Exit, Pursued by a Bear

[Red Fel]

No, I'm not leaving the forums. Rather, this is a thread about epic departures.

In every campaign, characters come and go, for various reasons. Often, those reasons involve being a corpse. But when a character leaves of his or her own volition, there's often an interesting cause. Maybe it has something to do with the player. Maybe it's just time for the character to move on. Ideally, these transitions are handled with compassion, charm, and a touch of nostalgia.

Even more ideally, they make for a great story.

Share your experience. Tell the story of how your character - or a character in your campaign - left the party in a particularly awesome, tragic, or otherwise magnificent manner. (Not a Magnificent Manor. Although that would be a pretty cool disappearing act, actually...)

[Stux]

In one game our ranger was destroyed by a Sphere of Annihilation, brought back through wishes, and then promptly badly failed a jump check and fell in to lava, killing him. No wishes left. Our rogue was pissed off, as it was his ring of wishes used to bring the ranger back!

Our DM was not cruel and character deaths were pretty rare.

[DSmaster21]

I had a human avenger GMPC that left on a dragon. I was running a campaign of 4e that got up to level 8 and I figured that since the players had fought a dragon before they would remember their near-deaths as it strafed their melee wielding butts. Turns out they didn't so they all (for the most part charged while my character held back after trying to talk them out of it. They were getting owned so my character snuck up to and climbed a boulder. I then waited for the dragon to come back for another run and tried an acrobatics and athletics check. I critted on the acro and the athletics was a 16 without mod so I leapt onto its arm and climbed to its back. The dragon was too distracted by a guy on his back stabbing a greatsword through its scales to continue the fight with those on the ground so it flew in a straight line and left them in the dust. I was thinking that they would eventually reach where we came down and find one of the bodies (I was going to battle them against each other in my down time.) but that was the last session before many of them left for college so my Avenger is still out there on the back of a dragon furiously trying to pierce its scales.

In my first campaign (Basic Fantasy RPG) that I ever played we reached 3-4 level when the DM decided to have our town attacked by a wyvern. We naturally tracked it to its lair. We were almost all killed in the fight when my human barbarian decided that we needed to get out. I had him pick up our halfling and goblin allies and throw them outside. The others grabbed the wounded and started limp out while I stood my ground. During the next turn my HP got dropped to negative 19 (in BFRPG a barbarian class feature is that he only dies on his negative con + con mod and I rolled the max of 18 which gave a +3 mod. This is why everyone started taking least one level of Barbarian). My Barbarian turned back and apologized to his conscious allies and then took up our dwarf paladin's warhammer and swung it and his battleaxe at the ceiling and brought it down.

[Spore]

I like that thread. My druid however died pretty undramatically. It might still be hilarious in context. So we're basically defending the main entrance of an ancient dwarven community from the army of the evil sorcereress bent on conquest and I play "tank" with my animal companion and a summoned bear "flanking" me. I am huge, so we cover 6 spaces of the 9 spaces wide bridge.

While we are pushing back the hordes, highly dangerous mercenaries "backstab" the group and nearly kill our archer, severely wounding our gish. I jokingly laugh about how I hold the line while the group gets murdered behind me. Then a crit happens along with a crit card.

"Sword in the forehead: Double damage and 1d4 Con damage." it said.
"You take 34 damage and....4 Con damage."
"Well, it appears that a nameless henchman killed me."
Wha....what?"

End of the story, we killed off two mercenaries (they, that is) and we won the fight for now, but I am still baffled on how I have been killed by a CR 4 hobgoblin captain while the others killed a CR 14 encounter.

[HolyCouncilMagi]

Hm. I guess it depends on your definition of 'leaving' but in a former campaign of mine, the party had to leave a land that was being oppressed by a necromancer dictator in order to stop a homebrewed super-powerful elemental of Law who wanted to eliminate life so there would be no more change in the planes. However, we couldn't just leave the kingdom unattended, as fighting the elemental would be a long-term goal. Without any input from the rest of the party, the LG Fighter intentionally took a blast of negative energy and, as per the DM's ruling, became a Wight with full class levels, and let himself appear to be controlled while he got ready to fight the tyranny from the inside... And that was the last we saw of him...

Or at least it would've been, but it turns out that despite the player rolling a new character, he was also now on a solo campaign with the DM in the necromancer's land. And we eventually met up again, conveniently right after the player's new PC ninja/cleric got ganked by a devil.

Hm.

[Red Fel]

Glad to see this is an entertaining thread. I think I'm ready to share one of my stories now.

This was a Dragonlance campaign. I was the only player who had a character who had perma-died. (This was a conscious choice on my part - he was an LE samurai-type, and it was his time.) My new character was a Noble Draconian, and arguably one of only two Good characters in the party; certainly the only character who wasn't a total sociopathic kleptomaniac murderhobo. He was adventuring with the party because of their noble quest involving a certain spear of some renown - ironically, this character was one of two people in the party who could handle the thing without screaming in pain. The DM, who was amused by the players but a little annoyed with how conveniently evil they could get, decided to reward me for this, and we conspired to a fitting ending to remind the players that you can be more than just a protagonist.

During the campaign, my character received some missives which he did not share with the party. Come the epic climactic battle against a dragon-demigod-undead-thing-which-should-not-be in a demiplane composed entirely of bones, blah blah, heroes triumphant, cue epilogue-mode.

The DM decides my epilogue should come first. The characters awake to discover that my character is missing; in his place is a note.

In the note, he explains that is has been an honor serving a noble cause with these people, and that he will always value their friendship. He also reveals the nature of the secret missives - the Noble Draconians came into being as a near-extinct breed, and their numbers have been thinning ever since. A small community of Noble Draconians became aware of this character's presence, and wants to recruit him as a role model, guardian and breeding male. He believed this to be a noble cause, now that his quest with the party was done, and departed to join his own kind.

He finishes the note with an observation that the PCs were kind of evil, and kind of jerks, and please don't ever look for me okay thanks bye.

The DM and I exchanged amused looks while the rest of the players just sat there, like, "wait what?"

[Fax Celestis]

I had a Giovanni in a V:tM game that accidentally sparked Gehenna by botching a Necromancy roll and summoning up the spectre of an angry, vengeful vampire hunter and Pentex exec.

That botched roll killed him immediately and quite a few vampires afterwards.

[Spore]

I had a Giovanni in a V:tM game that accidentally sparked Gehenna by botching a Necromancy roll and summoning up the spectre of an angry, vengeful vampire hunter and Pentex exec.

That botched roll killed him immediately and quite a few vampires afterwards.

I don't get that at all, sorry. Translation please!

[BWR]

V:tM - Vampire: The Masquerade. Game about being vampires and fighting the beast within (oh, the angst!)
Gehenna - the prophesized end of the world
Giovanni - a clan and family of vampires, specializing in necromancy
Pentex - a company from the sister game Werewolf: the Apocalypse. In W:tA you fight the destruction of the natural world and Pentex is the caricature bad company whose secret mission is to actively destroy everything natural.

[Fax Celestis]

In D&D terms: my dwarf nat 1'd a Diplomacy check on a gate spell used to summon Baphomet (Demon Lord of Vengeance), causing him to fly into a fury, kill the summoner (me), and start the apocalypse, starting with a genocide of every dwarf ever and with particular attention to dwarven summoners.

[Arc_knight25]

Was coming to the end of our campaign, We had started with quite a few people and now dwindled down to just 4 of us. The DM wanted to start a new campaign so for our final session he introduced the Deck of many things.

My g/f at the time was a human fighter, she got a new loyal servant a keep and a few levels out of the deck.

My friend lost his soul and we had to fight death to get it back. More barter with him since I had found a nightmare steed. The steed for the soul all was good.

Then my turn. I got a keep, a bonus to a few abilities and then I get enslaved by one of the Princes of Hell. Its what you get for playing with a deck of many things. So as I'm pretty much naked in a cage with the Demon Prince looking through his new found items, notices the deck of many things. Being a gambling demon I guess he drew a card. Card he draws is Ruin. He loses everything in his possession. So now I am free to leave so I book it. The Prince is just to stunned to do anything. We figured that since a whole layer of the Abyss was now lacking a leader that the celestial armies of good had a good chance on taking some ground.

We were playing 1st ed.

[Dawgmoah]

In the best traditions of Monty Python and the Holy Grail a band of 3rd level adventurers decided to attack a two story castle built of stone and held by hobgoblins.

The hobgoblins had cleared everything around their castle, boulders, trees, bushes, etc, to form a zone at least 500 feet around the fortress, and had lookouts on the walls.

The party stopped on the crest of a hill looking down at the fortress and began to discuss how they may be able to attack without begin targeted by hobgoblins with ranged weapons. That's when one of the lads, a fighter, drew his sword and began running towards the castle.

What does the rest of the party do? They all begin yelling and follow the fighter. Out of the five, four made it to the closed gate and by the time the gate was forced there were two survivors who then died trying to get down the hallway...

[Darcand]

I had a CN half orc bard who joined a campaign already in progress. The story was that I was looking for the same NPC as the party at that point in the campaign. Once the party found the missing NPC my character (not really caring about savibg the city from the BBEG) called it a job well done and left the party.


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[Sir Chuckles]

I once died by pile-driving Asmodeus from orbit, killing us both.

I was a Weretiger with Iron Body cast on myself.

[Scumbaggery]

The campaign was a Frostfell setting.

I was playing an Orc barbarian/fist of the forest/frost rager. I had an abysmally low Intelligence score (5-6 I think) with a 14 in Wisdom and played the part of a nature-savvy idiot pretty well. His name was Grimlokk.

The other character of note was a cloisetered cleric of Pelor, and he did a pretty good job at playing a very snooty priest. The player in question was also kind of a jerk to me IRL too, so I made no hesitation to have my burly Orc have appropriate responses in-character.

We're fighting this Gargantuan Zombie Kraken/Squid thing in the middle of a frozen lake. The priest pitifully attempted to turn it, with no luck. Zombie Squid did not like this, however, and decided to toss our pompous priest into the air in response. As he flew up into the air, the player looked at me and told me both in and out of character: "THIS IS YOUR FAULT, GRIMLOKK!"

Grimlokk did not like this. With a mighty jump check, he sprung into the air and made a grapple check to try and grab him. The priest thought I was trying to save him, and intentionally failed the check. In reality, Grimlokk was pile-driving him into the ice. He survived the initial crash (barely) and was rendered unconscious, but then was thrown at the Zombie Squid as a distraction while the rest of us killed it. When asked by the rest of the party why, Grimlokk responded with: "he hurt Grimlokk feeling!"

[Sith_Happens]

So two nights ago my current group sits down to play, and things quickly get about twice as trippy as normal. Which is really something, given how trippy the campaign already is normally. We eventually find out this is because we're still asleep and the whole sequence has been the slightly-more-than-slightly-insane party Druid's hippy-dream-quest, which the rest of us are tagging along in thanks to vaguely-defined nature spirit shenanigans.

Shortly after that, we end up fighting a henchman of the BBEG who had snuck into the dream to assassinate us, during which fight the dream suddenly melts away and drops us awake in the middle of town in our exact positions at the time. Once we win, the giant talking tengu mask from the dream that the Druid apparently worships appears again and tells him he's "worthy." The Druid proceeds to float into the air and fade away in a brilliant light while exclaiming that he's finally "become the forest," which is in turn followed by his pseudo-cohort (we're too low level to actually have Leadership yet) riding off into the sunrise.

The DM then adjourns the session, and the Druid player tells us that
1. He's leaving the campaign due to time constraints.
2. His "cohort" was a severely deoptimized 6th-level dip build with Leadership and the Druid was the actual cohort.


...Do I win?:smallwink:

[Red Rubber Band]

*snip*

That was pretty cool. Was the pseudo-cohort originally planned out like that? Or was it something they changed/made up recently?

[Sith_Happens]

That was pretty cool. Was the pseudo-cohort originally planned out like that? Or was it something they changed/made up recently?

Originally planned like that. The reveal was especially amusing because it was a comic-relief character (and the de facto mascot NPC of our previous campaign that the Druid player DMed, imported via an unspecified dimensional travel accident) whose total contribution to combat over six sessions was one use of Inspire Courage and two Grease spells.

[Necroticplague]

At the climax of a campaign, we fought an enemy caster face-to face as he opened up a permanent gate to Hell). Of course, he tries to fling us through so we get torn apart by whatever. However, my readied action was to grapple him as soon as i was within distance. Unfortunately for him, this occured when i was flying past him due to being launched with TK. I managed to land the touch attack to grab on. And unfortunately for him, he failed the check to be in control of the grapple. So I ended up dragging him with me through the portal.Though the character was essentially dead for narrative purposes, it's hard to complain when he went out physically dragging someone to hell with him, even if the last exchange was a bit pithy

"Dredmor:Go to Hell!
Byurly Stranjler:Only if you come with me!"

[ArqArturo]

In my very first dnd game, my bard was torn apart (and eaten) by a pack of wolves.

It was traumatizing.

[Adverb]

Once upon a time, I was playing a Bard in a dungeon, which was a terrible idea to begin with. Then there was this badass Wizard we had to take down, and since my spells were only so-so, I read a scroll of antimagic field so that the rest of the party could take him out. Then there was this pit trap that dropped me into some lava.

Antimagic field plus lava is hard to come back from.