PDA

View Full Version : Most Memorable Player Death



Atanuero
2010-05-07, 08:47 AM
It's been a while since I've seen one of these... anyone have some cool stories? Any system works :smallbiggrin:

nedz
2010-05-07, 09:25 AM
I take it you mean PC death, killing your players is a tad extream.

glennfrogknight
2010-05-07, 09:45 AM
The setting I'm running is affectionately named "GodZarus: Destroy all Monsters." It's a custom setting run in e6 where through some means unknown to all but Zarus, he managed to make himself be the only deity left. Zarus, for those who don't know, is a Lawful Evil deity who basically believes in human supremacy. And seeing that he's the only deity around, humans are the only ones with access to any divine magic.

Cut to the party, a band of nonhumans formed up of mostly Minotaurs (modeled mostly after the Krynn minotaurs stats) with a few others thrown in, trying to get by in a world where even the heavens look down upon them with scorn.

There's been a lot of party deaths. The humans have many druids and rangers hunting in the wilds, seeking out all non-humans to exterminate them. The dwarves, gnomes, and halflings are all gone. Elves are short in numbers, and the other races are scattered about. The minotaurs have just been discovered, having inhabited a far-off island. The last group of nonhumans with any sort of structure to their society, they're the last hope for all life that isn't human everywhere.

My favorite deaths were when some of the team got captured due to foolishly trying to attack a group of humans out on a shore. They were mercilessly tortured, and a few died from it. The rest managed to escape and have a much stronger hatred for humans, which is what I was going for.

The Big Dice
2010-05-07, 10:03 AM
Silly character deaths, eh?

In a Cyberpunk game, the characters captured an agent from a corporation they had been fighting agianst. One of the characters says, "It's all right lads, I've got loads of armour!" Then walks over to start interrogating. Unfortunately, the corp agent had a device called a slice 'n' dice, basically a monowire whip implanted in the thumb.

Whoosh goes the slice 'n' dice, off comes the PC head.

In an L5R game, there's a tournament called the Topaz Tournament, the introductory adventure in the 1st edition rule book. The final event of the tournament is to go collect some eggs from a specific animal. (A fish that lays eggs in trees and can kill starting characters, but that's another story.) Anyway, one of the NPC competitors has made a deal with some bandits to ensure that he wins the event. PCs collect the egg they need and bandit archer step out from behind trees as they head back.

"Give us the egg and nobody gets hurt!" calls the leader.

"**** off!" Says one of the characters.

Twang go the bows. Thud goes the body.

In a D&D game, we were going through a puzzle dungeon. The clue said something about taking a leap of faith, and the way was blocked by a pit that was too wide to jump across, filled with acid. We were all fairly low level at the time, so flight wasn't an option.

One of the characters ties a rope around his waist and leaps. Unfortunately, the rope showed a lack of faith in what he was doing, so he falls into the acid. Several failed rolls to get him out later, the character dissloved, adding the stuff he was carrying to the acid pool.

Optimystik
2010-05-07, 10:28 AM
I take it you mean PC death, killing your players is a tad extream.

Thread over

gallagher
2010-05-07, 10:43 AM
umm, once i actually had to kill one of my teammates, if this counts as a double-whammy of sorts.

he had put on a helmet and, as a sorc, lost the willsave, and became the mindslave of a mind flayer and started to attack us.

now this was a gestalt game, and i shamelessly gestalted a monk with a paladin of slaughter, which was quite fun actually. i used my glaive to trip him as part of an attack of opportunity, then curb-stomped him (had teh decisive strike ability, a monks belt, improved natural attack... you get the picture)

anyway, i crit'd him into oblivion, and thanks to his low hit die and meager constitution, got him on the massive damage rule.

so yeah, a paladin/monk mix defeated the sorceror/CW samurai mix

Aharon
2010-05-07, 10:57 AM
My PC was killed in a fight he couldn't possibly win, but the villains had been too late. There had been some kind of prophecy that he would be the cause of the downfall of the evil forces, so they eliminated him - but not before he could father the child that was actually instrumental in that victory :smallcool:

The fight itself was pretty awesome, because I actually managed to kill some of the bad guys, and I didn't know the DM intended the outcome of the fight to be fixed - he was good at hiding it.

unre9istered
2010-05-07, 10:58 AM
In a game I was in one of the characters built and launched himself out of a catapult. He'd have survived if not for rolling a 2 on the fort save verses massive damage. A 3 would have been a success.

DabblerWizard
2010-05-07, 11:06 AM
I take it you mean PC death, killing your players is a tad extream.

I'm glad I was saved the trouble of stating the obvious, sans spelling mistakes.

At least the title made me chuckle.

Ruinix
2010-05-07, 11:33 AM
the most memorable one.

a fighter of a friend on MERP Rolemaster. we was 3 that night, and was trying to follow the steps of the local baron who was preatty insane. anyway, my friend follow him to the shore of a tiny but profound river, and he manage to slip in to a boat wich was filled with some stuffs.

sudenly the boat was pushed down river unmanned. so he attemp to jump WITH A RING MAIL on.

he fail xd, and try to swim up and fail and fail XD
my char was a mage on that game, so my master allow me a "luck" and "elven sense" roll, i succed. and use all my powers point to reach him and teleport him to the shore and i had to swim to the shore.

the other char was some sort of paladin, he was doing his thing trying to save our mate and for the last roll of healing abillity the master said the magical words ...

"if u not critical fail (01-03 on a D100) u save his life"

then the paladin put the dice on the dying elf, he throw the dice it get a 02 XDDDDD

was epic EPIC fail.

i made an ice coffin (saint seya stile :smallcool:) and send him to inmortal lands through the river XDDDD.

Obi-Juan
2010-05-07, 11:46 AM
We were fighting Tiamat, when our Half-Dragon Beguiler Sorcerer/Dragon Disciple of the Adamantine Dragon decided that knocking the cave pillar would kill Tiamat's Avatar and give us a buttload of XP. Unfortunately, Tiamat, on her turn cast a Shield Self spell and when he went with his plan, he killed all of us

Shnezz
2010-05-07, 11:52 AM
Nagol Raveneye, a human rogue who wished to become a lich mage via Pazuzu, was killed when confronted by Bahamut, rather than give up his mage and lich powers, and be 'cleansed of evil'.

Idos Shiftswap (Real creative for a doppleganger, eh?) was killed by a teammate. Sort of. He got mounter combat, and promptly jumped on another PC's tamed dire wolf. Hit his head on the ceiling when it bucked him off (inside a cave). Was eaten.

Akal Saris
2010-05-07, 11:56 AM
Silly character deaths, eh?

In a Cyberpunk game, the characters captured an agent from a corporation they had been fighting agianst. One of the characters says, "It's all right lads, I've got loads of armour!" Then walks over to start interrogating. Unfortunately, the corp agent had a device called a slice 'n' dice, basically a monowire whip implanted in the thumb.

Whoosh goes the slice 'n' dice, off comes the PC head.


My character died in what was possibly the least memorable character death in Cyberpunk. As in, the DM didn't even realize that I was dead until an hour later.

The character was a photo-journalist, and using the char generation rolls I had about 8 horrible things happen in my life with no good breaks. You know - you were born to a single mother! Your mother abandoned you! You were picked up by an orphanage! The orphanage sold you to a corporation! You made a friend, a local police officer! You were framed for his murder! Etc.

So, I have this tough luck character with no money, and pretty terrible stats. So I stayed in the get-away car while the amazingly powerful other 2 players in their gundam suits go in to get the briefcase MacGuffin. Partway through an hour-long combat which I'm not part of and eventually go home for dinner, a rocket flies out and hits the get-away car. I come back and ask what happened, they say "Blah blah blah, not much, oh yeah, the car got blown up." One of my friends goes "OH! Hey, his character was in that car, wasn't he?" Awkward silence all around.

Gensh
2010-05-07, 12:45 PM
In one of my dnd 3rd campaigns, the seventh-level party (wizard, monk, druid, bard, absent cleric, absent fighter) decided to pick a fight with the son of the god of war, a barbarian 22 with permanent (Ex) Spell Turning. He was entertaining the subjects of his city in the Colosseum at the time, so the wizard used Bands of Steel to trap him when a bunch of lions were released into the arena. They munched on him for a while, but eventually, he beat the strength check and started running toward the party. The wizard thought he could beat him by spamming fireball while they ran away (he was CE and wanted the collateral damage too), since he could ride the druid's tiger. First shot was a success. Second shot rebounded, killing everyone but the monk, whose player pulls out his phone and calls the cleric's player for a Cure Moderate Wounds.

BloodyAngel
2010-05-07, 01:33 PM
The one that most stands out to me was our party's warmage stepping into the path of three Howlers and being ripped to shreds in a desperate attempt to protect the party's rogue, who was very badly wounded. Everyone had warned her that she'd likely die doing it.... Including the DM, twice. She didn't care, she decided to be a hero. In the one round that it took the howlers to tear the poor warmage apart, another member of the party managed to heal the rogue and they went on to win that fight, but he never got over it. It helps that PC deaths are rare in our campaigns. Said rogue went on to live a long happy life after finishing that campaign, because of one heroic warmage. He named his daughter after her.

Oh and the rogue in question? That was me.

kestrel404
2010-05-07, 02:40 PM
My last PC in the current game had a rather interesting end. His schtick was that he would steal the special abilities of others, and re-interpret them for his own use - a Journeyman in Earthdawn, if that means anything to you. He was a jack-of-all-trades, melee monster. After the party gained a couple of levels, he was considdered to be the single strongest PC in the game - and he was a meleeist with a couple of odd tricks (magical disguises and super speed) in a party full of well-built Casters.

This all just goes to explain why, when he was captured by an evil mutant spider with an infectious bite, dragged back to that spider's lair, and bitten, I had to seriously contemplate his response. After about ten minutes of roleplaying with the GM, I decided that the PC would not be fighting tooth-and-nail against the infection. He would embrace and adapt, like he always did with strange new abilities.

That's why, when the other PCs arrived to rescue him, he had just finished eating the original spider-thing, and he was a partially-transformed, evil looking six-armed spider-man with carapace-like armor skin. My first words were, "Hey guys, I killed the monster."

Party's response? "No, you ARE the monster. Kill it with fire!" Mostly, that was due to one specific PC whose primary personality trait is 'if it looks like a monster, kill it'. I knew that would be his reaction, and chose to go with what the character would do, even though I knew it would get him killed.

onthetown
2010-05-07, 02:43 PM
The only one I find memorable is when one of the guys in our group was hijacking the campaign away from the DM. The DM, without even bothering to talk to the player, got the character to walk onto a trap, fall down into a pit of spikes, and got no reflex or anything to save him. Too low-level to bring him back to life and we couldn't "save his soul". Granted, none of us were impressed with the way the guy always wanted to be in the spotlight, but it would have been great if the DM had talked to him first.

Scoot
2010-05-07, 02:56 PM
After spending about a week mentaly torturing the BBEG's guards (We convinced them that the castle was haunted, and that there's "Something in the Ale"), we finaly lost our cover. It involved a librarian and a staircase, but I won't go into detail.

Cue about 100 guards piledriving me into oblivion, and both the Sorcerer and Swordsage scrambling for ideas.

Since I'm going to die anyways, I prompt them to start blasting away at me, the sorc was able to shoot off a few fireballs, and the swordsage used a maneuver that apparently made me "explode" a few times.

When I decided my character was reaching his limits, I shifted, grew tentacles VIA warshaper, and proceded to turn into a whirlwind of teeth and gore. I took out 14 guards.

The swordsage was splattered shortly before, and the sorc was ripped to pieces shortly after.

The paladin decided to watch and play his fiddle, he was later killed by the BBEG in a 1v3.

Our "Blaze of Glory" run. We all loved it. :smallbiggrin:

I was sent to Ysgard, the sorc was sent to the Clockwork Nirvana, and the Swordsage became a messenger of the God of Death (This involved a Coin flip).

Oh ya, I was a Longtooth Shifter Warblade, to clarify. Duel-wield Kukris.


Edit: To clarify, when the party blasted me, the guards grappling me were denied their ref saves. Many were cooked. I think above 30.

Dashaderic
2010-05-07, 04:30 PM
Oh boy, lets see how many I can remember.

Ulric, the mighty Barbarian, trying to save the mayor of a city who had just been released from the curse of an evil necklace, dying due to an unlucky AoP that crit. He had 10 hp left, but he had a nice con, so he wasn't dead yet...then the DM reminded me that the bonus Con from Rage disappears...durp.

Running a Starwars campaign, the two party members end up trying to sabotage the ship they are on. They accidentally blow up the engines while just reaching the upper atmosphere. 1200d6 worth of falling dmg.

Now the fun part, all the following where caused by the same player, using different characters.

With a Warmage, set fire to an small jungle Island, waking the local red dragon and getting his skin burn off.

Burned down a village with the party inside. Killed everyone.

Sets fire to ANOTHER tropical island, kills himself (Another warmage no less).

In a current sci-fi campaign I am running, two PC's where killed by a crashing star-fighter. Luckily for them it was a dream sequence for one of the other characters.

Lycan 01
2010-05-07, 09:00 PM
My first DnD game saw me and the rest of the party dying after the DM got tired of me knowing the rules better than him. Before you assume it was my fault, know this - we'd spent the last 10 minutes of the game waiting in line behind monsters from other games in order to register a complaint with the DM, and after kicking down the door, vaulting his desk, and trying to Cleave his face, we all got teleported to a room full of mushrooms. I lost my patience, threw lantern oil at an angel, then chucked my torch. The angel teleported, and I asked what happened when the oil and fire met mushrooms in a locked, air-tight room.

With a grin he told us that because of me, the villagers in the valley below witnessed a mushroom cloud rising from the top of the mountain. Five seconds later, a democratic vote of 3-to-1 saw me elected as the new DM.



There was also my Dwarf Sniper in a Warglory game, who did the whole "shield his team from the grenade blast with his body" bit. Only it wasn't on purpose. I just fumbled my attempt to throw the grenade back before it killed anyone. :smallfrown:


One of my players in a Fallout RPG got pinned to a wall by a piece of rebar wire through his chest, after another n00b decided 3 sticks of dynamite were more than enough to kill a Deathclaw I was fighting. The whole party was quite upset by this, since the guy didn't even bother to think about what he was doing, and I was one of the best players. So the DM cut me a break, so to speak, and had my brain put into a robot until they could clone me. Unfortunately, he got banned shortly thereafter, so I never got my new body... :smallsigh:

The Cat Goddess
2010-05-07, 10:34 PM
SciFi GURPS game... we sneak into the pirate base, get the info and blast our way out... as we're escaping in our ship, pirates are pursuing. The GM says "you can fire your lasers at enemy missles, or you can rely on piloting to dodge the missles and fire on the enemy ships."

Pilot player says "don't worry, I've got an 18 skill... I can't fail!" (famous last words, right?)

We fire on enemy ships, pilot rolls to dodge... 18 (3d6 system). It's okay though, not a critical failure because GURPS says piloting critical failures have to be verified... pilot rolls to verify... 18.

I quickly say "but my character has extraordinary luck!" "Can't use luck for others", I'm told. "But what about being lucky enough to survive?" I ask... GM shrugs and tells everyone to build new characters.

The new characters arrive for the briefing on their next mission... and in comes my previous character, with the "Captain Pike" treatment. :smalltongue: One beep yes, two beeps no... But hey, at least she got out with the information the new group needed!


More recently, when starting the Savage Tide adventure path... the very first adventure, very first encounter... TPK.
The spider-thing in the hold of the ship killed each character one at a time... because they each went down into the hold one at a time! :smalleek:

Dienekes
2010-05-07, 10:39 PM
One of my players thought that the best way to get out of the situation was to perform a rocket jump.

The results were interesting.

Atomicwarz
2010-05-07, 10:47 PM
One of my players thought that the best way to get out of the situation was to perform a rocket jump.

The results were interesting.

By interesting, do you mean gratuitous amounts of fire and gore?

Reynard
2010-05-07, 11:01 PM
Isn't that enough to keep most PCs interested?

Not exactly memorable as in epic, but more as in I can't forget:

I had a Dread Necro running about. He'd just got his mitts on both a Skeletal Sandworm+Exotic Saddle, and a Skeletal Bulette. I was looking forward to romping around with them, killing things.

Next session, a few players don't show up, so we run through a randomly created dungeon. We work our way through, and towards the end the cleric falls down a 100 foot pit trap. Don't fret, he survived, the DM rolled minimal damage, and he missed the spikes. So, I have my Necro do the DC6 jump check.

I rolled a one, and hit 3 out of four spikes.

Lord Vukodlak
2010-05-07, 11:27 PM
I had a gnome wizard charge at a white dragon carrying a sack full of explosive material planning a suicidal assault. It would have been an awesome player death but the dragon missed the AoO so I was able to drop the back and keep running. White dragon went boom.


Now onto an actually heroic death.
The party is fighting this big bad uber evil. At one point he grabs my wizard by the throat and begins to strangle me as he holds off the rest of the party with his free hand. He actually used a telekinesis spell to hurl them well over a hundred feat away into some nice flaming wreckage.
"I told him through most struggled words that I was going to kill him", now while he was strangling me casting any spell with a verbal component was not going to happen with his death grip on my throat.
He responded,
"What are you going to do little wizard, break your staff over my head"

I choked out a laugh and said.
"Now that you mention it, yes"
So I did break my staff over his head. It was a staff of power. In what the DM described as a blinding flash of light the two of us vanished from existence.

absolmorph
2010-05-07, 11:42 PM
umm, once i actually had to kill one of my teammates, if this counts as a double-whammy of sorts.

he had put on a helmet and, as a sorc, lost the willsave, and became the mindslave of a mind flayer and started to attack us.

now this was a gestalt game, and i shamelessly gestalted a monk with a paladin of slaughter, which was quite fun actually. i used my glaive to trip him as part of an attack of opportunity, then curb-stomped him (had teh decisive strike ability, a monks belt, improved natural attack... you get the picture)

anyway, i crit'd him into oblivion, and thanks to his low hit die and meager constitution, got him on the massive damage rule.

so yeah, a paladin/monk mix defeated the sorceror/CW samurai mix
Things that are wrong with this:
- CE Paladin variant gestalting with Monk. Monk requires Lawful.
- The Sorcerer//Samurai would have d12 HD.
- Can you trip on an AoO?

FMArthur
2010-05-07, 11:43 PM
Playing as a rogue.

"I think there might be traps ahead..."
"Relax, I got this."
*is killed instantly*

Wizzardman
2010-05-08, 12:18 AM
umm, once i actually had to kill one of my teammates, if this counts as a double-whammy of sorts.

he had put on a helmet and, as a sorc, lost the willsave, and became the mindslave of a mind flayer and started to attack us.

now this was a gestalt game, and i shamelessly gestalted a monk with a paladin of slaughter, which was quite fun actually. i used my glaive to trip him as part of an attack of opportunity, then curb-stomped him (had teh decisive strike ability, a monks belt, improved natural attack... you get the picture)

anyway, i crit'd him into oblivion, and thanks to his low hit die and meager constitution, got him on the massive damage rule.

so yeah, a paladin/monk mix defeated the sorceror/CW samurai mix

...You do realize that, as a monk, you can choose to have your attacks deal nonlethal damage, right? You could have knocked him out and found a way to save him.

Math_Mage
2010-05-08, 01:31 AM
Things that are wrong with this:
- CE Paladin variant gestalting with Monk. Monk requires Lawful.
- The Sorcerer//Samurai would have d12 HD.
- Can you trip on an AoO?

Heavily debated. Plenty of DMs allow it.

Thajocoth
2010-05-08, 01:58 AM
I take it you mean PC death, killing your players is a tad extream.

So me and my D&D playing friends were playing while stranded on this desert island with no source of food or escape. We had set up a makeshift table from the plane wreckage, and we were able to find our dice and character sheets, so why not?

(This event never happened)

-----

Here's a near-death:

DM has a group of Orcs riding wolves or something attack us. Once it's clear that they're sufficiently kicking our butts, and everyone in the party except me is nearly dead, some paladins ride in on horses to save us. After the orcs kill one of the paladins and bring the others to near death, the remainder of the help that the DM sent us runs away... This was supposedly an on-level encounter. It was also the first encounter of the day. We did successfully kill all the orcs...

By the end, everyone except me was below their surge value in hp, some in single digits, and that includes the survivors of the rescue party. I did not mention to anyone the fact that I was still at full health. I figured that would be in poor taste. All my stuff was ranged and Leaderey, and the rest of the group did a good job of keeping these melee enemies in melee. (Warforged Artificer, focused on healing and boosting allies, not on summoning and such...)

What made the orcs so difficult was that they were getting a bonus for being mounted, and their mounts were also getting attacks. Now that some of our party has mounts, this doesn't seem to be how the rules work. [4e]

Irreverent Fool
2010-05-08, 02:44 AM
For the record, D&D materials are a very close second to food & shelter on my "desert island" list, assuming I have company.

We had a memorable non-death in a game of cyberpunk2020 (2nd).

I was GM. The party fixer's player had rolled up/constructed his character with ridiculous body and cool scores. The guy was almost as hard to kill as a 'borg and had no cybernetics to speak of. He was a pretty good roleplayer and even went into some detail on his rolled-up past, including a dear cousin Natalya from his nomad days who now worked as a ripperdoc.

Well, it so happens that the intro to the campaign arc included stopping a local Al Capone posergang from shaking down local businesses. One of these happened to be a shop in which the party's techie worked (the only one who didn't manage to roll 'unemployed'). Long story short, they wasted the gang's henchmen and snagged the case they'd been keeping the cash in. The tech failed his roll to detect any sort of safety on the case and similarly managed to jam the lock.

Ivan -- the fixer -- said since it wasn't rigged to blow or anything, he'd just pry it open. So the player describes how Ivan stands splay-legged over the case and starts working a crowbar into the gap. BOOM!

Thanks to the 2e book having NO DESCRIPTION HOW TO APPLY GRENADE-LIKE AREA-OF-EFFECT DAMAGE, I made a snap judgment that the damage should apply to each of his body parts individually. Amazingly, his head took a minimal amount of damage (any damage to the head is always doubled in this game), but each of his arms and legs took enough damage to get 'severed' (he was wearing an armor vest and helmet at the time). More amazingly, he made his COOL roll to stay conscious. The rest of the crew peeks out from behind the tech's work-in-progress (a now ruined flying vehicle) and sees Ivan sitting there against the wall, limbless. "Do me a favor and get my phone from my left pocket. Call Natalya." he says.

obnoxious
sig

JLighter
2010-05-08, 03:54 AM
Party including LG Cleric, CN Ninja (although the DM had told him he couldn't play CN, he was doing it anyway), LG Monk, CG Ranger, and NG Druid. We ended up coming across an undead horse attached to a cart with a bunch of dead bodies in it. Cleric, being religiously opposed to undead, smashed the horse. The Ninja took offense at this (claiming "tactics" as a reason, but he was more or less full of ****), and started harassing the Cleric. Finally, he pushed too far and the Cleric started beating the crap out of him. I finally ended up leaving at that point because I was sick of the session, but I'm pretty sure the Ninja ended up dead.

The Cat Goddess
2010-05-08, 04:14 AM
So one of my players has a reputation of having poor luck at rolling dice. So much so that he has me roll his hit-point die every time he levels.

During a previous campaign, the characters are in the frozen Northlands and have, once again, split up to hunt for the last remaining bad-guy... so who finds him? Unlucky, of course. And the bad guy? A Drow Assassin, of course. Needless to say, they didn't find Unlucky's body until the Spring Thaw.

During the same campaign, another player was playing a Forest Gnome WarMage. Sixteen inches of laughing death, riding a climbing dog. The first time he nearly died was when the party was attacked in camp. The crossbow sniper Catfolk on watch didn't wake the party, because he "wouldn't be able to sneak attack the orcs if I let them know I'm awake!" :smallannoyed: The Gnome survives a coup-de-grace with 7 hp and manages to hide while the Stonechild takes down his would-be killer.

The second time he nearly died was when the party was storming the lair of a young blue dragon. While the rest of the party was dealing with the remaining orc guards, he races his climbing dog along the wall (unknowingly avoiding the randomly placed pit traps) and casts... Lightning Bolt! :smallamused: Yes, a veteran player of many years of AD&D cast lightning at the blue dragon. The dragon proceeded to show the Gnome what Lightning was all about... killing poor "Climby" the climbing dog.

The third time he nearly died was in the previously mentioned frozen Northlands. He'd replaced his climbing dog with a blink dog, now that he'd gotten himself a Ring of Blinking. Separated from the party (this happens a lot with my group), he spots a group of Frost Giants. Figuring he'll attack them and signal the party at the same time, he fireballs the giants. The Giants, annoyed and hurt, hurl rocks... every single one of them hitting his AC, but missing because of his blinking. I rule that he and his blink dog are stuck for one round on the Ethereal Plane because they are literally buried in rocks. He has "Blinky" Dimension Door into the middle of the giants... forgetting that, while the Blink Dog can act after doing so... he cannot. A few hits and a few lucky misses later and I rule that the Blink Dog, in an act of self-preservation (it's got 2 hp left, the Gnome has 16), Dimension Doors back behind the pile of rocks that it was previously buried under.

Of course, he wasn't without his funny moments... such as when he used Shatter to break the ceiling above a group of Xorn... who were Earth Gliding at the time. Or the time he was asked to "see to" an unconcious Frost Giant. The party leader wanted the Giant stabilized and woken up, so he could be questioned... but didn't explain that to the Gnome. The Gnome walked over and yelled "WAKE UP!"... using the Shout spell. When asked why he hadn't bandaged and stabilized the Giant, he replied "What part of War & Mage would give you the idea I healed people?"

The Fourth time he nearly died, the party was trying to break the seige of a castle so they could get inside. The Gnome proceeded to spam "Summon Elemental Monolith" with his 4 Ninth level spells and sent them to "distract" the army. Things were going well and they had gotten to the castle gates when the Gnome spotted the Green Dragon who had been leading the seige. Deciding that he "needs to kill that thing... that's a lot of XP right there!" "Blinky" refuses to Dimension Door onto the Dragon's back... so the Gnome Sudden Quicken's a Sudden Empowered Fireball, followed by a Sudden Maximized Fireball. The Dragon survives this indignity and does a strafing run on the party... half of whom are busy climbing the wall (and thus, unable to defend themselves!). When the Dragon swings around for a second pass, the party Bard/Warlock starts reading a scroll, preparing to interrupt the Dragon's movement. The Dragon swoops in, attempting to snatch the Forest Gnome "and your little blink dog, too!" only to crash into the Wall of Force the Bard/Warlock just cast.

The Fifth time the Gnome nearly died was inside the castle... after numerous fights, the Warmage was nearly out of spells, the Bard was out of spells, the Barbarian was out of Rage and the party encounters a Marilith. The Marilith uses her surprise round to... summon a second Marilith. The Catfolk Scout/Crossbow Sniper (with self-loading Force Handcrossbows of Speed) goes on the attack. Now, said Catfolk's player had recently read the rules about Effigies (in Complete Arcane) and had saved up all his spare treasure so that he could buy a Solar Effigy. He was so very proud of his construct companion... having it carry him around, fly him up walls, etc. The Mariliths both cast Blade Barrier to (you guessed it) separate the party. The two barriers crossing in the square that the Warmage was in. Luckily, he made both his saves since the Ethereal Miss Chance from Blinking wouldn't work against the Force Effect of the Blade Barriers. The Gnome retaliates with Chain Lightning (his last 6th level spell for the day)... which is useless, since Mariliths are immune to electrical damage. :smallamused: The Solar Effigy smacks one Marilith around while the others concentrate on the other.
Round 2... the party pounds on their target and the other Marilith, enraged by the Effigy, uses Telekinesis to throw it... right though the crossing point of the two Blade Barriers. A hail of woodchips, metal fragments & feathers rain down on the Warmage as the Effigy fails to save vs. Telekinesis and then fails to save vs. either Blade Barrier. The horrified Catfolk begins to wail about "all that money I spent!" while the Gnome actually cackles in glee.
The Catfolk's player, angered, proceeds to have the Catfolk fire at the Gnome... confusing the heck out of the two Mariliths. :smallconfused: The Gnome has "Blinky" Dimension Door them into the next room... where only a luckily failed Spot check by the evil Cleric keeps him from certain doom.
Round 3... :smallbiggrin:

Scarey Nerd
2010-05-08, 04:59 AM
Whilst not the BEST death, my first PC death was fairly memorable.

I was playing a half-orc barbarian (Yeah, I like them a lot :smallcool:), and I was a bit late to a session, but texted the party and asked them to start without me. When I got there, they were getting destroyed by gnoll archers, because the DM had an uncanny skill at double critting the PCs. My PC arrived, raged and ran forward, drawing his greataxe and yelling in fury. An archer stopped shooting at my comrades, took one shot at me, critted and brought me down to -12 in one shot.

Memorable for the fail.