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Having grown up on playing very lethal campaigns, I've always felt an odd disconnect with most players as they don't seem to take character death very well, that or they're surprised when I'm not only not disappointed when my pc dies but rather I'm relishing an awesome last stand. I remember an awesome encounter at a PFS table where we were struggling to take down some river drakes I believe while on a boat. We were down to the last one but we were all nearly down and out. The last drake came back into the boat but got a little too close to me while getting on the boat and got hit with a stunning fist for its carelessness and it actually failed the save likely saving one of us an attack we weren't in any shape to handle. Luckily I was up next and tripped him, I then died from the acid that was spat on me the earlier. However the drake was on the laying on the ground and everyone pounced on it and it was hard fought win. However the dm realized he had ran the encounter for a higher tier than we were playing and decided to not count my death. Needless to say I got some odd looks when I contested him on this. I finished the session but didn't play the character again cuz frankly I was quite content with that being his end.
Not every death is a good one though, sometimes your final stand is more like having your underwear pulled over your eyes and being pushed off something very tall and are good for a laugh.
There was another PFS scenario I played where you basically had to play tower defense for a meeting happening at some old lighthouse and I was playing a switch hitting half elf slayer. We decided to split the party, cuz we're smart, and have me at the top of the lighthouse keeping watch where I could safely fire arrows while the others were downstairs to take the brunt of the assault as I was under leveled for the tier we were in. Sounded good on paper right? Well none of us expected two unarmed fighters with potions of fly to storm the lighthouse from the top. I was promptly punched, pinned and hogtied while the rest of the party braced themselves for the forces storming the first floor. They fought for a while and i had partially excused myself so they could do their thing but I wasn't dead but had no chance of breaking my bonds. A soldier checked the top of the lighthouse but I managed to feign being dead and he left me be. It looked as if so lon as the rest of the party survived I'd be good too. Except they started shooting flaming arrows at the place and I reminded the dm of the barrel of whale oil next to me we explicitly brought up there for me to dump on people should the opportunity have shown itself. The party heard an explosion soon after. X(
This was really fun session, made mainly memorable by my rediculous death and I thought it'd be fun to hear similar experiences. :D
I can tell all my character deaths because I didn't have so many, not having had a lot of killer GMs and trying to play making sensible choices. But in my about 15 years as a roleplayer I had quite a few character deaths.
I'm reposting here the story of my first PC death and probably one of the best ones!
It comes from the «Players do the Darndest Things» thread and I'm keeping it as I originally posted it as I am too lazy to rewrite:
I'll stop bashing the poor fire wizard for some time. Seriously, he might not be the sharpest knive in the kitchen but he's not always so bad!
Today I'm bashing Dalindra... Just a bit. He's a good player. He does great roleplaying. He's... probably reading this thread, too.
Not all the players who take unexpected decissions are fools or bad players. Sometimes things just keep being more and more messed up. And then, you end killing your own party.This happened a long time ago in a Call of Cthulhu game. Dalindra was playing a naive English gentleman, I was playing a curious French naturalist. We were both fairly new to roleplaying and totally new to Call of Cthulhu. I had never lost a character in my whole life and I usually got very attached to my characters (I still do). Fortunately this one was pregenerated and I wasn't too attached to him... because he had one of the greatest deaths ever!
We went into a monastery and ran into a ghoul-like creature. I was unexperienced enough to try to fight it, so it left me unconscious with a single hit.
Everybody ran, but Dalindra stayed back to save me so our party split (never split the party!). Dalindra got lost and found the monastery's basement, where a strange looking snake man was performing some kind of ritual inside a pentacle. He held a sacrificial dagger. He looked... friendly?
«Humansssss. I am humanssss friend. Lets me sssssave your friend» the creature hissed.
I was dying. Dalindra was desperate. So he did the more logic thing you can do in a Cthulhu game. He believed him. He gave my barely alive body to the cultist so he could heal me.
Dalindra was so immersed in the game that he didn't even consider he might be doing anything wrong. You should have seen his face when the cultist stabbed me in the heart and a dark mist started covering the whole room!
Dalindra thought fast and charged the cultist, throwing him outside the pentacle and taking his place. The mist swiftly devoured the cultist, but Dalindra was safe inside the pentacle.
The mist swiftly devoured the cultist, but Dalindra was safe inside the pentacle.
The mist talked to him, trying to make him come out of the pentacle, but he stayed there all night until it was already in the morning. He was desperate.
«Come out. I'll let you go» said the mist. He was desperate enough to believe it, so he left the pentacle...
And that's how he ended being posessed by an avatar of an avatar of Nyarlathothep (I can only remember the Spanish name).
The GM told us that, had he stayed inside the pentacle, he could have left unharmed in the morning. But the poor englishman had trust issues... he was too trusting.
I was given to choose between playing a new character or helping the GM with roleplaying minor NPCs. I chose the latter so I was able to see what happened behind the curtains and get the whole picture of what happened the next months of story. AND IT WAS EPIC.
Dalindra kept roleplaying his character the same way at first, but slowly making him more and more alien and creepy as the posession grew inside him. His character was more and more sinister and more and more emaciated. He started to manifest strange powers.
In the end he was completely lost. The other party members ended attacking him and, already fully posessed, he slew them all, only to be consumed by the posession shortly after that.
The only survivor was the young journalist, who had ran away a week ago and ended his days in an asylum.
I enjoyed this story a lot being only a watcher because I always knew what was going on and the GM allowed me to watch all the private scenes as long as I kept my mouth shut, which I did. I have to say that the story was great and Dalindra did one the most creepy roleplaying ever. I never regret having lost my character because it made a wonderful story.
As of writing this, I've had zero character deaths. This is by some weird fluke, mind you. Frequently my characters lives have been saved by someone else taking the punishment or I've managed to avoid punishment through shenanigans/magic/good dice rolls.
I'm not a smart girl. Just a lucky one.
But I have witnessed plenty of vicious deaths in some brutal campaigns. The one that stands out was the first session of an adventure where we were under attack from dragon cultists and were defending people from the village in a castle. While talking to the mayor, since we had just arrived, we feel the castle shake. We go up to the ramparts to find a blue adult dragon leering down on us. It starts by killing most of the defenders on the rampart, while we try and throw as much damage as we can at it. We are first level, mind you.
Our fighter, Tybolt the Guardsman, who was on this journey to get enough money to then retire with his pregnant wife a village over and take up baking as a profession, attempted to rescue some guards who were about to fall to their deaths as part of the castle began to fall away. He sprints across the castle and yanks those guards to safety. But when the dragon reaes back for another breath weapon, our friend Tybolt, a day from retirement, takes 58 lightning damage straight through the chest.
This set the tone for the rest of the adventure, with a death batting average of 1 death every 3 sessions.
My character saw a lot of his friends die, particularly people who were helping him overcome a lot of his personal demons. He himself lived till retirement from the adventure, and he is now a villain.
This wasn't an overkill but my most unexpected character death: (reposting again)
In a recent game we had 2 dead characters before we could even act.
As we could only enter the room by a magic portal, we could not make any kind of check to see what was there, no clues on what we were finding there. We entered the room and were caught flat-footed by two Bogeymen.
We rolled the worse initiatives ever, I had a +7 modifier and our fighter had about a +8.
They were first. We rolled poorly against their deepest fear aura and then they casted consecutive Phantasmal Killers on me and the Fighter.
With a double saving throw Phantasmal Killer sucks. The Fighter had a +16 to her Will Save and about +19 to Fort. I had +16 Will and +13 Fort. I had casted Heroism on all the party members.
I don't remember the exact rolls, but we managed to fail the 4 saves!!!
The GM couldn't believe it! We had to be pulled out of the room by our 8 Str Wizard.
We were Cyclic Reincarnated and it ended being a good thing for the story (both characters who died were going through hard times and were kinda depressed and distracted before their deaths) but when it happened it was really shocking.
I've always feared boogeyman for their ability to kill player characters so randomly.
But two at a time was just unexpected! 4 failed saves! The fun fact is that the two characters who died had been lovers until a day ago. The Fighter broke their relationship because she felt they weren't being honest (they kept it secret and she was expecting to have an arranged marriage someday) and both were very affected because of it.
And the first turn of the first encounter they had after that they just died. My character always thought that their deaths were a consequence for being unfocused and depressed, so after being resurrected she changed a lot.
She had been very childish before, but since then she learned to put all her personal issues aside when in battle and to stay always focused. If she wasn't strong enough, people would die, so she had to be stronger even when hurt.
It was a death who made the characters even more interesting.
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I ran a module a while back and one of my players got caught in the worst overkill I've ever had as a GM. Gunpowder Ooze had split, PC got grappled, was knocked unconscious, and had a talisman trigger and that talisman was hit with a primal magic effect. Rolled on the chart and it came up as an elemental touch. Rolled d4 for the element, came up fire. He's grappled and unconscious, so it discharges into the ooze, starting a chain reaction of fire cones back and forth between the two oozes until the room was completely immolated, including the PC's very, very charred corpse.
I've never experienced a character death, although I did get critters by a charging Orcish bard/rogue who was invisible wielding a falchion which put me at -8HP
Was very random.
I was saved however and in his last ditch attempt to escape he ran from out war priest and cast vanish on himself only for my character to go next and flip him the bird whilst casting glitter dust in the space in which he had been standing
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Probably not "overkill" in the strictest sense but this is my absolute favourite horrible death story from over 3 decades of gaming.
Our group comes upon the location we must enter to find the McGuffin which is guarded, we discover, by a small number of Yeth Hounds--I don't recall if it was 2 or 3. A reasonable challenge for our large party of 6 or 7 characters except every single character fails the saving throw against the Yeth Hounds' baying but one, the guy in our group with the magic dice who always rolls disgustingly well. Panic ensues as per the fear effect and we all flee except the one guy who finds himself facing the creatures alone. It's not long before he is killed but this is right around the time that our session ends for the week so the battle is put on hold.
In our game, when someone dies, their next character just joins up with the group--we don't make people wait for a suitable time or location to work them in or go through any long introductions etc. If Dave dies, Joe shows up wearing Dave's PC T-shirt as soon as Joe is ready to go.
With that in mind, fast forward to next session: we still have to get the McGuffin guarded by the Yeth Hounds so we mount a second assault on the location. Once again, the Yeth Hounds bay and everyone fails their saving throws except that one guy with the great rolls...that one guy who saved last week and died because he did. Everyone but him flees again and he is killed again which makes him the only person I've ever known to have had two characters killed by the same mobs because he made successful saving throws.
In a GURPS game I inflicted 4d6*2000000000 pts of damage on each pc. Which was a lot of overkill. It was the end of the campaign, they had tracked the secret base of the bad guys down a bit slowly and discovered a 50MT fusion bomb on a short time fuse and they had left the bomb squad behind. They attempted to disarm it improvising to the correct skill from a selection of incorrect skills and then fumbled.
Bomb went off.
Characters were reduced to their constituent atoms or smaller pieces.
In pathfinder we have had 3 bards killed by the gunslinger in their own party, on every occasion the Gunslinger has been hit by a confusion spell an proceded to crit the bard with multiple gunshots on each occasion massively overkilling the bard. We now have a policy of not mixing bards and gunslingers in the same party.
In my very first D+D game 34 years ago my mothers character was kicked to death by a mule while trying to force it into the dungeon ,which impressed me for decades. I have never tried to use mules as pack animals in dungeons
Had a scenario where my fairly hardy/tanky dwarf druid who wears stone fullplate was scouting a cliff face via spider climb and making sure it was safe for the party to go up. The character has negligible dex, so my AC didn't particularly go down very much just because I was scaling a wall; the character has a really great perception skill; it seemed reasonable to send me up first.
Triggered a flying archer ambush. For a few rounds we held our own despite the party being light on ranged characters (and all stuck on the ground) and me pinned down on the cliff face. But a slew of high rolling arrows got past my AC and next thing you know, I'm just under the negatives, HP wise... while hanging onto a cliff... about a hundred feet up...
Yeah, the 10d6 falling damage finished my druid off. Oh well; she got better.
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Back in early 3.0 days, a game store near my grad school had a D&D "league" where you could play a character with multiple DMs on a variable schedule. Basically proto-OP with no real campaign oversight. There were no rules against playing evil characters or PvP, and no tiers like in PFS so any level characters could mix. I made a 1st level bard and showed up to a session, where in an early fight the evil 9th level wizard in the group decided to fireball the group, hitting 4 PCs and one enemy. The DM told me to make a save and my response was along the lines of "why bother?" as even half damage would put me at dead.
That league...had its ups and downs. I had a cleric get killed so early in a session (maybe 10 minutes in?) that I literally pulled the "His identical brother walks out of the woods" cliché. I went through about 5 characters until I landed on a dwarf paladin/dwarven defender who survived up to 14th level and then retired.
I don't remember the actual monsters involved, beside 'kruthik'... it was in D&D4, we were exploring a dungeon, we were 6 rather than 4 and the GM overdid the making the encounter up to the party, so we never had a real chance, we were destroyed.
there was also the Fire Giant King's hall in module G3, but there we were savvy enough to retreat when we realized we were overpowered, so we Horaced the giants and got them a few at a time, and managed to win and survive.
My second PF character, and third character ever. Murdok Krog, of the Krog clan, a loud-mouthed Dwarven TItan Mauler Barbarian and Hunter of Giants. This was back in the happy days before I understood how Titan Mauler worked. It was a great archetype back then, Murdok dualwielded two Greatswords and generally just yelled at the top of his lungs. We were playing a round-robin where everyone in the group got to be GM for a day. There was another player who was really new, and his session was against something ridiculous like 15 Hill Giants and a Fire Giant boss. They had distance and rocks to throw. We gave it a try, but the tide quickly turned against us, and things looked bad. TPK level bad. So Murdok Krog decided to create a distraction in order to let the others escape. Or rather, he was the distraction, in typical Barbarian fashion. I don't remember the details
He proceeded to be crushed under the weight of ~15 boulders flying at him. But the team managed to get away. To this day, Murdok Krog's grave remains, two greatswords sticking out of a rock pile...
I don't blame the GM, though. He was as new as I was and we barely understood the concept of CR, much how to design good encounters. Besides, it was a great last stand and a fitting end to Murdok's legend.
Back in early 3.0 days, a game store near my grad school had a D&D "league" where you could play a character with multiple DMs on a variable schedule. Basically proto-OP with no real campaign oversight. There were no rules against playing evil characters or PvP, and no tiers like in PFS so any level characters could mix. I made a 1st level bard and showed up to a session, where in an early fight the evil 9th level wizard in the group decided to fireball the group, hitting 4 PCs and one enemy. The DM told me to make a save and my response was along the lines of "why bother?" as even half damage would put me at dead.
That league...had its ups and downs. I had a cleric get killed so early in a session (maybe 10 minutes in?) that I literally pulled the "His identical brother walks out of the woods" cliché. I went through about 5 characters until I landed on a dwarf paladin/dwarven defender who survived up to 14th level and then retired.
I had a similar experience to this: I rocked up as a first level Elf Fighter/Thief in my very first AD&D game, and everyone else was at least 4th-6th level in a long running campaign. We proceeded to wander through a place that looked like landscaped gardens and rather docile fauna, until...
... I was overkilled by not being able to save the Dex roll for a Red Dragon's breath weapon... (and even saving I would have been dead anyway)The Wizard who owned the theme park was quite contrite as "they were only supposed to be Polymorphed Ants" as *fake fabulous beasts* attractions; only a REAL Red Dragon had snuck in for Sh1ts and Giggles....
He gave my character a "spare body he had lying around" (as mine was now a pile of ash)... so ended up an Elf in a Human body that just happened to have lycanthropy... -.-
Well, this was back in world of warcraft d20 or was it just warcraft d20, I forget.
But I was a gnome in my own mech and had lots of gunpoweder. We fighting some demons, ally fireballed area, I rolled a 1, thus gunpowder was hit. All went up, I mean, it was a huge explosion, no ally or me survived. I rolled the damage. Was like over 100.
The shrapnel took out the demons while the flame took out the rest of us.
I think we took most of the forest with us.
There was a low reflex DC 15 from explosion, but no one made it.
TPK.
lol, that reminds me of my very first game, the whole party got TPK'd by a single bugbear.
I don't remember if this was my first character death ever, but in Vampire my character died while investigating a catastrophe zone, burned by the heat of 4 suns.
The ressult of a session going completely the wrong way because a mixture of a disruptive player, bad decissions and sheer bad luck.
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If we want to talk about times we've overkilled PCs, I once had a BBEG rogue 5/assassin 9 in a 3.0 game that managed to crit with a death attack, using a poisoned greataxe, against a 10th level wizard. I think the poor guy had like 40 hp (d4 HD back then), and I told him, "Take 73 points of damage, and make me 3 Fort saves vs. the death attack, poison, and massive damage." The look on his face was worth it. :)
The party ended up fleeing the encounter (the assassin had friends) and ended up using a charge from a wish item to recover and raise their wizard friend. It didn't help them that they were absolutely not prepared for combat, as they were having an audience with the queen at the time of the ambush.
In another game the party decided they wanted to hunt down an NPC angel hunter because of his obvious evilness. So they found his volcano lair, and completely missed all the clues that he didn't live there alone. So they were fighting him, and no one noticed the invisible red dragon with max Move Silently ranks sneaking up behind the party until it full attacked the sorcerer and reduced him to ground round. They managed to drop the bad guy but had to use teleport to flee the dragon.
If your barb is only 100 HP, he's not up to fighting frost giants, period.
Heck, I'm not sure he's strong enough to go bothering hill giants.
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I've been in a game with a character at over -200 hp and still fighting. I had to spam a few heals after combat to bring him to full before deathless wore off. (Remained conscious from a mythic ability).
I guess overkill was being decapitated, delt 200 damage, and falling into the abyss. Still kept that one from dying. Death is flexible
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In one PFS game, my halfling fighter charged down a hallway out into an open courtyard. The moment he came out into the open he got blindsided, leaving nothing behind but a pair of boots and a bloodstain.
A giant had thrown a foo dog statue thrice his size at him, and crit, killing my brave warrior instantly despite being at full health.
The other PCs were so stunned, no one wanted to leave the tunnel.
Some years back I had a gnome who failed a fear save and then kept making saves to stay on his feet and running away over ice and snow until he fell off a cliff and got beaten to death by an undead tree.
For the most part I try not to die a lot since I get really into the RP for my characters, make custom minis, etc. Some might call me a power-gaming primadonna, but I tend to focus on survival. I have been thinking about adopting a more "face first off the cliff" style of play for some future campaign, perhaps even making a Vigilante who will be replaced by a new Vigilante with the same secret identity if he happens to die. They'd be very diverse PCs who all share the secret identity of "El Flamingo!"
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In ascending order of overkill:
My second PFS death. The GM tended to roll every d20 in the full attack at the same time. After noticing the archer had no light backup weapon, my Brutal Pugilist barbarian managed to close with her and grapple. I needed a 6 or higher on the d20, and, of course, rolled a 5.
As it turned out, the first arrow dropped him, but because the GM rolled all the dice at the same time, apparently the archer kept firing arrows into his corpse. At least he got to soak the entire full attack, letting his allies finish off the archer and recover him for raising.
My first PFS death. The GM apologetically announced, "Instant Death For Someone" and rolled a d6, which landed on me. My wizard was instantly killed from full HP by a sneak attack crit through the heart from behind...
...and was then electrocuted by that same attack. It'd be easy to guess which PFS scenario that was, but since I had a free Raise Dead boon from an earlier convention, it was for the best.
Finally, my first non-PFS death. After saying the exactly wrong thing to a certain overlord, she charged my aberrant sorcerer with a quad-critting weapon. I believe at least Power Attack was involved.
She crit, and both his Blur spell and his aberrant crit-negating ability failed to protect him. He went from full HP to so far below CON that an admittedly low Breath of Life wasn't enough to save him. Also probably for the best, considering I replaced him with a wizard who was horrified that everyone had let a cultist of Azathoth do all the talking thusfar.
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Oh my where to begin (these are all the same character at different instances useing 1st edition critical hit charts)
I was split in half down the middle by a lance (I don't even know how that worked).
I had 100+ damage dealt to me in one strick at 6th level by a balors whip that crit for x3 damage rolling max.
I was shrunk down to a place I couldn't normally fit then half way into this cave an evil mage dispelled the shrink crushing me into a sausage.
I was turned inside out and stabbed in the now outside my body heart. That wasn't cool.
Oh turned to stone then disintegrated.
That is all that occur to me at the moment.
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Here's a good story: we were in the last book of iron gods, the second-to-last encounter which has a really, REALLY big thing that tears people into really, REALLY small pieces. So we enter the room and see that big thing, and what appears to be the final boss, standing next to it. My character, a bloodrager, does the thing he is best at and charges the big thing. He hits it for upwards of fifty damage. It then proceeds to full attack him, killing him instantly despite temporary hit points from rage, and bears endurance. Pieces of his corpse fly everywhere. Then the techslinger pulls out their laser gun, and blasts it into ash. In one round. Had I not charged, the big thing would not have killed me.
Ahh, memories. My first EVER character death. So there I was. Ten years old. Just found a group to play pathfinder with after about two years of self-taught 4e play. (Yes, I played 4e for two years with only myself and my brother). I had a character! Seventh-level ifrit fighter. He wielded a scimitar and no shield. One night, while me and the rest of the party were sleeping, we heard a stomping noise coming from down the trail. I got out of my tent just in time to see a rock (not roc) fly over my head, thrown by a greater cyclops. The rest of my party began running away, but it threw a single rock at the cleric, and he dropped to the ground unconscious. I realized that someone needed to distract it if there was to be any hope of escape. So, naturally, I charged. (No similarities here, nope). It somehow rolled a nat 1 on its attack against me that round, and I lived for six more seconds. This was enough time for the wizard to pick up the cleric and haul ass out of there. Then, the cyclops critically hit me with an awesome blow. I had 87 hp. The hit did 149 damage. My pasted corpse flew 40 feet and landed in front of the wizard, who didn't care and just kept on running. They both escaped.
Preface: 3.5 game, using an imported version of the 2nd Edition Combat and Tactics Crit tables.
Wizard got caught in a Glacial Wind spell, nat 1'd his save (prompting the crit) and got:
A Killed outright by damage.
B Killed by crit effect of frozen head and chest.
C Killed by knockback from wind tossing him into a lava chasm.
We've had a couple other "double-deaths", but nothing has equalled that triple. Yet.
In our final session of one campaign, we finally fought the demi-god dragon of doom. Eventually, he takea notice of my sorcerer and fires his void breath attack against me. I roll a nat 1. The character is erased from existence. No more body, no more soul, nothing is left of him. All the other characters got their planned retirement, which was ironic because his was the only one with questionnable compatibility with the agenda of the goddess that had blessed them. I sometimes joke that she knew what was coming all along.
In the last fight of one of my most epic campaigns I had a player who wanted his character to perform an heroic sacrifice. Both he and I were consequent and didn't try to force things.
Everybody suffered a lot on that fight. Many PCs and NPCs were completely useless. It was probably one of the toughest fights I ever GMed. The boss focused on trying to kill this character (it was logic as he held a weapon designed specifically to kill him) but... a combination of the appropriate dice rolls, healing spells from other characters and the fact that he was a tankish character he couldn't be killed!
The fun fact is that thanks to the boss focusing on killing him everybody else (but the dragon mount of this character) survived. The other chatacters wouldn't have survived but e did. He was a hero who survived his own sacrifice XD
I've always felt a bit guilty of not being able to kill a character that I was allowed to kill with one of the most powerful enemies that I've ever GMed. And then I've killed other PCs against much less threatening ememies.
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No one dies on my watch!