Most epic PC death!

[Vexxaar]

So what was the most epic PC death you've ever had in a campaign, especially from a storyline perspective? Have you had an epic twist that you just weren't expecting?
:smallamused:

[Haluesen]

Well I had one PC death that itself wasn't all that epic, but was a pretty good twist. So I think that counts, and got us to look at our enemies in a different way.

It was a 3.5 game where we incorporated klingons (a long story there) but without their usual tech, brought to standard D&D tech level. Well we were wandering some ruined dungeon while on the search for a group of them that betrayed their people and now were living as brigands, sent by their emperor to stop them from acquiring a powerful artifact and in general putting them to death for treason. Well, we get into the room with the leaders of these bandits, and start to fight them. We all got so wrapped up in fighting them, the standard boss encounter, that we didn't expect any major surprises. And Spot checks were not on our side. The DM rolls an attack and damage, then my character (bard) had a sudden hole fried in him. Imagine our surprise at seeing that the "artifact" was the only working phaser (sp?). Of course after that the others were able to stop him and the other 2 bosses and get the phaser and destroy it, but that was what took them from being fairly standard bandits against our magic into a surprising threat, and my characters death revealed it.

Of course he was later raised, and before that one of the others took one of his hands as a keepsake, but that's not quite epic. :smalltongue:


Here's another little story of going out with style.

So a different DM from our group of players, new game, playing a gestalt barbarian/totemist. Well despite warning of the dangers of a particular dungeon room, our characters decided to face the threat within and found a few gorgons and a beholder. Now the gorgons were in our encounter level but not the beholder, then again we were warned. So we try to fight the group, and between eyes beams and turning to stone the fight was not going well. There was just my guy left and one other character, who made it clear she was grabbing a PC and running for it, and my barbarian didn't have much fight left in him. But I wanted to at least do something, maybe to buy time or maybe just to proverbially flip the bird to the beholder. So I asked the DM if I could throw one of the gorgons. :smallbiggrin: She said I could try, so I rolled a grapple and a Str check, and next thing I know I'm picking up the big stone guy. Yay for raging! So yeah, I threw it at the beholder, damaged him a fair bit, and got some cocky dialogue while distracting him before my death. Of course the DM was fair and we were able to get some rezzes, but the others just got a normal rez. My barbarian there got raised directly by what was our campaigns god of brawling basically, complete with a thumbs up for the ballsy move. :smallamused: Suffice it to say, a fight that was always remembered.

[Phelix-Mu]

I think it was a winged-demon of some kind, it took the party cleric of Kord/Sanctified One of Kord, and grabbed him, flying up into the air. For some reason I'm not clear on, this cleric (must have been level 12 plus or so) didn't have a means of flight at hand, and was in pretty bad shape. So, I believe what happened was that he decided to trigger triad spell on that one spell that causes yourself to explode (and he seemed to have fatally misunderstood that spell). I gave him a chance to retcon after I explained that allowing multiple castings of a suicide spell is not all that useful, but I think he still tried to blow the thing up, high in the air above a frigid mountain.

Needless to say, the demon died (he could have beat it to death at that point, honestly), and the cleric fell far enough to have killed himself, after exploding.

Luckily, I think the player was starting to tire of that character (some players seem to have a character half-life for whatever they create). Cause after the cleric came back as a dwarf (previously aventi that got reincarnated), and jumped off the side of the ship (in armour) to try to grapple the advanced fiendish kraken (which didn't go too well), the player expressed an interest in making a new character, lol.

[With a box]

What I founded in reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1wdub3/the_strangest_thing_youve_done_with_a_bag_of/

Perception_The_Night

So, my PC's came across the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. No one had the knowledge to disarm it. The solution, stick it in the bag of holding. I determined this was a very clever way to save the city and let it fly. That bag of holding was not opened for a year. (Real Time) Finally, BBEG has the party on the ropes. Only two remain, barely clinging to life. I thought this was the end. After a year of play the party was to fall in the final confrontation atop the tallest mountain in the world. The rougish member takes a mortal wound. With her dying actions she tosses the bag of holding to the fighter, which he proceeds to open unleashing the full power of the nuclear blast. Party dead, world saved. Absolutely the best ending to a campaign I have ever been a part of.

[AlanBruce]

The party in my game was protecting an NPC that came back from the Upper Planes to seal an ancient aboleth back in a Cerulean Sign.

The Aboleth was still caught in the portal, but his minions weren't- shaboaths, eyes of the deep, and half farspawn scrags.

All this happened underwater as the party took a serious beating as they attempted to protect the npc while she finished the ritual, which took a little under 10 rounds to complete, but with the aboleth slinging spells at her and the part's wizard using celerities + tekeprot spells to move her around, it was a daunting task. All the while avoiding the aberrations.

In the end, when the final beast was struck, the npc caster was ready to seal the abolish, buut the party was in the negatives as the entire room began to summon aberrant reinforcements.

All was lost as the aboleth tossed an empowerd and maximized orb of force at the npc.

that's when the drow paladin decided to sacrifice herself for the greater good.

Using her shadowcloak, she jaunted right between the npc and the orb, taking the full blast and utterly killing her.

This gave the npc caster the necessary time to seal the aboleth, which caused the many horrors from beyond to swim back deeper into the caves were they spawned from.

A hard battle. A friend lost (and later revived), but the world was safe.

I did not expect the player to pull that move, though.

[Stuvius]

This isn't very epic but it was fairly funny so....


I was DMing a campaign in which the party had been hired to guard a caravan of supplies on its way to an isolated mining town. Several caravans had mysteriously disappeared along this route. Two days or so outside of the town they were ambushed by a group of lycans, who had been taking out the caravans. The dusk blade in the group took a full attack (I rolled like a champ on the damage :smallsmile:) in the face and was in bad shape. He decides to flee “twelve feet up", his words, a nearby tree. On his next action the lycan easily climbed up the tree and hit him again. The damage took him to negative HP and he fell from the tree dying as a result of the 1 d6 of fall damage not the powerful were bear that was roughing him up. We still give him crap for that one. Whenever his PC is in trouble we start pointing out nearby trees he could flee to.:smallbiggrin:

[bjoern]

I was playing a barbarian/frenzied berserker. I had been playing him for a long time was ready to try something different. We were fighting a dragon who was getting the upper hand on the party and my guy had taken some serious damage. Then the dragon breathed on me a couple times dropping my heath way below zero but deathless frenzy kept me going. The dragon had a horrified look on its face as I walked through the fire, flesh and hair falling away from my body in flaming liquified globs. I kept taking damag from him and just kept gouging him with the great sword. The party used my martyrdom to escape and I stayed behind occupying the dragon. The dragon had only 60 or so HP left when my frenzy expired and I fell to to floor in a heap of scalded flesh and charred bone. I was happy with how he went out.

[AvatarVecna]

I've got two stories: the first is a tale on monks being awesome, and the second is about casters being awesome.

The fight took place on top of an Eberron airship. We were fighting against the BBEG of the campaign (who the DM says was originally going to wipe the floor with us and then leave): a Lich Wizard throwing around Meteor Swarm. We were about 10th level at the time, and after several rounds of combat, the whirling frenzy barbarian, the thrown weapons rogue, the sorcerer/favored soul/mystic theurge, the druid/master of many forms, and the bard/beguiler/ultimate magus were all either taken down or were occupied, leaving only my goliath monk.

Over the course of three turns, I dodged several spells, charged the lich, grappled him, and then ran off the edge still grappling him. With all the buffs I had on me, he couldn't get out; he'd used up his high-level slots "wiping the floor" with us, and had none left for escaping the grapple. So we fell. And then we both died. So what? My 10th level monk just killed a lich with 17 wizard levels who almost TPK'd my group.

The other was a homebrew 20th century world where magic was just being discovered and, while magic was scarce and wizards weren't too powerful (max of 6th level spells), we could design our own spells by doing in-game research using the DM's spell point system. I'd built a gnome with a a talent for illusion but an obsession with evocation. The character died while we were under siege LotR style: all of the PCs were out on the battlefield, and I'd used up my second to last 5th level spell. What the DM didn't remember was that I prepared at least one blasting spell per level, which I saved for emergencies. As the enemy leadership was demanding our surrender, I let loose with my homebrew "Bombing Run" spell and a quickened "Machine Gun Spray" spell. The enemy troops were decimated, and the leadership was hit hard enough for the rest of the party to take them down quickly. Unfortunately, the only way to maximize damage on the leadership was to center it on them (and by extension, us). The rest of the party was well-prepared for AoE blasts on the battlefield. I was not.

[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.
Translation for the non-V:tM inclined:

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.