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druid91
2010-12-21, 07:36 PM
So I've been thinking, I always love the epic death, heroic sacrifice type things.
Especially in the form of taking the BBEG with you.

So, What are your tales of PCs dying awesomely?

Psyren
2010-12-21, 07:58 PM
Death Throes from Spell Compendium helps you take the BBEG with you.

I recall a story on the boards where someone's Artificer took down an Elder Evil by getting swallowed by it, then detonating a pile of bast disks while unknowingly possessed by a Balor, who also exploded. The DM couldn't decide what reward to give him I think.

Venerable
2010-12-21, 08:12 PM
Setting: A version of Eberron that lacks resurrection magic.

Scene: Sharn, city of towers. It had been several days since new warforged, aided by drow, swarmed up from below and seized the city. Our party of heroes had joined forces with the Brelish armed forces that were in the city when it fell. Their mission: to seize and hold the airship docks while the mighty Brelish warship Intrepid docks and discharges troops loyal to the Crown.

Our heroes fought their way up to the docks, which hang above the city's spires and below the Skyway. Enemy fusiliers had placed cannons and used them to great effect against the Intrepid, which had lost its mast and rudder and was coming in hard. The warforged enemy commander, who by this point had lost most of his troops, fired off one last device that sent a shot screaming into the underside of the Skyway above. The myriad tiny devices that had been buzzing around him coalesced into wings. As he began to ascend from the platform, a chunk of the Skyway began to fall. Doom was moments away. The party members raced for the nearby air skiff, save one. The dwarf fighter, who had a well-earned hatred for warforged, charged and jumped the commander. Growling "You do not do this and get away," the dwarf pinned the frantic warforged to the platform. The falling chunk of Skyway slammed into the Intrepid and smashed through the docks, which fell into the lightless depths of lower Sharn.

Two days later what little remained of the dwarf's body was found, his greataxe next to his hand.

Now that was a satisfying ending.


[The dwarf got better. Turns out there was a little resurrection magic, after all. :smallwink:]

Anxe
2010-12-21, 08:25 PM
The best story of PC death in my group was about an archer character. The player was relatively new, so he liked switching his characters around. The party invaded an Orc lair. They found the Orc nursery, which was heavily guarded. The party decided to evacuate immediately. The archer had the lowest initiative for that combat. He decided he'd stay behind the cover the retreat of everyone else. He took down about 8 Orcs before dying. He managed to ensure the survival of everyone else in the group. It was pretty awesome.

Callista
2010-12-21, 08:34 PM
I've never managed to kill both my PC and the BBEG at the same time; but I've had one PC deliberately sacrifice herself.

The BBEG in question was a Girl, not a Guy; but that hardly mattered because when you're a dragon as a big as a school bus, you don't exactly qualify as dainty or non-threatening.

My character was a halfling rogue/paladin. (She had an absurdly high Reflex save. This will become significant later.) We had gotten our hands on a magic item that could cancel the dragon's breath if it was used in the same round as the dragon's breath, and my character was the one we chose to have it. We got into the fight, and like most fights with dragons, it was short and brutal.

The dragon immediately used her breath weapon and hurt us pretty badly, but that gave the rest of us the chance to start sticking sharp pointy things into her. We had only the one spellcaster, a halfling bard, who doubled as our party healer; and when I rolled low on my save (REALLY low; I'm pretty sure it wasn't higher than a five), she used that round to heal me.

I was gambling that the dragon wouldn't be able to breathe again so soon, and I wanted to see whether I could get another shot at the dragon; so I didn't ready the magic item that would've canceled her breath weapon. Turns out that she was able to recharge that quickly, so the next round we got hit again by the breath weapon, and we'd be completely unprotected this time.

My character was still next to the bard. She knew very well that she could have prevented the dragon from hitting us full-blast. She also knew the bard couldn't take another hit from that breath weapon.

So I had my character attempt to shield the bard with her own body. The DM allowed it--if I could make a Reflex save at a -10 penalty.

I made the save. My character died; the bard lived; and the party went on to kill the dragon.

I think my character probably set some kind of speed record there--it couldn't have been more than three seconds from the hubris-induced bad tactical decision to the repentance and atonement!

LOTRfan
2010-12-21, 09:08 PM
My players went all Swan Song (Supernatural Spoilers) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-PP1PTBGMI&feature=related) on the Epic Level BBEG. The campaign was supposed to have a very dark turn, and probably last another 5 levels.

The Epic level Cleric/Wizard/Mystic Theurge/Demonologist was going to use an epic version of Abyssal Rift to drag the entire city into a barren layer of the Abyss (yes, I stole the idea from Angel: After the Fall...). They all decided to bull rush him. He lost concentration, and they all fell into the rift right before the portal closed. Both the PCs and the BBEG were ripped apart by the demonic hordes gathering by the rift. I had several plans for the upcoming adventure, but, eh, they wanted to die heroic deaths. :smallsmile:

AslanCross
2010-12-21, 09:45 PM
More of a story of the bad guy taking ME with him, but I'll tell it anyway.
We were playing Prisoner of the Castle Perilous, a Lv 18 adventure. The last boss was a simulacrum of Acererak who had taken over the tower and used it as his base.

My character, a Wizard/Geometer/Silver Pyromancer/Fatespinner, had already blown away the lich with a single spell. His summoned Balor, however, was bearing down on my comrades and a Dread Wraith had drained my CON to critical levels. I had 16 HP left and the Balor was about to fillet me.

I cast Power Word: Stun on the Balor and breach its spell resistance. Thanks to my comrades it's at low HP, so it's stunned.

I cast Celerity and then blast it with a Maximized Orb of Fire (with Silver Pyromancer's Sacred Fire turning it into pure holy damage). The silvery orb blasted right through its chest. It blew up and killed my wizard.

The Dark Fiddler
2010-12-21, 10:04 PM
Long story short, my Warforged Warblade tried to bullrush the Blackguard villain who use to be his friend off the platform they were fighting on into a nearly endless void. Failed the strength check though. Later broke through the floor of the platform (that was no longer in the endless void, thankfully) to let the one party member who was still on the side of good escape, crashing through the floor and getting crushed to death in the gears of the giant robot the BBEG was using as a base.

Ailurus
2010-12-21, 11:03 PM
Short version:
End of the Age of Worms campaign.

Paladin/crusader multiclass rams a Holy Avenger into the chest of a tainted god, before promptly exploding into a ball of holy fire turning both himself and the BBEG into dust.

mechanics:

a) Greater divine surge maneuver from ToB, intentionally dropping con score to 0.
b) Con score of 0 = dead = sets off the death explosion of the Righteous Aura spell (spell compendium).
c) add in power attacking for full with aforementioned holy avenger (with greater divine surge offsetting the attack penalty)

Net result was I think around 350 points of damage or so. Maybe not a lot by char op standards, but since it was a published BBEG who only had about 700 HP (and was already hurt from a couple rounds of combat already) it did cleanly take him from 50-60% health to dead quite nicely)

Edit: I know above approach may not be 100% rules legal (comes down to if you take the con damage before or after the attack happens with greater divine surge) but the DM cleared it ahead of time for me due to rule of cool

Noedig
2010-12-21, 11:41 PM
This is Shadowrun 3rd, so bare with me.
This was after many a run so, we were pretty well known, which is a mixed blessing. We apparently pissed off of the dragon that ran Saeder-Krupp by ruining a plan of his that we had no knowledge of and he came after us.
After an epic battle which saw a lot of use of portable SAMs, my physical adept gets eaten. I happened to roll high enough on my resulting body tests to avoid being killed outright, but was very very close to death.

So I decide to be cool and pull the pins on all of the HE grenades that I had with me. I obviously died, but on the upside, it rained dragon parts in Munich for about 10 seconds.

Vizzerdrix
2010-12-22, 04:17 AM
Thlarook, my first "Gish"
I was playing a barbarian/cleric, and we had just reached the blighter we'd been hunting. We had her cornered in her cave. A mess of brambles and half dead trees growing underground. while taking constant fire from her archer ally, our druid and the other barbarian had waded into the thorny vines and immediately got attacked by a fiendish dire wolverine. It did a number on the barbarian, but the fight was going okay. Until the Blighter sent a wave of flame out over the brambles, dropping the druid into the single digits and the barbarian into the negatives, then she too turned into a dire wolverine and moved up to finish off the other barbarian. I charged through the remaining flames, killed the first wolverine, cleaved into the blighter and critted, killing her too. The next round, I clw'ed the barbarian (I think he was at -8 or 9), and moved up to the archer, only to take a heavy crossbow crit (the DM rolled max damage) to the chest, for just enough to kill me. The group swarmed her and tore her to bits. I was buried outside the cave, along with my gear (High honors, when you consider that my group at the time was a bunch of scavengers and I had some expensive stuff). Now that is how a character should die. As a hero. :smallsmile:

Clovis
2010-12-22, 08:43 AM
The BBEG was a demon prince who had harassed the country millennia before. It found a way back to the prime via a demiplane, kept together with a doomsday device called 'Doom bell'. The bell got its power from an artifact, a gem that used to be in the shield of a god. The gem was at the end of the bell's tongue. The demiplane was a conduct between the Abyss and the Prime. My mage ripped off the gem and the demiplane imploded. The demon prince's connection to the Abyss was severed and an NPC princess was able to vanquish it with another artifact, the afore-mentioned god's sword.

Prior to gem-ripping my mage had his pinkie bit off by a griffon and was brought back alive using the pinkie which he'd given to the party cleric. All the other PCs vacated the demiplane before the implosion.

End of a looong campaign.

Lifeson
2010-12-22, 12:46 PM
Me and my party were helping a city in a civil war end by taking out one of the sides, and my team was sent to blow up all of the storage rooms. I got a glimpse of the enemy general, and with a few leftover explosives, I decided that I'd be the one to get rid of him, being the elf who could aim.

So, I dropped several sticks of dynamite and blew them up with an explosive blast. His guards got my remaining hitpoints, but I just erased said general who was probably four or five levels higher than me. As an added bonus, I hit the DM's kid's character with the blast as well. Good times ;D

Moogleking
2010-12-22, 03:25 PM
The party paladin grappled the BBEG Lich, in a flooding room and cast "Bless Water" as it filled. He drowned, but killed the Lich in the process.

Hanuman
2010-12-22, 04:29 PM
Dance of ruin is a nice one to go out on.

Brom
2010-12-22, 05:06 PM
I had a DM who was fond of Call of Cthulu. It was D&D 3.5, and in his campaign setting (a very magnificent game world he'd worked on off and on for 15+ YEARS! still trying to tell him to get it published) the BBEG was actually not evil. Or a guy.

Instead, it was a creature from...somewhere. A group of archmages had seen it as a star passing over the world, and seeking to drain its power for use in their war, they pulled it from the sky.

It was an Eldritch Horror who promptly sent the world into darkness before being vanquished on the lives of a dozen epic heroes.

The star it arrived in was actually a prison vessel. Upon vanquishing, it's body was split into four pieces, as well as its mind. We were finding fragments of its mind. My character was the party wizard, a warlock by personality if not class. "Power. I want power." It was his whole thing. He flirted on evil if not for odd, sentimental moments that no one understood, and he had been threatened with execution by more characters than I can think of (everyone in the party at least once).

So what does he do?

Of course he melds his body with the eldritch artifact.

After years of adventuring, he realizes that he's an ******* and decides to research it, and realizes that he can command the prison vessel if he merges with all four parts of the creature's mind. Should he be able to resist possession by the eldritch horror at this point (I took Iron Will and Keen Intellect, which later become a plot point) he could potentially fly it away.

Failing that, killing him should also kill the creature, because melding with its mind was causing their souls to be fused.

The party was also working on a plan to use huge portals to send the eldritch horror into its own demiplane, and then collapsing the plane. Which would have also killed my character.

We didn't get to finish the campaign, but we got 2/3rds of the way through the story arc, and it became obvious there would be no happily ever after for Brom of Ebb, wizard and later eldritch horror: merely a cold, soulless death while he ended his life to destroy the mind of a creature from beyond.

I loved it. I love being the martyr in games =P

Callista
2010-12-22, 06:32 PM
I witnessed this at the table, which nearly killed one of the PCs:

We're fighting things that can fly. Many of us have sensibly gotten out the missile weapons and some of us have taken to the air ourselves. The terrain is tricky; we're in volcano territory and there's a great big lava flow right nearby. One of us has climbed to a cliff that's overhanging the lava flow and has readied an action to attack whatever enemy comes into range first. Obligingly, one of the demons comes at him... and bull-rushes him off the cliff into the lava.

The PC promptly uses the ready action to grab the demon, stating that "If I'm going down, he's going down with me." So, since he's well over the thing's light load, the demon starts plummeting into the lava too. The DM allows a reflex save to grab onto the edge of the cliff, but the PC refuses it because that means letting go of the demon; and states he's going to try to land on top of the demon when they both land in the lava. He makes this second (much tougher) reflex save, and then lands the jump to the edge of the river of lava, feet barely singed.

The demon? Well, let's just say fire resistance 10 is no match for immersion in molten rock...

I thought it was pretty epic.

LOTRfan
2010-12-22, 06:38 PM
I witnessed this at the table, which nearly killed one of the PCs:

We're fighting things that can fly. Many of us have sensibly gotten out the missile weapons and some of us have taken to the air ourselves. The terrain is tricky; we're in volcano territory and there's a great big lava flow right nearby. One of us has climbed to a cliff that's overhanging the lava flow and has readied an action to attack whatever enemy comes into range first. Obligingly, one of the demons comes at him... and bull-rushes him off the cliff into the lava.

The PC promptly uses the ready action to grab the demon, stating that "If I'm going down, he's going down with me." So, since he's well over the thing's light load, the demon starts plummeting into the lava too. The DM allows a reflex save to grab onto the edge of the cliff, but the PC refuses it because that means letting go of the demon; and states he's going to try to land on top of the demon when they both land in the lava. He makes this second (much tougher) reflex save, and then lands the jump to the edge of the river of lava, feet barely singed.

The demon? Well, let's just say fire resistance 10 is no match for immersion in molten rock...

I thought it was pretty epic.

That would have never worked in real life, but pretty cool. Then again, in real life you don't go around fighting demons either....

Callista
2010-12-22, 06:41 PM
In real life, you aren't a barbarian capable of casually shattering all the Olympic world records before breakfast, either. :)

LOTRfan
2010-12-22, 06:42 PM
Very true. :smalltongue:

Laurellien
2010-12-22, 07:15 PM
The set up: A very high level party (17thish) consisting of myself, Astragoth LE archivist, a LN Cleric of Tiamat, and a CE Wizard. We all have warrior cohorts (half-fire giant berserker and a frost giant included).

We are assaulting a fortress of paladins to claim a doomsday device that we can use to plunge the world into darkness and awaken our imprisoned evil goddess. My character (shapechanged into a gargantuan eldritch giant) kicks in the door and walks into a room with 30 paladins and what can only be described as a space marine dreadnought. The dreadnought issues a grim challenge to me and I cast Avasculate on it, doing 3500 damage. Then all at once the paladins charge me with their keen falchions and leap attack, doing enough damage to kill me more than 10 times over. I fall to the ground dead...
Red light shines out from my eyes, the room heats up and the distant sound of hammers and anvils pervades the area. A deep, booming voice then calls out "And now I, Surtur, honour my end of your bargain." Death Pact kicks in, and I return to life. On my action Astragoth stands, brandishing a mahogany staff. The faintest gleam of otherworldly fire remains in his eyes, and he grins menacingly, "Now it's my turn." He snaps the staff of power over his knee, and before he suddenly shifts planes, he sees all of the paladins that brought him low burning in magical fire.

Hanuman
2010-12-22, 10:03 PM
Teleport into the monster and drop some blast disks in it's lungs?