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So, what is the dumbest PC (or NPC) death you've witnessed?
As in, the character did something extremely stupid and then died.
We had a character antagonize an evil intelligent construct, get blasted and then attempt fisticuffs with a dragon. He would have survived dragon fisticuffs if he hadn't gotten hurt in such a dumb manner. The healer said he wasn't going to waste resources on stupid.
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"I throw the potion of dragon control into the dragon's mouth. What happens now?"
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In one of my friends campaigns, another one of the PCs attacked the Captain of the Guard, who was surrounded by guardsmen, while the rest of the party was sleeping. This happened because he tried to rob a merchant selling trail rations because they were to expensive (he had 608 go). Then, he got arrested, and waited until he was in the jail (but not in a cell) to attack them. We were level 2, that rogue never made it to level 3
The barbarian tossing the halfling rogue up onto the top of the cliff to scout. He is immediately set upon by a horde of gremlins.
Climbing through a window to attack the magus with her sword because she kept missing with her crossbow. Granted, this was her very first game ever.
I had a magus PC get beat up by a fighter boss and withdrew with single digit hp left. The cleric got knocked out, but the rest of party killed the bosses guards and injured him to "barely standing". The magus charged back into the fight, trying to finish off the boss, and missed. The next two attacks also missed and then it was the bosses turn. He attacked the magus and rolled two natural 20s.....
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I had a friend who had his character walk out into the open, announcing he was the god of his enemies. Turned out his "enemies" were red mantis assassins. The leader of the enemies didn't believe him for a second and cast Hold Person on him.(this was in their camp) The leader then had a couple of his subordinates coup de grace him. We couldn't come to his aid in time, so he died.
Was kinda funny.
I had a monk who, upon fighting some flying enemies that landed some good hits and then took off, ran over to the barbarian and readied a grapple check. Barbarian threw her up at the enemy group like a javelin, she grabbed one and killed it the next round, and then died from falling damage + huge enemy landing on top of her damage. Stupid, but amazing, but stupid.
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So, what is the dumbest PC (or NPC) death you've witnessed?
Player forgot his character healed with negative energy and threw a Cure Serious Wounds on himself.
Second time his character died in 15 minutes. The first death was the reason he healed with negative energy.
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1. "I go to negotiate with the horde of orcs." DM warns him twice "They are NOT up for parley". This is the final session and we're supposed to go after the BBEG, the armies were to be in the background. PC ignores DM, wears his full paladin outfit and marches straight into the bad guys army.
2. (Same player, modern Vampire setting some backwater village where the farmers are out with guns to "kill the demons", I was DM)
PC: I try to stop the mob.
Me: They shoot at you, hit you in the shoulder. Not trying to kill you, they think you're human, just move aside.
PC: I heal.
Me: They are out to "kill the demons" are you sure you want to heal in front of them?
PC: Yes.
Me: They'll shoot
PC: Let them!
Me: Its 50 people with guns!
PC: I got this!
You couldn't save the guy :(
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The party was scouting a grove of Darkwood trees and encountered the very territorial Stegasaurus that laired there. Knowledge checks determined the beast had the same Speed as the PCs. They came up with a plan to have one PC hit the beastie with a crossbow bolt, then run away, luring it to the beach, so the party could sneak back and get enough Darkwood for the purposes of their quest. The person leading it there would run out into the surf and break away at that point (requiring having a bit of a lead).
So "Joe" had his character be the bait. He ran out into the open, pinged it with a crossbow bolt, and then ran. The dinosaur followed. So far so good. But every round, Joe fired a single crossbow bolt back at the beast, even though it was already following. The other players looked at each other - "What is he doing?" - but he ignored them. He was close to the beach, the dinosaur following not-at-all far behind, and Joe calculated that he could fire one last crossbow bolt and still have a 10-foot lead, so he did that. Dinosaur's turn, it got within 10 feet.
Joe forgot that Large and Huge creatures have Reach. Steggie gored Joe, knocking him below -10hp. Steggie then walked forward on top of the body, stomped around for a moment, and scraped its feet over the area, then turned and headed back for its grove.
Joe couldn't explain afterwards how he thought his PC would have gotten away once he reached the beach.
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I was playing an epic 3.5 game, with the "3 natural 20s is an automatic kill" house rule in effect.
The DM rolled 3 natural 20's and our healer wasted an Alternative Fortune on trying to keep me alive.
Then the 4th Nat 20 dropped. That d20 has been retired and to this day sits on display in the room.
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Waaay back in 1e AD&D, when my brother and I had not long started playing the game, his first ever character tried to climb down a cliff whilst wearing plate mail. He went splat.
Also my brother, his second ever character (iirc) charged a black pudding when he only had 2hp left. Death occurred at 0hp back then, and a black pudding did 3-24 damage. He got eaten.
In a Vampire: The Masquerade game, a player decided to try to blood bond one of the other PCs who was lying torpid in a car boot. The donated blood woke the other PC from torpor, who immediately entered a hunger frenzy. The donor PC had not taken any precautions against this, and fell to the frenzy of the Malkavian who, unable to control the bloodlust, went all the way to diablerie on the would-be regnant.
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PFS play, playing 'up' in a challenging scenario.
...character has the best perception and stealth of the party, manages to sneak their way *right into the cluster of undead waiting for someone to sneak into them*.
...he lasted most of a round, at least?
...and thank goodness someone in the party had resources to overcome that.
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3rd Edition. This isn't mine.
GM: you finally reach the end of the dungeon, a huge hole stands in front of you with no visible end.
Barbarian: I do the angels jump!!!
20d6 of falling damage and a beholder before the barbarian was no more.
2nd Edition, this time it happened to me. Ended the big boss battle and my wizard had a in-game discussion with another character, after the argument I decided to teleport out of there alone to the town. That very same day the local tavern was renamed "The wizard's mishap", where you can still see the damaged wall
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GM: "Making your Perception check, you can tell that two guys are standing on either side of the door inside the dim room, waiting for somebody to enter."
PC: (raging barbarian) "I go in and attack!"
<Low-dex/all-strength barbarian fails reflex save on patch of oil. His typically junk-anyway AC is now -2 from raging, -2 from flanking, and -4 from prone. He eats two AoO sneak-attacks, then the bad guys get their turn and dish out four more TWF sneak-attacks for a grand total of 18d6+18. ...I can't remember if he died right there, or was coup de graced next round, but suffice to say he bought the farm.>
Player of dead barbarian (later, incredulous): "What kind of OP encounter was that?"
GM: <eyebrow lift> "Two 3rd-level rogues...."
Icing on the cake: They immediately surrendered to the rest of the party and were silver-tongued devils rolling Diplomacy to weasel out of getting killed.
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In a skull & shackles campaign we encountered a giant squid or octopus or something, it attacked our ship, we killed it easily (this was like mid-game or whatever, like book 3 or something), and we had one player decide he wanted to dive in and look for some eggs because he wanted to raise one to be a pet (he kept trying to finagle animal companions without actually doing anything mechanically that would give them to him. He did this in several campaigns with several characters, it was getting annoying at this point). He managed to find the nest and was promptly set upon by the original cephalopod's mate, who was angry because not only was he attacking it's nest (I don't recall if this was the male or female, or if we even knew at that point), but he was also covered in the remains of it's mate having just participated in the battle that killed it. He went down alone, because the rest of us were like "no, that's dumb, we won't help," was a human with no swim speed, no means of breathing underwater, and no magic (the guy kept wanting to multiclass even though he really didn't know how to properly combine classes the smart way, so he was something like vanilla fighter 4, vanilla rogue 3, feat combos that made no sense, and a poor choice of rogue talent). Obviously he died, and none of our characters even though to question if we should wait for him to surface, because the second he dove off the side of the ship we knew "welp, we're never seeing that moron again!"
I had a similarly annoying cleric in the same campaign. And that was his third and least annoying character. He refused to take any ranks of swim or memorize any water survival spells. The captain, angered that he refused to take any swimming lessons (retrain a rank or two into swim) had him thrown overboard. Only when he started drowning (the dope was wearing a breast plate) did the party mage cast air bubble on him.
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I had a player once... oh my stars...
So there was this evil book. Really evil. Like, trying to read it prompted a Will save or level drain. And this was back in the 3.0 days, when sufficient level drain was really, really bad. And the player was 3rd level.
"I try to decipher the book."
"Your initial Spellcraft roll suggests it is powerful beyond your ken. Dangerously so."
"I try to decipher the book anyway."
"Will save."
"2."
"Instead of reading the book, inky darkness pours from your eyes, nose, and mouth, filling the pages briefly with eldritch runes that sink into the vellum and vanish. You lose a level."
"I try to decipher the book again."
"Will save."
"15."
"Once more, you feel as though your very soul was being ripped out from the base of your spine to the top of your skull and dragged across razors made of despair to feed the dark tome's hunger. Lose a level."
"I try--"
"I try to decipher the book again."
"You know what I'm going to ask for."
"12."
"Alright, the rest of you see him hollow out, as though draining away into some endless cesspool at right angles to all holy creation. He crumbles, like so many brittle burnt pages, and is no more."
"WHAT?! HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN?"
The player seriously was upset. He hadn't seen it coming. It was SO telegraphed that there are aliens light years away watching slight wobbles in the Sun's movement indicating our planet who are also saying "Oh dang, that guy's going to try a third save... can you believe it?!"
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I had a player once... oh my stars...
So there was this evil book. Really evil. Like, trying to read it prompted a Will save or level drain. And this was back in the 3.0 days, when sufficient level drain was really, really bad. And the player was 3rd level.
"I try to decipher the book."
"Your initial Spellcraft roll suggests it is powerful beyond your ken. Dangerously so."
"I try to decipher the book anyway."
"Will save."
"2."
"Instead of reading the book, inky darkness pours from your eyes, nose, and mouth, filling the pages briefly with eldritch runes that sink into the vellum and vanish. You lose a level."
"I try to decipher the book again."
"Will save."
"15."
"Once more, you feel as though your very soul was being ripped out from the base of your spine to the top of your skull and dragged across razors made of despair to feed the dark tome's hunger. Lose a level."
"I try--"
"I try to decipher the book again."
"You know what I'm going to ask for."
"12."
"Alright, the rest of you see him hollow out, as though draining away into some endless cesspool at right angles to all holy creation. He crumbles, like so many brittle burnt pages, and is no more."
"WHAT?! HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN?"The player seriously was upset. He hadn't seen it coming. It was SO telegraphed that there are aliens light years away watching slight wobbles in the Sun's movement indicating our planet who are also saying "Oh dang, that guy's going to try a third save... can you believe it?!"
....
....
....
What.
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Yeah. And that's the short version of the story. It cuts out the context of how they found the book (which made it clear they shouldn't mess with it yet) and their tribe elder telling them not to mess with it and the repeated chorus of the rest of the players telling him not to mess with it...
That same campaign featured another player who decided his ninja should jump into a spiked pit because he had a good Jump skill and should be able to avoid the spikes. Which was true, but he rolled a 1. And didn't have a lot of hit points left. Did I mention the jumping into the pit saved no movement across the map nor did it serve any purpose, as there was nothing at the bottom of said spiked pit? Except, of course, spikes. So many spikes.
He also got mad at dying and didn't think it should have happened.
I'd say I was a terrible GM, but the rest of the players somehow managed to struggle through without impaling themselves on easily avoidable spikes or triple-draining themselves by reading an obviously cursed book. So it probably wasn't all me.
Probably the Book of Vile Darkness...most people would be smart enough not to try reading such a book after the first time if they aren't evil.
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In an subterranean cave, level 5 or so
GM: The serpentfolk guard jumps into the water to cross to the other side. The water lights up *rolls a bunch of d8s in front of the players* (nature roll - electric eels) and he is fried on the spot.
A couple rounds later, when they were fighting in the proximity of this lake:
Inquisitor: I jump into the lake
GM: As you get close to jumping you see that the commotion has attracted even more eels.
Inquisitor: Yes I will swim to the other side.
GM: *picks up a bunch of d8s visibly* it's quite a long swim over, probably 2 rounds.
Inquistor: I will heal myself in between.
GM: *rolls in the open* The Inquisitor sinks to the bottom of the lake in a display of light.
Party after encounter: We fish him out with a long pole and some line/hooks. We want that loot back.
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Probably the Book of Vile Darkness...most people would be smart enough not to try reading such a book after the first time if they aren't evil.
It wasn't. It was a custom item that was one of the MacGuffins of the campaign. It would eventually have revealed some of its power, giving them a choice of path to take, but in that moment its main purpose was to let them know they were involved with some terrible dark stuff.
And in theory he could have made the Will save at that level (nat 20 auto-success). To this day, I can't fathom what he thought he was going to gain from successfully reading the book tho.
Three of our four party members had been one-shot killed by critical hits from an axe-wielding horror. The fourth one, our dwarf wizard (earth school), hadn't entered the room yet. The logical thing to do at this juncture would be to run like hell and see what he could do about, e.g., hiring new adventurers to recover our bodies/finish what we started.
So, naturally, the wizard decides this is the time to try out his custom researched miniature-tremor spell to try and cave in the door . . . in the process waking the entire dungeon with the equivalent of shouting, "Hey guys, dinner's here!"
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GM: *rolls in the open* The Inquisitor sinks to the bottom of the lake in a display of light.
I gauss he regretted that action.
I'll show myself out.
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Would an almost death count? In my current game, we had a few sessions where we were sailing on a ship. We got attacked by a megalodon. One of the characters is a skinwalker bear. After a few rounds of us shooting arrows at it, he picks up the cannon (which we hadn't been using since the megalodon was too close to the ship to aim at with) and fires. The GM has him make a Ref save. He fails and both he and the cannon plunge into the water. The now rather angry and very very big creature proceeds to swallow him whole. Luckily for him, the cannon blast had done enough damage for us to kill it just a few rounds later before he could suffocate and we pulled him out.
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About a decade ago, I was running a 3.5 Epic Level game. At this point in time the party was... level 32, I believe. The player in question was playing a class from the Book of Nine Swords, I believe the Sage, or something similar to that. Anyway!
He was the bodyguard of his wife's character, who was a level 32 aristocrat (don't look at me, I recommended against it). He asked and paid for a pair of rings of shield other for him to absorb half of her damage, since he was playing the bodyguard. All of it made sense.
Never mind that she had twice as many hit points as him, because despite starting with over 2 million gold in gear, he didn't buy any Con boosting items or manuals of health. He 'wanted to have a weakness.' His words, not mine. This had resulted in the death of a previous wizard to a young adult red dragon's fire breath combined with a 10d6 lightning bolt, so I'd have thought he'd have learned better.
Well, they tracked down a temple to the evil goddess they were opposing in the Shadow Plane. Within, the group saw 2 mariliths, 6 balors, and a deathdrinker (with 9 levels of cleric). The last has a lovely ability to heal 1d8 hp per hit die of creatures with more than 10 HD when it kills them. This is an important aspect of the fight. It didn't help that they were down their usual melee specialist.
Things were going well until someone killed one of the balors and it detonated, dealing 100 untyped damage to everything in the room, unless they made their Reflex saves. He had evasion, and evaded. His wife was an aristocrat, and did not, so he took 50 damage. The Deathdrinker was not amused, until it realized there were 5 balors left.
It executed the next balor itself, healing 20d8 and making its save, while everyone else had a bad day. Another 50 damage to our daring bodyguard, and he began to panic as he saw how badly damaged the other balors were, and his action was spent taking off his ring before the deathdrinker killed the next balor and set off a chain reaction that killed every balor and left the party half-dead. He failed one save, and was left at about ~20-50 hp, I don't remember how much.
The deathdrinker was fairly heavily injured, but only one character could hurt it, and they were plinking at one another round by round. Rather than retreat and heal himself, the bodyguard uses 'Wolf Climbs the Mountain' on the deathdrinker to give himself a 20% miss chance as he attempts to injure/annoy it by climbing all over the monster. He succeeded on the latter.
The party screamed in frustration as it killed him with a single blow that bypassed the miss chance, and healed the deathdrinker 32d8 hit points.
Thus arrived the player's ~10th character resurrection of the campaign.
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A huge stone guardian at the entrance to a valley of tombs: "What is your purpose in coming here?"
Low-level PC: "To loot, pillage, and if at all possible r-"
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Wizard decides the best way to evade an angry dragon is to jump off a cliff and cast levitate. Leaving them floating in open space, slowly descending at 10' per round.
With a hungry, flying dragon.
They never recovered the body.
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Wizard decides the best way to evade an angry dragon is to jump off a cliff and cast levitate. Leaving them floating in open space, slowly descending at 10' per round.
With a hungry, flying dragon.
They never recovered the body.
sound like someone in a game I play.
Always using his spells in really "creative" ways.| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
You're inside the cave, there's a funny tingling salt scent in the air. The chamber opens up to a perfectly clear pool full of bleached white rocks.
Player 1: Uh, I throw the end of my rope in the pool.
GM: It bubbles and vanishes before your eyes.
Player 1: Oh that seems bad... is there any exits?
GM: There's no other exits in the room.
Player 2: No duh there's no exits, I jump into the pool.
Player 1: What??
GM: Uh, are you sure you want to do that?
Player 2: Of course.
GM: Okay... you take... 94 acid damage.
Player 2: WHAT!?
Player 1: Why did you just kill yourself like that.
Player 2: You said it was magical teleporting water! The rope VANISHED!!
GM: ...
Player 1: ...
AD&D 1e, 1st lvl character meets a giant spider, tries to find it hand to hand, gets bitten because one blow was not enough to kill it... and fails the save or die ST
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Tickling the wrong kobold in his sleep...
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first time gamer play an Elf wizard (because Tolkin...)
first encounter , they are out in the woods and 5 wolves approach them.
player(Elf) : "i pet the wolf closer to me"
me : " he takes a bite of your hand..."
didn't actually killed him, but with 1d4 hp (2nd ed) he was damn near close.
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Tickling the wrong kobold in his sleep...
This of course begs the question... is there a right kobold to tickle in his sleep?
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This isn't exactly a dumb way to die, but merely unfortunate. In the first full on 1e campaign I played in back in the day the party was teleported out of danger by the party wizard. Teleported into the middle of a stampeding herd of Irish elk (Megalocerous, an extinct deer species that grew to great size with truly impressive antlers). The druid was trampled to death before anyone could roll initiative.
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You gotta figure, as a druid "trampled by elk" has to be so common a way to die as to be cliche. Like that guy who went to live with the bears in Alaska and then was killed by bears. Buy the ticket, take the ride, amiright?
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You gotta figure, as a druid "trampled by elk" has to be so common a way to die as to be cliche. Like that guy who went to live with the bears in Alaska and then was killed by bears. Buy the ticket, take the ride, amiright?
We also found it supremely ironic.
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You gotta figure, as a druid "trampled by elk" has to be so common a way to die as to be cliche. Like that guy who went to live with the bears in Alaska and then was killed by bears. Buy the ticket, take the ride, amiright?We also found it supremely ironic.
♫Like ten thousand spoons
when all you need is a knife,like saying "Hello elk, I'm a druid"
and then losing your life.♫
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You gotta figure, as a druid "trampled by elk" has to be so common a way to die as to be cliche. Like that guy who went to live with the bears in Alaska and then was killed by bears. Buy the ticket, take the ride, amiright?We also found it supremely ironic.♫Like ten thousand spoons
when all you need is a knife,
like saying "Hello elk, I'm a druid"
and then losing your life.♫
Famous last words: "Oh crap, I should have taken Fast Empathy..."
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We had a whole plan to steal some items out of a strongbox at a dock owned by an organized crime outfit during a PFS campaign. Our plan was to turn our sneaky gunslinger invisible and have him sneak into the hideout, pick the lock and steal whatever it was we were after and set fire to the warehouse while the rest of our party hung out in the bar overlooking the dock. Things were going great until our Cleric decided that she was "Going to take a nice walk on the dock, as it is a beautiful night." The table looked at her like, "What? We just spent 40 minutes coming up with this plan." She would not be deterred. So she decided to go for a stroll in the mafia infested dock after midnight. The mafia captain started questioning her and didn't like her protestations that she was just an innocent lady walking in the dangerous slums by herself wearing full plate armor at midnight whistling to herself. The goons started putting a beating on her and she thought that it would be a great idea to jump in the water to get away from them. Her swim check was somewhere around -4. The captain immediately jumped in after her and spent the next minute or two drowning her. This actually worked out pretty well for us, as our gunslinger bungled a few rolls. The guards were so busy trying to kill our Cleric that they didn't notice him shoot the lock off the chest. They didn't even notice the fire for awhile, as they were so focused on watching their captain drown this girl.
After the game session ended, one of the players told her, "Now, normally when someone dies, the rest of the players pitch in some gold to help raise their fallen comrade, but in this case, and I am not speaking for everybody here, but I am not giving you a damn red copper piece." Actually, it turned out that he WAS speaking for all of us.
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I’ve had an honorable mention. Party has been fighting this flying snake woman at the top of a 180ft tall tower. Very tough fight, gunslinger is the only one that can regularly hit her. Eventually she finally starts to retreat but stops 15ft out from the edge of the tower. Gunslinger doesn’t want her to get away so he tries leaping off the edge and attempts to grapple her, a large creature with a good strength and dexterity as she’s flying. While he easily makes the jump, she gets an AoO (hitting him and draining wisdom) and then he fails the grapple so he plummets. I pull out my tower of d6s and roll damage. The dice gods had a sense of humor however, he survived the fall 2 hit points from death and then made his stabilization roll. After the incident he dedicated himself to Cayden Cailean.
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I’ve had an honorable mention. Party has been fighting this flying snake woman at the top of a 180ft tall tower. Very tough fight, gunslinger is the only one that can regularly hit her. Eventually she finally starts to retreat but stops 15ft out from the edge of the tower. Gunslinger doesn’t want her to get away so he tries leaping off the edge and attempts to grapple her, a large creature with a good strength and dexterity as she’s flying. While he easily makes the jump, she gets an AoO (hitting him and draining wisdom) and then he fails the grapple so he plummets. I pull out my tower of d6s and roll damage. The dice gods had a sense of humor however, he survived the fall 2 hit points from death and then made his stabilization roll. After the incident he dedicated himself to Cayden Cailean.
For a gunslinger? That's not dumb, that's grit fishing. : D