PDA

View Full Version : Gamer Tales I Really Should Have Died Back There.



King of Casuals
2014-12-15, 02:58 PM
For this one campaign I made a Tiefling samurai named Makoto Tanaka, and due to a combination of 18 constitution, scary good health rolls, and the samurai class feature that lets you keep fighting even when in negative HP, he seemed incapable of dying. One day, our party was given an anonymous tip telling us that an evil drug-lord was currently staying in his summer home filled with loot. We decided to check it out. Now our party currently consisted of me (the ubertank, Tiefling samurai), a halfling summoner with a pet phoenix, a slightly neutral-evil Elf rogue/archer, and an extremely chaotic-evil goblin arsonist with a tendency to cut people open like Tauntauns. After our rogue and goblin promptly failed their stealth checks, the rest of us charged the place, and killed all of the outer guards. When the time came to assault the manor, our rogue had the brilliant idea to torch the opium fields BEFORE be entered the house. Being the tank of the party, I chose to confidently stride through the front doors. There were three shotgun weilding guards inside, all of which hit me directly in the chest. Unfazed, I was charging at the nearest one, trying to distract them before they could reload their guns, when a rifleman shot me directly in the forehead. Got a natural 20 with a rifle, thats 1d12x4 damage. Despite all this, Makoto kept on coming, and killed all four of the guys, then promptly let the rest of the party take care of the drug lord, and fell over on the floor to take a nap.

What are some stories about your characters where they probably should have died, but ended up surviving? I would love to hear them.

YossarianLives
2014-12-15, 03:03 PM
My sorcerer got hit by a poison dart that dealt 5d6 con damage (we were at level 6. I don't know what the DM was thinking) I failed the first fortitude save and that reduced me to 3 con. However the next save I made the check by one thanks to a resistance spell I cast on myself. If I hadn't cast that spell I would have died.

TheCountAlucard
2014-12-15, 04:01 PM
Well, there was the time my brawler got his soul punched off. For a while we thought that had finished him off in a way that felt pretty cheap, but when we checked the errata for the power it turned out to have been something that said brawler was immune to.

DireSickFish
2014-12-15, 04:24 PM
I had a string of crit failures and bad decisions that I was certain was going to leave my character dead. Instead he just ended up insane.

We are in Antartica heading to stop the villan from doing a thing. We don't really know what the thing is other than it summons some giant elder god, one that kills you when you're alone in a frozen waste apparently.

My shotgun blows up on me as we kill the Nazis escorting the sacrifices to the ritual. But we freed the sacrifices and I can just pick up a rifle so that's fine.

Then we get to the ritual building and before going in I ask who brought the dynamite. We had disarmed a dynamite bomb earlier int he session but it was IC months ago. GM had me roll an Idea check to see if we remembered it, which I failed.

Disguised as Nazis we find only 2 people in the building the sacrifice is going to take place at. A Nazi officer and a pencil pusher. Also some strange circles but, whatever we figure we kill the badguys we're good. Decide to kill the officer first which was a huuuge mistake.

The death or the gunshot gets one of the circles glowing and some liquid that makes you go crazy if you touch it or look at it starts seeping from the room the pencil pusher was in.

I try and damn the flow so it doesn't reach the glowy portal circle thing. Crit fail on that, so I end up touching the crazy liquid. I also get to see the pencil pusher down the hall standing in the crazy liquid no worse for the wear. I get a phobia of the liquid and run out into the snow -by myself-. At the same time I have to start making checks to ward off possession, all of which has left me with no more than 18 sanity.

Fortunately everyone else got out of dodge soon enough that I wasn't alone for long. The pencil pusher crit failed and didn't posses me. Instead he possess a different party member.

I figure it out and try to kill him, but he just runs back into the building. With my blood phobia I can't follow. So another party member follows and tries to jump through the same portal the badguy-in-my-friends-body just did and dies instantly.

So I end up with longterm madness of anger issues and Hypochondria. Two other players died and I did not expect to be a surviving member.

(Un)Inspired
2014-12-15, 06:15 PM
I had a DM put my Wilder through something he called Dwarven Warnication; a practice he described as combining the best parts of a war with the worst parts of fornication. I had to make a load of fortitude saves. Failure meant taking lethal damage and success meant taking non lethal damage. I still not sure how he decided how many checks I needed to make but when I was done my character was basically an orange that had been squeezed into juice. He survived though.

Faily
2014-12-15, 08:11 PM
In Dragonstar (D&D in Spaaaaace), I survived an encounter with my mercenary, which could best be summed up in this quote:

GM: "The good news... you're at -9, and thanks to Diehard you're stabilized. The bad news... you're being grappled by an Elder Black Pudding."

And that was after another member of the mercenary group, in his upset about the rules of no shooting (we we're trying to avoid making pew-pew noises), threw a mushroom at the Pudding and sat down to light a cigarette, to watch the "show".

Laserlight
2014-12-15, 08:27 PM
Not my character, but in our group, a werewolf got sucked into a jet intake and sprayed out the back of the engine as a fine paste. But the turbine blades weren't silver, so the DM ruled that he survived.

Same character got thrown onto a production line in an ice cream factory. The machinery is supposed to cut ice cream--or errant werewolves--into bricks and pack it into boxes. "Wow, I've never taken damage from being packed in an ice cream box before!"

Lathund
2014-12-16, 05:17 AM
My Archivist found himself grappling with a large, bloated, undead dwarf king. And that king has some weird trait where spikes grew out of his body, which were coated in some sort of filth. I was impaled on one of these spikes and slowly felt my mind was taken over by some extraplanar being. I fall into the negatives, but due to the healing aura of our Dragon Shaman, I wake up again. Just after losing control over my mind, the king kills me off. A few rounds later, he is killed himself.

DM says: "You're at -9 and stable. Go." No possession, nothing. Although he does tell me: "You have cold resistance and low-light vision now." Two in-game days later, he tells me: "You wake up, feeling incredibly stiff. Your skin has changed." My character, a control freak, panics. He rushes to the first Cleric that might help him and asks for an examination. The Cleric indeed notices something weird is going on and manages to cure it (Remove Curse if I remember well). As soon as he does that, I notice something inside me is getting cold and my body starts shutting down. I realise that somehow, my death had been delayed and now that the effect has been dispelled, it is setting in after all. I freak out once more. The Cleric, as well as some of his colleagues, throw a bunch of curative magic at my dying body and somehow manage to save me. No death, no penalty and all former afflictions are gone.

Afterwards, the DM told me I was slowly turning undead before the curse was removed and that indeed, the curse had delayed my death. He also told me that when the effect was dispelled, he decided to roll a few dice and that if he rolled high enough, he would save me. And that indeed happened.

IZ42
2014-12-16, 10:58 AM
Fighting a hobgoblin and a black dragon. I've already been shot 3 times, but I decide to hop onto the Dragon to fight the hobgoblin. The Dragon takes off and my party is left on the ground while I fight a hobgoblin on a dragon over a lake. I finally kick the hobgoblin off (punishing kick) with 10 HP left. The Dragon then barrel rolls, and I fail my grapple check to hang on to him, and hit the lake, at -11 HP, 3 points away from dying. I'm stabilized, but underwater. Then the party druid saves me by evaporating the part of the lake I'm in, and walks in and takes me out.

FreedomFiend
2014-12-16, 02:30 PM
So I was playing Undermountain in Pathfinder with a Cleric of Suni (strong focus on healing), and we'd heard that a couple of young noble children had been dragged underground to be sacrificed to Cthulhu and their father would pay quite handsomely to have them returned. Due to a series of unfortunate events, one party member was polymorphed into a jaguar, I was down four permanent hit points and one hand, no one in the party was above level three, and we were showing up late, just as they started the ceremony. We decided to take the back entrance to reduce the chances that we'd be noticed. We managed to both defeat the guards and disarm/dispell the heavily trapped/enchanted door without raising the alarm, and started making our way in.

Of course, being a Cult of Cthulhu, the room we were in had a massive pool, and the floor was slippery with water and slanted toward said pool. I critically failed my reflex save to walk down the stairs and ended diving into the pool. The GM rolled D% to awaken Cthulhu with a 99.9% chance. He rolled a one hundred, then a ninety-three. So I clambered back onto relatively dry land and decided that Suni must want me to save the hostages pretty damn bad.

As we got farther in, we found out that the cultists were actually on the floor above us. We found this out because there was a hole in the ceiling where they were going to drop down a sacrifice after thoroughly torturing her so that her body could roll into the pool, summoning Cthulhu. Just as we found this hole, we found that there was already blood dripping down, and we didn't want to risk it touching the water, so I threw down my bedroll to catch it. We saw a staircase with a couple of guards and started going for it, but then found that there was actually a small dungeon complex containing dozens of hostages. While the paladin and the bard worked on freeing the hostages, I decided to buy them time by holding back the guards, fully expecting to die.

After several critical failures on their part, I'm still managing to hold my own while my team is escorting the last of the hostages out. Just before the last one is out, the sacrificial victim is thrown down, but doesn't roll into the pool thanks to my bedroll. At this point, the paladin finally decides that he should be the one fighting the guards and comes along to help me. While he was holding them off, I checked on the victim and found that she was still alive. At his point, the GM starts rolling to see if the cultists send reinforcements, with an 83% chance. In the twelve turns that it took to heal her back to consciousness, beat the guards, and scatter, he never once succeeded.

So not only did none of us die when we should have, but we even managed to save every single hostage, including the sacrificial victim. The only thing we lost out of it all was my bedroll.

A_Man
2014-12-16, 10:08 PM
Ha ha, one time, one of my group (ranger) was in a sidequest where he was sent to close up a portal to the underworld. He goes on in, and, with a couple bad rolls, ends up falling into the portal, and wakes up a month later in town. He brings the group into the sidequest (An archer, a wujen, a swordman with a sword which granted spirit sight, and my character, a brawler with a magic item that grants a bezerker rage), and takes us all over to the portal, to help close it up.

Upon arrival, the swordsman sees with his spirit sight 3 wraiths, and warns us, but just as he says it, our WuJen blasts him with a telekenetic blast, knocking him 50 yards away, almost killing him in one shot. Turns out the ranger got possessed by a powerful demon (as in, really good at possessing others) that, when seeing the wujen, left the ranger and got the more powerful wujen under it's control. At this point, no one aside from the swordsman could hurt the Wraiths, so we all gang up on the wujen, who almost kills us, until my brawler activates his Bezerker rage and we tie up the wujen with an anti-magic rope, while the Warrior runs over to help out with the wraiths, and quickly kills them.

Unfortunately, with the wujen no longer able to cast spells, the powerful demon suddenly leaves the Wujen's body and quickly attempts to possess my weak willed bezerking brawler. And, in a twist of fate, my brawler crits his willpower save, and the demon is quickly killed.