Most Cruel Encounter Thread: Post the best way you screwed with your party

[FishBonePendant]

I had a player who was complaining that the encounters they were running were "too easy" and didn't force any real thinking for how to handle them (He was an Evoker wizard who shot literally everything he saw, lack of thinking is YOUR problem buddy) So I switched out a few rooms in the temple the were crawling through with some traps that don't trigger a spot check.

One room had a glowing pool in the center of it that spawned one frog type creature every 4 rounds, as soon as it showed up, said wizard wasted his last use of magic missile ignoring the knowledge check he could've made. Oh well, th next round that frog had morphed into 4 frogs from being killed with magic damage. Then our team figured I was ****ing with our wizard by magic things powered by evocation spells, WRONGO. Slashing splits them in two, piercing splits them in 3 (they explode from poking) and magic damage melts them into 4.

After a few rounds the party is cornered by about 150 1HD frogs and scared ****less because 1 in 20 keep critting.

Eventually the FIGHTER realized no one has a bludgeoning weapon so they haven't tried that damage type yet. The wizard transforms the ranger's animal companion into stone, and our fighter starts swinging like there's no tomorrow. After the room was cleared they had a jolly time solving the puzzle to escape the room.

[Someonelse]

LOL
That's awesome! I'm totally going to steal that idea!

[Kazudo]

Toki. Complete immunity to all damage except nonlethal potassium-based damage to the ocular region.

The group had to scale a very violent colossal golem to his eyes and cram bananas in them in order to breach his DR.

[Segev]

There were elemental rifts opening up all over a large area, and trouble was coming through them. The party eventually tracked this down to a wizard's tower, where they found a Janni woman desperately moving from one huge spellbook to another (4 in total) as she attempted to keep the rifts from going out of control. Turned out the dwarven wizard had summoned her without properly binding her and tried to use her for his lacivious pleasures. She responded lethally. But now she can't shut down his experiments, and they're going wild.

The party, having more hands and thus time to do some searching while she kept working, figured out that the dwarf did have a canned solution, but it was definitely the "big red off switch" sort of event:

He had a ritual with a pre-arranged contractual binding that would call an Efreeti. One wish could seal the rifts.


The party stalled out trying to figure out what to do with the remaining two.

[Gabrosin]

In a campaign I DM'd several years ago, the party was approached by a desperate young woman trying to get her daughter back from a local noble, who had kidnapped her years ago and was raising her as his own. Moved by her plight, the heroes agreed to help her. They did a little research and discovered that the noble used to be a respected warrior, and retained guards loyal to him that would be sufficient to kick the party's ass in an open fight, so stealth would be necessary. They surveilled the noble's two-story house, and came up with a plan. The young woman would go to the house one night, with one of the party members as her attendant, and plead for the return of her daughter. While the noble was distracted by this, the rest of the party would sneak up onto a second-story balcony and infiltrate the upper floor, looking for the girl in her bedroom and carrying her off.

The plan went great, until the infiltration team found the girl with her tutor, a moderately powerful wizard. The party mage quickly stuck a Silence spell to the room... but it wasn't quite large enough to cover the whole area. The girl panicked, ran to one corner of the room, and screamed her lungs out: DADDY DADDY DADDY DADDY!

Chaos ensued. The party beat the tutor to unconsciousness, snared the little girl, and started to escape. The party member downstairs barely survived to get out the front door. The young woman disappeared in the confusion.

The noble and his guards pursued the party away from the house, and it became clear they were looking at a TPK or close to it. They abandoned the girl and booked it, and managed to get away. Now they were wanted fugitives in the city.

They later saw the young woman again, briefly. She thanked them for the diversion; turns out all she wanted to do was loot the valuable treasure the noble had hidden in the basement, and the girl wasn't hers at all. Then she Dimension Doored out of there before they could stop her.

That was the very last time the party forgot to attempt their Sense Motive checks.

[Kazyan]

Lilitu + Elite Array + 10 levels of Soul Eater + 2 levels of Battle Dancer + 600,000 gp of magic items and loot + Life Drain feat + Scroll of Quickshift = Every round, a random PC dies, the monster is back to full health, and its AC remains in the 50s. CR 23.

I had to make it do a few tactically suboptimal things to avoid a TPK.

[Renen]

Those frogs cant ALL attack at once can they?

[Gildedragon]

I tossed this guy (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/red-jester) at them, I gnomed him because, well, i felt gnome was fitting.
Second TPW...

First one was throwing a dinosaur stampede at them... I really didn't expect them to fail their grapple checks so bad and get eaten.

[FishBonePendant]

Those frogs cant ALL attack at once can they?

Tiny size, they can enter each other's square. But it's not like all 150 were attacking

[Telok]

In the dungeon of a famous and legendary lich there were golems. He'd made two stone golems in life as bodyguards, in lichdom he had one stone and one flesh golem.

You'd think that an over-geared level 9 party of five could handle seperate CR 11 and CR 7 encounters. Both times most party members were unable to damage the golems, people were negative hp, and the artificer had to do most of the damage with blast rods.

[Mr Adventurer]

"Mittens".

Take a Tyrannosaur. Advance it as much as you can and apply the Spellwarped template until it's CR is APL+3; this works great because Animal HD are 4 per +1 CR and Spellwarped has HD-dependent benefits including SR.

Then put a howdah on its back in which rides a Simulacrum of Elminster (so effectively a 10th level wizard).

[Captnq]

Pack of Werewolves.

I stripped the flesh from their bones and cast them into the molten silver lakes of erebus where there were told they would burn until the end of days.

Then I said, "Suddenly you discover yourself splashing in a silver puddle. You flop out and look around a dimly lit cavern. Corpses of dead crinoses are heaped all around you by the thousands. The rest of the party is climbing out of their own silver puddles. There is no more lake of silver. The Structure in the middle of where the lake where you were judged is a pile of rubble. Everything is crumbling and the ground periodically shakes. When it does, chunks of rock fall from the roof and break against the ground, showering you with dust and grit.

One of the players asked, "Gaia, How long were we in there?"
I replied, "It's Thursday. Later that same week."