloriously messy, horribly painful, and ultimately unremembered (largely because nothing was left of the "infected" facility except a slime filled crater. Sadly all our previous clones were declared traitors for allowing the facility to be destroyed. Fortunately they were all already dead, unfortunately our new clones got clean up duty. :(
Must have been another thread I've shared this in. My group was playing Star Wars. We were assaulting an imperial base, we'd broken in, taken some captives to which we wanted to knock them out but be quiet (don't know why we didn't just hit them, reasons I guess) ultimately one of us started shoving a stun blaster in their mouths to muffle the sound, first victim ended up with no head.
We met heavy resistance as we fought our way through the rest of the facility. I went down, We were out of med kits. To keep me safe they shoved me in a closet as they continued on, for whatever reason we overloaded a reactor, (might have been the point of this, can't remember) everyone ran for it, getting out of the facility just in time for it to go sky high.
Problem? Nobody remembered to grab me. My fiery body flew into the sky, my charred skin coming loose as I made my way towards the ground, coming in like a meteor. As I landed in front of my former comrades, I spoke one last time to my dear friends.
I have a number of great deaths over the years... Paranoia RPG was responsible for many of them.
That reminds me of a great Paranoia game we played back in the mid 80's. The object was to get to an underwater base.
Along the way one of the players died. We thought to continue but the COMPUTER said to stay right where we were. And since we didn't want to be used as Radiation Shielding, we stood at the bottom of the ocean with only so much oxygen to await the next Clone to arrive.
When he arrived, we had all died. Of coarse the new comer was told to wait right there for the next batch of clones to arrive (or risk being used as radiation shielding). He too died when our clones arrived.
[sigh]
I could go on. suffice to say, the GM had realized this issue and was laughing like mad and said that by the time the Computer realized the mistake and told the group to move one one person was down to 0 clones and the rest was down to 1 clone each.
It was more fun than the "Insert Retina" incident..... :D