Ruining the BBEG/encounter for your DM

[Invader]

I have to admit I take a little bit of enjoyment in making an encounter that was supposed to be really challenging into something pretty easy sauce. Not so much by breaking the game but by being intelligent or using spells and abilities in creative ways (especially when our current DM has no concept of ECL and CR lol).

The most recent instance was this past Sunday. Our group was a fighter6, ranger 4, thrikeen/wizard 3, cleric 6, bard 5, Druid 7(me) and paladin 5. Our fighter, cleric, ranger, and paladin have never played before this campaign so they're hardly optimized. The wizard and bard have played but neither of them are optimized either. Knowing this I'm cheesing m druid out as much as I can because our DM allows pretty much anything in any book so I have ashbound/greenbound summoning and 2 levels of Planar Shepherd to kind of even out the rest of the group in terms of power. That being said I'm very responsible with my power because my uncle Ben told me I had to be. That being said if I need to bust out something stupid to help us I will (usually I take the fairly obvious role of flying around using call lightning etc).

We're fighting through a large group of low level Derro plus a couple mid level 4 and 6 I believe Drow with classes which I can't remember when we find out the caster at the back of the group is a 12th level wizard.

We figured we were boned because the ranger and cleric were already down and the wizard was asleep for a few more rounds and I had burned through a lot of my spells and I didn't really have anything to compete with a 12th level caster, until I remembered a SNA IV greenbound brown bear has a +26 to grapple.

For the record a +26 grapple ruins a 12 level wizard. He did try to cast fireball on top of himself and the bear but the bear crit'd on his AoO for some stupid amount of damage, and I even gave him the opportunity to not cast the spell I rolled the 20 to threat lol.

What other good stories do people have along these lines?

[Mayito]

My party went through a really creepy mansion and long story short we find an insanely creepy and hideous... thing... at the end which did massive damage and used fear effects left and right. My whole party ran in order to try and ambush it at an earlier point but it showed up and most of the party got feared again. My sorceress tried to identify it and rolled well enough to know it was a summoned avatar of death. It clicked in my head "summoned" and I pulled out my trusty wand of dispel and poof the Bbeg was gone :-) apparently we were supposed to be saved by someone else because the CR was way to high for us to beat but when I did that my dm just sat there with an open mouth trying to figure out how to keep the game going. His face was priceless :-)

[Venger]

we were finishing up the eberron "eyes of the lich queen" module (it's pretty good, would definitely recommend it) and were at the boss fight: huge blue dragon. lotsa HP, bunch of metabreath feats, but despite all these things, lacks the only thing to make a dragon fight actually be hard, the cold subtype.

he snipes at us for a few rounds with his dragonbreath, we are able to avoid it easily enough (psyrogue, sacred fist, MotAO, and my character, a chameleon) since we all had some way laugh it off (evasion, evasion, ruin delver's fortune, and miimic class feature respectively) while I fly up to him with demon wings, taking a few rounds since he was really far out there.

I land a lesser shivering touch on him, spend an action die to emulate maximise spell, and burn an inspiration point to add my int mod onto the damage roll. 12>10, he falls like a stone about 70 feet since he started flying to meet me midway during my multi-round charge. he takes 7d6 falling damage due to being paralyzed.

everyone else's turn, the psyrogue CDGs him with some enormous save. he fails it and dies.

thus, my DM permabanned the shivering touch line. I did ask him about it before I did this and said I would use a different tactic if he wanted me to, but he said it was all right this one time and then never again.

to be fair, at this point, we had run through 9 combats that in-game day with no chance to rest or replenish spells. my chameleon's a decent gish, but it's an awful choice whether to conserve spells or to blow your load when fighting 3 vrocks. the fights before the dragon were 3 vrocks, before that, a bunch of monks, a boss monk, and a bluespawn charger, before that, some barbarians, before that, some other bluespawns, before that, some dracotaurs, and then a bunch of stuff before that.

after the dragon, we had to fight a damn bluespawn godslayer. it also had the handy effect of removing the dragon's corpse somehow (I was going to use the dragon zombie rules from draconomicon to reanimate it, but that's out) so we had to deal with that.

DM did at least say "you hear final boss music playing, you know this is the last fight of this in-game day" and I can at last go nova. chameleon hits him with a moon bolt and deals a bunch of STR damage. he pounds on the sacred fist and the psyrogue takes psionic potshots. next turn, ray of enfeeblement hits the godslayer's pitiful touch AC and lowered his str further. his str was now so low that he no longer qualified for awesome blow and his tactical options across the battlefield were severely limited. his improved bullrush was quite inadequate without his large str bonus, and he was at this point down to a 17 str. sacred fist bullrushed him off the tower. godslayer's huge size bonus trumped the sacred fist's poor str mod, but godslayer rolled a 1, so the SF outdid him. he took 20d6 falling damage and died.

DM then banned moon bolt. I scratched my head.

[VGLordR2]

This (1d4chan.org/wiki/Sameo) is perhaps the best story ever told of a player killing the campaign's BBEG. Enjoy.

[Gnomish Wanderer]

Sorry to say, I'm not so impressed with any of these. I don't mind when my players subvert an encounter through planning and in-game stuff, but beating an encounter through optimization and GM's poor planning isn't impressive.

[lsfreak]

This (1d4chan.org/wiki/Sameo) is perhaps the best story ever told of a player killing the campaign's BBEG. Enjoy.

The DM deserved it for using fumble tables. I have no sympathy for anything bad happening to a DM who use fumble tables.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

A friend of mine wanted to run a game, and only me and one other person were available to play so we each made two characters:
-A Cloistered Cleric going for a Cheater of Mystra build, lots of Summon Undead for Owlbear Skeletons.
-An OA Samurai 2/ Paladin going Charging Smite + Leap Attack with a Ritiik and Harmonious Knight, Wild Cohort: Magebred Warbeast Wolf.
-A standard Sorcadin build with Harmonious Knight, picked up Draconic Heritage (sonic) at Sorcerer 1 and DFI.
-A VoP Killoren Druid, Greenbound Summoning, Magebred Warbeast Wolf companion, cast Enrage Animal a lot substituting its effect for Whirling Frenzy. His goal was to hire adventurers to help him stop the global sickness that was wiping out his people, so his charitable cause was to split his cut of the loot between the rest of the party.

A few sessions in, two of our other friends wanted to join in, so they each rolled up one character:
-Another Druid with a Magebred Warbeast Wolf companion, Enrage Animal with Whirling Frenzy and lots of damage spells and crowd controls.
-A DFI Savage Bard with a shortbow and Wild Cohort for a Magebred Warbeast Wolf.

Just to recap, that's two primary melee characters (Sorcadin, Samurai/Paladin), an archer (Bard), two summoners (Cleric, Druid), a battlefield controller (Druid), six Magebred Warbeast Wolves, all with Inspire Courage +2, Inspire Courage +2d6 Sonic, and Inspire Courage +4d6 Fire. Note that the DM removed all alignment mechanics and outright immunities, so summoned Owlbear Skeletons were benefiting from Inspire Courage.

Going into a dungeon crawl that promised to lead us into the Underdark, we mopped the floor with every encounter that crossed our paths. Eventually we got to the final chamber of the level, and had to go through a dragon to proceed to the next level. It was an Adult Black Dragon (CR 11), against a party of six 4th level PCs, and we managed to lure it into a low end of the chamber so it wouldn't be flying. It managed to buff itself with Mage Armor and Shield, and none of us had any dispels.

Our wolves win initiative, and they all charge it and line up in a nice row across the front of its space. The dragon gets to go, so it steps to the right and breathes its line of maximized acid across all four of them. They all four save, and they all four had evasion, so none of them took any damage at all; he couldn't believe it. After that our characters got to go, the Bard cast Glitterdust and it rolled a 1 on its save, and was blinded for four rounds. The Druids cast Enrage Animal to put their wolves each into a Whirling Frenzy. The Cleric begins casting Summon Undead III. The two Paladins move in on its right side but don't really accomplish anything.

Second round, the wolves get to go again. They step into flanking positions and attack, and one manages to trip the dragon. Blind and prone, the dragon full attacks, misses some wolves, and misses the Paladins due to blindness. The summon undead spell finishes and two Owlbear Skeletons appear in flanking positions and full attack.

Over the next three rounds, the dragon remained prone and continued full attacking, and never hit anything. The wolves, paladins, and skeletons continued attacking and between all the Inspire Courage effects, flanking, and just the sheer volume of swings, they managed to kill the dragon before it could breathe again. I'm pretty sure the DM was planning on having it get up from prone and breathe on the round its breath came back, which would have been the very next round, on which the Glitterdust effect would have also ended. Its Maximized Breath of 48 damage would have definitely killed anyone who failed the save.

Our party of 4th level characters took down a CR 11 dragon without anyone taking a single point of damage. We all leveled up to 6th, and he quit DMing after that session and hasn't run a game since, after almost two years. We'll occasionally talk about that game and how amazing our party was, but he doesn't seem to remember that it even happened. Not only did we ruin the boss fight, we broke the DM.

[LordotheMorning]

We'd just gotten done killing a trio of BBEGs, which had been a tough battle. I was a level 14 optimized halfling Master Thrower named Katarin, a character who will always have a special place in my heart. We had a Fatespinner Sorcerer (who also happened to be a lich (long story)), and a Whirling Dervish Barbarian. The Barbarian was dead, and the Sorcerer was wounded and mostly out of spells, and I was also slightly worse for wear.

When the final bad guy went down something terrible started flooding out of her body. Apparently she had some sort of cosmic horror sealed inside her. So anyway it starts to leak out, and I'm starting to panic. No attacks work on it. It just keeps sucking them up. No spells work on it either. It's just a huge vacuum. We're pretty much running for our lives as it grows bigger and bigger. For my character, this was the most powerless he'd ever been. He'd spent the entire campaign being one of if not the most prominent members of the party, and he was the only one who lived all the way through the campaign (level 1-14). The other players sometimes would refer to me as batman for the way I always had a gadget for the given situation. He wasn't used to not having some way to be effective. So he takes out his final trump card: A Gate scroll.

Reading the text of Gate, I saw that Deities could choose to pass through the gate if they chose to, and it was pretty obvious that this thing was approaching godlike levels of power (honestly I don't know how our DM expected us to deal with it. I guess he intended for us to run). So I opened a gate to the plane of Celestia, and shouted "Yondalla, help me!"

And help me she did. Not only that, but practically every deity in the pantheon came charging through the gate to curbstomp this thing. The sorcerer's knowledge check revealed that this thing was called Atropos (don't know if he homebrewed this or if he found it in a book. It wasn't really an Atropal though), and was apparently the bane of gods and all creation, which is why the gods were so quick to come down and kill it before it gained full strength.

Long story short, I and the barbarian ascended to the heavens and gained divine rank for our heroic deeds, while the sorcerer opted to allow the gods to seal Atropos inside him in exchange for immortality (and restoring him from undeath). And the campaign came to an end likely several months earlier than the DM had intended.

[TuggyNE]

We'd just gotten done killing a trio of BBEGs, which had been a tough battle. I was a level 14 optimized halfling Master Thrower named Katarin, a character who will always have a special place in my heart. We had a Fatespinner Sorcerer (who also happened to be a lich (long story)), and a Whirling Dervish Barbarian. The Barbarian was dead, and the Sorcerer was wounded and mostly out of spells, and I was also slightly worse for wear.

When the final bad guy went down something terrible started flooding out of her body. Apparently she had some sort of cosmic horror sealed inside her. So anyway it starts to leak out, and I'm starting to panic. No attacks work on it. It just keeps sucking them up. No spells work on it either. It's just a huge vacuum. We're pretty much running for our lives as it grows bigger and bigger. For my character, this was the most powerless he'd ever been. He'd spent the entire campaign being one of if not the most prominent members of the party, and he was the only one who lived all the way through the campaign (level 1-14). The other players sometimes would refer to me as batman for the way I always had a gadget for the given situation. He wasn't used to not having some way to be effective. So he takes out his final trump card: A Gate scroll.

Reading the text of Gate, I saw that Deities could choose to pass through the gate if they chose to, and it was pretty obvious that this thing was approaching godlike levels of power (honestly I don't know how our DM expected us to deal with it. I guess he intended for us to run). So I opened a gate to the plane of Celestia, and shouted "Yondalla, help me!"

And help me she did. Not only that, but practically every deity in the pantheon came charging through the gate to curbstomp this thing. The sorcerer's knowledge check revealed that this thing was called Atropos (don't know if he homebrewed this or if he found it in a book. It wasn't really an Atropal though), and was apparently the bane of gods and all creation, which is why the gods were so quick to come down and kill it before it gained full strength.

Long story short, I and the barbarian ascended to the heavens and gained divine rank for our heroic deeds, while the sorcerer opted to allow the gods to seal Atropos inside him in exchange for immortality (and restoring him from undeath). And the campaign came to an end likely several months earlier than the DM had intended.

That's ... an unusually awesome and epic way to have your players foul up your plans. Seriously, getting a whole ton of deities coming charging through is kinda impressive, and you end on a really high note.

[Killer Angel]

This (1d4chan.org/wiki/Sameo) is perhaps the best story ever told of a player killing the campaign's BBEG. Enjoy.

I knew what your link was, before opening it. :smallbiggrin:
That story is also perfect when there's a discussion on how much stupid are crit. fumble's tables...

[some guy]

In the two dnd campaigns I ran, both of my groups defeated the bbeg in what I didn't designed to be the final fight.
The first was what I designed as a bit "you better know what kind of stuff the bbeg can do"-encounter. The bbeg had harassed many towns, in this fight the pc's all were there. In the final round the bbeg had more than half of his hp. Then before he could act, the pc's all got lucky, their attacks went through his concealment chance and hit 3 crits against him. It killed him dead. So much for my awesome temple ruins crumble halfway through the fight.

The second campaign the pc's were looking for the bbeg's lair, the cleric got the idea to cast "Helping hand" on the bbeg and lead the BBEG which looked to me like a particulary bad idea, as the bbeg was a dragon and the group had almost no cover. But hey. They were smart enough to buff themselves and all had protection from cold up. So when the dragon used his breath weapon it saw it was not particulary useful. It went up for melee. When it had used up his AoO's for the rogue and paladin, the cleric got in, pierced his magic resitance, touched him with Bestow Curse and the dragon failed his will save. Now it had 50% chance of not acting. It couldn't get away anymore and was killed. So much for my awesome dragon lair encounter.

[Slipperychicken]

In the same campaign, our Beguiler managed to take out two bosses with Hold Person. Both fights went something like "people charge eachother -> I suggest that the Beguiler cast Hold Person -> bad guy fails save -> CDG". I feel bad for my DM sometimes; all his enemies are humanoids and none have any immunities to speak of