Ridiculous Random Encounters and Deaths - Breakdowns of the System

[JBPuffin]

So a couple of minutes ago, I was playing Dragon Age: Inquisition. I've since rage-quitted. The reason?

A buffalo.

Yes, on CASUAL, a single, random buffalo encounter killed my entire level 10 party of two warriors(both one-handers), an archer rogue and a mage (dabbler). True, it gave itself Grit and practically the entire time had 5 HP to its name, but even so. It is probably the most pathetic death I've ever experienced...so it got me wondering, have others suffered worse?

Tell me your own horrific tales of random encounters gone wrong! What should have been easy, and where did things get off track? Help me get over my shame :smallfrown:.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I can't summon any to mind right now, but read up on some Dwarf Fortress stories. This is exactly what happens in that game all the time.

[druid91]

That time I ran into Entei outside of cherryblossom city or whatever the first city is called.

And then he roared and my pokemon ran away.

Dwarf Fortress, the time I was walking along and then an arrow struck me in the head and I died. Never even saw the shooter.

[Rodin]

Dying to a campfire in Diablo II. No, seriously.

See, in DII Poison damage couldn't kill you. It could only drop you to 1 HP. I was fighting Andariel, and ran out of Health potions. No biggie though - I was a range champ, I can kite. Except, I didn't pay attention to where I was running, and my foot brushed a little fire on the ground.

THUMP.

[Corlindale]

Malboros have always been pretty terrifying in Final Fantasy games. They have a nasty habit of starting the battle with an AoE breath attack that inflicts a number of status effects on the entire party (including Confusion, which makes you lose control of the characters). Unless you have some form of protection against this, it's pretty much game over.

Farming Malboro tentacles in Final Fantasy VIII (which you needed to obtain one of the powerful summons) was thus a pretty nerve-wracking experience.

[JustPlayItLoud]

Blasters in Nido in Phantasy Star II. Way too strong for that point in the game, powerful area attack, likes to appear in groups, likes to ambush you, and the game has a ridiculously low escape rate. Just Google it to hear the horror stories.

[Inevitability]

I play nethack. This alone should be enough. I once had a character die to, I kid you not, a newt. Granted, he was paralyzed at the time, but still.

[Gnoman]

Dying to a campfire in Diablo II. No, seriously.

See, in DII Poison damage couldn't kill you. It could only drop you to 1 HP. I was fighting Andariel, and ran out of Health potions. No biggie though - I was a range champ, I can kite. Except, I didn't pay attention to where I was running, and my foot brushed a little fire on the ground.

THUMP.

In Diablo I you could kill yourself by equipping the wrong sword. One of the unique weapons in that game had -10 HP as a stat. So you get down to 9 HP left and equip it...

This was particularly bad because death wasn't a slap on the wrist in Diablo I like it was in D2. You died, you had to reload, and there was no autosave.

[Winterwind]

In Diablo I you could kill yourself by equipping the wrong sword. One of the unique weapons in that game had -10 HP as a stat. So you get down to 9 HP left and equip it...You could also kill yourself by unequipping the wrong item. If you had anything that gave you +X HP, if you unequipped it, it wouldn't recalculate your HP based on your relative health, it would simply subtract that amount of HP. So it was entirely possible the only thing keeping you alive was some item you held, and if you swapped that out for something else, bam, death.


This was particularly bad because death wasn't a slap on the wrist in Diablo I like it was in D2. You died, you had to reload, and there was no autosave.It was worse in multiplayer, because there, it actually functioned like in D2 (drop your equipment where you died, revive in town), except if you left the game, it wouldn't bring your corpse to the town next time you loaded - you had to retrieve your stuff from the dungeon or lose it all, and getting there with basically no equipment to speak of, if there were monsters in the way, was much more difficult in D1 than in D2.

[Gnoman]

You could also kill yourself by unequipping the wrong item. If you had anything that gave you +X HP, if you unequipped it, it wouldn't recalculate your HP based on your relative health, it would simply subtract that amount of HP. So it was entirely possible the only thing keeping you alive was some item you held, and if you swapped that out for something else, bam, death.

Never had that happen. I DID have an incident with Griswold's Edge (+20 MP, -20 HP) where I didn't realize just how low my HP was, and I needed just a little more MP to cast Town Portal.

[Razgriez]

I do not wish to count the tales of the number of times my crew has suffocated to death in FTL. Either because I was in a nebula and couldn't find where the heck a breach or fire was, or because a Zoltan Crew member passed through the Oxygen room causing the game to auto-reroute power, and when the Zoltan left, suddenly I had zero power to O2, and didn't realize until it was too late why my Oxygen was being depleted, trapping my crew in an airless Med-bay. Double points of shame and embarrassment if this all happened, while an Ion Storm was also occurring....

In Star Trek Online: As someone typically captaining Escorts, the number of times I've been flying length wise along a Borg Unimatrix ship making strafing runs with my cannons, only for it to lose it's last HP, and because I have power routed from Auxillery (Turning), and Engines (Speed) to boost Weapon power, I tend to get caught in Warp Core Breach explosions (which, for a ship that nearly rivals some of the smaller Warhammer 40,000/Battle Fleet Gothic ships, tends to be rather large). Note to others, Do not perform fly-bys of ships about to explode, not only is the pattern full, it's also probably lethal....

MechWarrior/Battletech games: Just, any time you're in an Assault Class mech, (80 to 100 tons), and it get's destroyed by an annoying little Light Mech (20-35 tons), typically mounting only 2 (lower weight) energy weapons. Especially since virtually all Assault mechs tend to mount at least 1 weapon that puts out over 10 Damage, or a bunch of lighter weapons for Beam Spam, or More Dakka., and 1 or two hits is usually enough from those weapons to strip the armor from said light mechs, or destroy a part completely. (As Said light mechs also tend to mount XL engines to get a speed, and weight advantage, said hits are usually enough to core out a side torso, and thus, the engine, causing them to cartwheel down the hill in destruction.... or they would if they weren't so nearly impossible to hit! Stand still dang it! *Shakes fist in mock rage*, I only get 7 Shots per ton/critical slot of AC/20 ammo!)

[Rodin]

It was worse in multiplayer, because there, it actually functioned like in D2 (drop your equipment where you died, revive in town), except if you left the game, it wouldn't bring your corpse to the town next time you loaded - you had to retrieve your stuff from the dungeon or lose it all, and getting there with basically no equipment to speak of, if there were monsters in the way, was much more difficult in D1 than in D2.

Speaking of D1 Multiplayer, the most creative ganking I ever got came from that game. A higher level character had helpfully opened a Town Portal to the Catacombs to let me get a jump on exploring deeper. I go through the portal, and find that he had carefully rounded up as many Goatmen Archers as he possibly could, and when I stepped through the portal there was a perfect circle that fired in sync so that I ate around 50 arrows simultaneously.

When someone goes through THAT much trouble to kill you, you can't get mad. You just have to applaud their ingenuity.

[Brother Oni]

Final Fantasy Tactics. During the prologue when you're maybe 1 or 2 battles in, it's possible to trigger a random encounter with ~5 yellow chocobo while you're all low level Squires and Chemists (starting job classes).

Since they out damage you, out run you and can self heal, this typically results in a TPK. As this is a PS1 era console RPG, you restart from your last save and there's no autosave function.

[Wraith]

The guys with whom I play Red Dead Redemption have an endless supply of such stories.

There's the guy who was walking down Main Street in Armadillo and, aiming for another player, accidentally killed the dog who sits outside the train station. The entire town went ape-s*** and obliterated him instantly in a hail of bullets while otherwise ignoring the gunfight between 5 other players going off around them.

There's the guy who was having a fist fight on top of a building (don't ask) when he tripped and fell over. The physics were as such that his character rolled down the slope of the roof.... very.... very.... very.... slowly.... flailing and ragdolling for about 60 seconds to move ~10feet before finally lurching over the edge and dying when he hit the floor.

There's the guy who was trying to get Throwing Knife kills who spent 5 minutes slowly and carefully stalking another player, hiding behind trees, crawling and rolling along the ground.... Only to be ganked by the 4 cougars that the other player had deliberately been kiting towards them at the time.

Then there's the guy who was riding his horse at full tilt whom I shot at with the Explosive Rifle. I missed him but insta-gibbed his horse out from under him. He continued in the air for a few seconds like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, floating along with his legs around an invisible saddle before he finally realised that gravity was a thing and face-planted into the road.
And then my other friend throwing-knifed him in the back of the head as he tried to get up.

And my own personal favourite - Throwing a hatchet into the back of my own horse's head while riding it, killing it instantly and tipping me over a cliff to ragdoll somewhere in the bottom of what may well have been the grand canyon, surviving by the tiniest sliver of health left.... And then pounced on by a wolf while climbing to my feet. :smallsigh:

I miss that game.

[The Glyphstone]

Wolves in Baldur's Gate. At a high difficulty level, one wolf could TPK your whole party unless you got lucky with kiting and ranged attacks.

Or, for that matter, Baldur's Gate at the highest difficulty level - your character could be killed during an unskippable cutscene at the very beginning of the game.

[Cyber Punk]

Ah, that reminds me of the days I was an avid ADOM gamer. Had one of my mid-level characters get killed by my more-powerful-than-I pet because he got in the way of a firebolt. Or the first time I tried to mix two potions of water and KA-BLOOEY!

Who dies from an explosion caused by mixing water with water?

[Gnoman]

Obviously, someone really bad at Alchemy.

[Knaight]

Honestly, the buffalo doesn't seem so bad. The Fabled Lands game books have a fight with a bull which is nastier than another with a dragon, where the description explicitly mentions that bulls in bull fighting are pre-injured and still very dangerous, and this one isn't pre-injured.


Obviously, someone really bad at Alchemy.
Are you kidding? Someone figured out how to make an explosion by reacting water with water. That's alchemy prodigy material right there, and it's a shame they died in the process. The alchemical field will never recover.

[DigoDragon]

The original NES Legend of Zelda. Getting the White Sword can be tricky and I managed to reach the cave with just a sliver of health. Picked up the sword, exited the cave. Baddie spawned at the cave entrance, causing a body slam and killing me. D'ooh. XD


MechWarrior/Battletech games

Mechwarrior 2 Mercs, I landed on the planet with an NPC I hired along. I gave him the 100 ton Atlas, figuring it would take effort for him not to hurt something with that mech. First encounter of the mission was against two little elementals (they're like, 1 ton powersuits?). They both fired at the atlas. Both hit the head. Head exploded.

Wow, right out the gate!

I managed to complete the mission. My NPC buddy was dead, but I recovered the atlas. Sure enough, the head's armor and structure was gone. The rest of the mech was in pristine condition. :smalltongue:

[Derjuin]

ADOM thrives on out-of-depth encounters. Whether it's the ones generated by the quirk of the Small Cave (enemies are always spawned at 2x your level), or the randomly chosen high-level monsters for the Uninteresting Dungeon (werewolf lord, ugh) or the Dwarven Halls (could be almost anything in the game), or even a rat that happened to cross a chaos corruption trap too many times and turned into a writhing mass of primal chaos (under level, like, 30, these things are guaranteed to kill you).

[OrcusMcP]

They don't strictly count as random, but the Evil Doors from the Magnetic cave in FF4 were utter bullcrap. YOu fought one anytime you wanted to go through a door and they had insta-death moves that couldn't be countered. Bullcrap, I tell you.

[Mando Knight]

I managed to complete the mission. My NPC buddy was dead, but I recovered the atlas. Sure enough, the head's armor and structure was gone. The rest of the mech was in pristine condition. :smalltongue:

Well, that's what you do when you want to nab someone else's BattleMech. Pop the head, take the body.

[Gnoman]

They don't strictly count as random, but the Evil Doors from the Magnetic cave in FF4 were utter bullcrap. YOu fought one anytime you wanted to go through a door and they had insta-death moves that couldn't be countered. Bullcrap, I tell you.

They always tell you who they're going to attack, and reflect works on the death attack. Which they aren't immune to.

[OrcusMcP]

They always tell you who they're going to attack, and reflect works on the death attack. Which they aren't immune to.

That would've been nice to have learned when I was 11. :smallwink:

[DigoDragon]

That would've been nice to have learned when I was 11. :smallwink:

The caveat is having your Reflect up before the door casts death. :smallbiggrin:

[Mx.Silver]

While it's not technically an encounter that went wrong, in the sense most of the examples in this thread are, I am reminded of the incident that made me give-up trying to play Arcanum.
For the purposes of this story, there are two things you'll need to know about Arcanum. Firstly, all characters in it have a stamina bar in addition to their HP bar. This fuels casting spells and taking various actions in combat (e.g. Running, attacking multiple times, etc.) but if it ever goes into the negatives then the character falls unconscious for as long as it takes for the bar to recharge into the positives.
Secondly, all characters suffer from critical miss chances in combat, all of which involve something bad happening to the character. The two most common negative effects are injuring yourself and losing stamina.

On this attempted to playthrough I'd decided to roll-up a fairly straight-forward mélee character, and was exploring the first area with the AI companion character Virgil when I ran-into a hostile wolf and a small goblin-like shaman. Not a particularly challenging fight.
The wolf charges my character, but fluffs its attacks, while Virgil runs ahead to engage the shaman. My character swings at the wolf and critically misses, taking some damage and losing half their stamina. Then the shaman casts a spell that paralysis Virgil.
Things aren't looking great, but in the next the round the Shaman critically misses and disarms itself. Then the wolf critically misses and falls unconscious.
Over the next couple of rounds, my character finishes off the wolf and rushes over to assist the still paralysed Virgil. My character's stamina bar is now about 2/3rds empty, but at the time I think that, because the character is specced for combat, I'll be able to kill the shaman before that's a problem.
My character critically misses on their first swing and falls unconscious.
Ordinarily, this would be the time I'd reload, since my party is now completely defenceless against an enemy who I haven't landed a single hit against. But because both characters are incapacitated, it's never my turn, so I can't access the menu. So instead I'm forced to sit there and watch as the enemies kill my team and I get booted back to the main menu.


Except the enemy shaman is still disarmed. It can barely hit either incapacitated character, and only does miniscule amounts of damage when its blows land. But the thing is, critical miss damage isn't determined by weapon damage.
So over the following countless rounds of 'combat', at least 5 minutes of real time, the damage from the enemy shaman's critical misses starts to accumulate. Eventually it reaches the level where its scripted behaviour is 'run away from the source of damage' and it flees from mélee range with the two characters who are completely incapable of attacking it. Of course, once it's out of combat there's nothing else for it to do, and the AI is quite aggressive, so after a couple of rounds of dithering, it charges back in to combat. Until it critically misses again, causing it to repeat the process.

It continues to repeat this process until the critical miss damage kills it.

With the combat now over Virgil and my character recover, having taken only minor injuries.



I have not played Arcanum since.

[DigoDragon]

I have not played Arcanum since.

Wow, that is an amazing story. Quite funny.

"I dunno what happened. I critically missed and fell unconscious. Then I woke up at second level!"

[JNAProductions]

Tales of Maj'Eyal. With the Everything Is Unique Addon. 'Nough said. (If you play the game.)

For everyone who doesn't, unique monsters have classes. Up to three of them, in fact, and EIU can up that limit. So there I am, level 3 (when uniques start to spawn) and the very next floor has nothing but class level having monsters. As I'm fighting one, he almost one-shots me (I had a +20 HP item on, he took me down to 15 in one hit) and I resign myself to death. I choose my attack, and suddenly I'm back up to 130 HP, when I attacked with 120 max and 15 current. I'm immediately knocked right back down, but I notice I'm level 4.

Thing is, in ToME, anytime an enemy dies on the floor you're on you gain experience, and there was a special event that made Nagas fight Yaechs elsewhere in the level. So almost every time the guy I was fighting attacked, I got a level up and full HP restore because an enemy was killed somwhere else. Saved my butt repeatedly.

I then make it all the way to the bottom (somewhere around level 10) and find the boss with two minions. Bosses aren't affected by EIU, so I get her down by 25% HP before too long. Then an badly aimed shot from the summoned monster one of her minions have kills her the rest of the way in one hit. I just facepalm, at this point, because my enemies are killing each other more than I am.

So knowing I'm sorely outclassed, all I need to do is grab the boss loot for an artifact and run. I maneuver carefully around the Thought-Form Bowman's arrows (the summon that had killed the boss) which is not easy in ToME, and finally I'm one step away from the loot. I take a step forward...

And get one-shotted by the Solipsist Naga that had actually summoned the blasted Bowman. -_-
Completely forgot there had to be one.

Long story short, when the game is hard enough on its own, don't add something that makes every single enemy more powerful than a boss.

[Knaight]

Long story short, when the game is hard enough on its own, don't add something that makes every single enemy more powerful than a boss.

That does sound like general best practices, though I'd imagine that just adding classes does at least leave the bosses hit point totals intact, which at least leaves the scarier bosses on the high end. Just not the likes of Norgen, the shade, or the sandworm queen.

[Cristo Meyers]

Another for Dragon Age: Inquisition. This is the huge crack for me in what is otherwise a really good game:

There's a spot in the Emerald Graves area that is patrolled by giants and brontos. The brontos, for those you don't know, are essentially rhinos: herbivores and if you leave them alone, docile. Giants are, well, giants. They want to eat you. But the rewards for killing them can often be worthwhile.

However, since the area is so crowded, the brontos often get clipped by an AoE or an overzealous party member. Brontos have a lot of defense and health, so it can take a long time to kill one.

I think you're all seeing where this is going:

Fight giant, clip Bronto.
Fight Bronto, clip another Bronto.
Kill one Bronto, clip yet another Bronto.

...and so on and so on until you're dealing with a horde of the damn things just because you wanted to kill a giant. This will happen, almost without fail, you you attempt to kill just about anything in the area.