1001 Embarassing Ways to Die in D&D

[atemu1234]

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend that boiled down to personal anecdotes about characters dying in remarkably stupid or embarrassing ways in D&D, and I thought that surely everyone who has played for a certain amount of time would get a number of these.

So, without any further ado, here are a couple of mine.

Jumped headfirst into a pit trap, convinced it was an illusion (it was an illusionist's castle, after all). It wasn't.
A half-elf bard, convinced by their success at seducing a dragon, attempted to seduce the tarrasque. No, it did not work.
Disemboweled by a housecat (admitted it was their own fault for playing an elf wizard at low-levels with a con penalty).
Barbarian jumped off of a cliff after the sorcerer bluffed them into thinking he had cast a fly spell on him.
Lighting oneself on fire in an intimidate attempt. Did not take into account the fact he was barely into double-digit hp.
A low-level paladin decided the obviously demonic weapon was a perfect tool for his campaign against evil. Unfortunately, the cursed weapon had other ideas.
Dropping a fireball at one's own feet to take out a Worm that Walks.


Anyone got any others like this?

[danielxcutter]

I don't really play, but I think this would be really stupid: Get TPK'd because your party put all the melee combatants in the front and died horribly because the first ambush wiped out all the squishy casters. You do not have any excuses for that. Not one.

[Droopy McCool]

I can think of a few:

Tackled the bad guy and plunged into a volcano. Later I was told I could have just pushed him.
Last words: "That Tarrasque isn't real, that's just an illusion."
Run over by a party member driving a cart. (Really. There's no joke involved.)
Chose to fight a bear unassisted, unarmed, and underleveled.
Knocked unconcious in a waist deep pool of water. Drowned.

McCool

[stanprollyright]

Tried to kill the (admittedly evil) questgiver: was zapped by Disintegrate.

Tripped by a party member while running from zombies ("it's the goblin way!").

Drowned during a noncombat scenario.

Sold Unholy Water as Holy Water; killed by an angry mob.

[Telok]

* Plane shifts into solid rock. (Ninja, thought the solid cliff was a thin wall.)

* Triggers the trap "Just to see what it does." (It kills you with poison, acid, explosions, and dropping five tons of lava on you from 30 feet up.)

* Friendly fire area of effect Hostile Empathic Transfer (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/empathicTransferHostile.htm).

* Jumping into the "black tarry pool." (Big black pudding, ate him.)

[Bromley20]

Charging the BBEG and impaling yourself on his spear
Accidentally getting 1 shot by the party rogue who was hiding in a pile of books
Illiterate Barbarian mistaking acid for healing potion and pouring it in your mouth
Kleptomaniac rogue putting on an amulet of strangulation
Brain eaten by worms from a favored spawn of Kyuss
Claiming to be a great thief and getting killed by a rival thieves guild member
Forgetting a winter coat
Getting executed for attempting to assassinate your party leader during the night
Everyone was tied to a tree so we wouldn't go flying away during a storm. We forgot to untie someone and left them there...
Getting a javelin to the chest after opening the party face's front door
Accidentally poisoning your towns water supply

[Inevitability]

Be a psion with Ability Burn. Burn too much, and die from HP loss.
Have a party member attack you to figure out how strong that new magic armor is. Die from the crit.
Summon a familiar in an area afflicted by Distort Summons. Die as it attacks you.
Plane shift to the Far Realms to evade pursuers, because 'they will never follow me there!'.
Stand too close to the guy with Death Throes on him.

[Xervous]

Cleric in fullplate rerolls nat 1s so he's feeling good about the jump check to cross the gap over the massive chasm. "But Cleric!" his party members say. "You can still roll a 2"

He rolled a 2.

[Telok]

I remembered a couple.

* Tenth level barbarian dies to a bat swarm. He didn't have a torch, or flint and steel, or a blanket, or a cloak, or... Well, he had a big axe and some magic armor.

* 12th level dread necromancer dies by being pushed off a cliff by another party member as punishment for being useless. The party member was a soulknife.

[Malimar]

The DM drew a bunch of pink and purple circles on the map. My factotum made the knowledge check to recognize them as purple funguses and shrieker mushrooms. We formulated an elaborate plan to use silence to render the shriekers impotent and not wake up the purple funguses.

Turned out the pink circles were purple funguses and the purple circles were shriekers, not the other way 'round as we had assumed. We silenced the purple funguses and tried to walk past them and they attacked.

Such was the ignoble demise of Jack Jackson, Attorney at Law, Specializing in Interspecies Law, Also an Adventurer and his trusty mule, Oxford.

[sage20500]

First experience with 3.5 d&d and my party was around level 6. DM brings out a group of Formians including two Formian Taskmasters that had set up an ambush. Party was just a Half Orc Barbarian, a halfling Sorcerer, and a Wood Elf Ranger 3/Rogue 3 that had a cleric as a cohort.

Encounter Opens up with the barbarian having to make a will save, which he fails, proceeds to turn on the party as he tries to murder us. Elf manages to drop 1 Formian Taskmaster that he can see, as well as the minotaur that the taskmaster had been controlling. Suddenly gets the bright idea of shooting the barbarian in order to knock him out since he's hovering around 15-20 hp, and one arrow should only deal around that much. Lines up the shot, and rolls a nat 20, which he then confirms. Barbarian drops with a arrow embedded into his skull, just like the several other previous boss monsters which have been killed by random Elf crits at point blank range all through out the adventure. I honestly really should have seen that coming...

[Tainted_Scholar]

Town mob tries to burn a Warlock at the stake. The Warlock let them set her on fire, breaks free from the ropes soon afterwards (They took damage from the fire) and kills the towns folk while still on fire. After putting herself out, she goes looking for a healing potion, and falls down a flight of stairs and kills herself.

[Togo]

Back in the old living greyhawk campaign run by the RPGA different GMs wrote adventures and then everyone played them around the word.

One adventure featured a 'test of faith', where the characters are trapped by an evil army, and have to trust to the gods as they leap from the tallest turret of the castle. Their faith is rewarded and they get teleported to safety.

A different adventure in the same series featured a monk who lived on a remote clifftop stack, that could only be reached via a 'test of faith', involving leaping from the edge of the cliff and trying to reach the other side. Unfortunately, despite the name and flavour text, there were no gods involved in this - it was a straight jump check or fall 80 feet onto jagged rocks before being swept into the sea to drown.

Emboldened by the success of the first test, when faced with the second literally over a hundred characters died. At one convention we clocked over 30 PCs jumping to their deaths, praying fervently.

[Long_shanks]

- First game ever: drowning in a sewer after a crit from your possessed paladin ally.
- Donning a cursed cape (-10 to str) as a psion with 9 str. Always have identified everything after that.
Those were two of my first three characters.

[Coventry]

My all time favorite:

1st edition Fighter that got bored with how long the thief was taking to find traps, then ran forward to "help". Cue pit trap.
Vector II: I found it!!!!!!!!!... (thud)


My personal oops:

Iron Golem (to squishy elf wizard): Only those who accept the challenge may enter. Do you accept the challenge?
Lomion: Yes!
Iron Golem: (Natural 20, confirm crit, near max damage)


One I can safely tell about my players:

(level 2 ranged combat) Ranger: I charge the stone giant
Stone Giant: (attack of opportunity, crit, confirm)
GM (me, OOC): Your character's new name is, "Tent Peg". He wasn't hostile, ya know.


And the signature quote from forum member ZeroGear seems relevant:

If there is anything I learned from D&D, it is to never bull rush a Gelatenous Cube.

[thoroughlyS]

The following characters are all mine in the same campaign, one after another, with character life in real time:

Played a LE character as a real jerk (runs off by himself a lot, yells at party members, that kind of thing). We encounter a deck of many things and I draw the Comet (go up a level if you win your next fight alone). Run off to fight a thing because the last time I did this, it was a phantom fungus. Meet a pyrohydra. Group comes running and fight the pyrohydra, who left me dying on the floor. One of our party rogues decides I'm more of a liability than anything, and puts a crossbow bolt in my neck. Character lived ~3 months.
Decide part of the reason I died was my character was kind of "out there", so I roll up a LG hoplite style fighter. One of the DMs decides the easiest way to introduce me to the group is to have me be like their "bodyguard" on a mission they're doing for a city. The mission is to infiltrate and take down their rival city. We get there and the other DM says that all of my magic gear was provided by my job, so it has stuff like the city's crest on it. We stop at a local pub and gather information. Turns out the two cities are pretty much identical, but the people here seem happier. Group decides to betray city, but know that I'm lawful, and would try to stop them. One character (played kind of cheatsy) pins me to the ground and hands me over to authorities. I get the gas chamber immediately. A literal gas chamber. Character lived ~1 week.
Last character in campaign is a half-orc sorcerer that I built to intimidate. He plays up his orcish heritage to seem like a full orc. DM doesn't even try with a backstory. Explains to the group that as they are travelling through plains, they see what looks like an orc sleeping in a bed surrounded by bedroom furniture (a random outsider teleported me and the contents of my room to a field). I get out of bed and start addressing the group when the ghost elf rogue invisibles up and attacks me. After 1 round the party has beaten me to death. Turns out she did it because of the "fierce hatred between elves and orcs". Another character explained that it seemed like I was a random encounter. Character lived ~30 minutes.

In short: killed by party, killed by party, killed by party. I stopped making characters for that campaign.
But we still hung out 'cause they were my friends.

[danielxcutter]

The following characters are all mine in the same campaign, one after another, with character life in real time:

Played a LE character as a real jerk (runs off by himself a lot, yells at party members, that kind of thing). We encounter a deck of many things and I draw the Comet (go up a level if you win your next fight alone). Run off to fight a thing because the last time I did this, it was a phantom fungus. Meet a pyrohydra. Group comes running and fight the pyrohydra, who left me dying on the floor. One of our party rogues decides I'm more of a liability than anything, and puts a crossbow bolt in my neck. Character lived ~3 months.

Decide part of the reason I died was my character was kind of "out there", so I roll up a LG hoplite style fighter. One of the DMs decides the easiest way to introduce me to the group is to have me be like their "bodyguard" on a mission they're doing for a city. The mission is to infiltrate and take down their rival city. We get there and the other DM says that all of my magic gear was provided by my job, so it has stuff like the city's crest on it. We stop at a local pub and gather information. Turns out the two cities are pretty much identical, but the people here seem happier. Group decides to betray city, but know that I'm lawful, and would try to stop them. One character (played kind of cheatsy) pins me to the ground and hands me over to authorities. I get the gas chamber immediately. A literal gas chamber. Character lived roughly ~1 week.

Last character in campaign is a half-orc sorcerer that I built to intimidate. He plays up his orcish heritage to seem like a full orc. DM doesn't even try with a backstory. Explains to the group that as they are travelling through plains, they see what looks like an orc sleeping in a bed surrounded by bedroom furniture (a random outsider teleported me and the contents of my room to a field). I get out of bed and start addressing the group when the ghost elf rogue invisibles up and attacks me. After 1 round the party has beaten me to death. Turns out she did it because of the "fierce hatred between elves and orcs". Another character explained that it seemed like I was a random encounter. Character lived ~30 minutes.

In short: killed by party, killed by party, killed by party. I stopped making characters for that campaign.
But we still hung out 'cause they were my friends.

I think that was less stupid and more of your fellow players screwing you.

[Story]

Does getting into melee combat as a Rogue with 10 CON count?

[danielxcutter]

Does getting into melee combat as a Rogue with 10 CON count?

Depends, but probably not as much as most of the other examples on this thread.

If you were a Wizard or a Sorcerer, on the other hand...

[thoroughlyS]

I think that was less stupid and more of your fellow players screwing you.
Oh, trust me. Every one of those deaths was stupid. And the best part is you can see the Idiot Ball (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall) trading hands: First it was me, then the rogue, then the DM, then the rest of the party, then back to the DM, and finally slam-dunked on my head by the ghost. (https://youtu.be/2RrT-4IV1ac?t=3)

[Inevitability]

- Donning a cursed cape (-10 to str) as a psion with 9 str. Always have identified everything after that.


How did that kill you? Sure, you can't move anymore, but on a psion that's actually not such a big problem.

[Jowgen]

I once had a player's character dying in the first session without that character ever uttering a single word to either the party or NPCs. On the taking-you-to-quest ship, he charged an attacking kraken, forgetting about the reach, and got grabbed, subsequently getting crushed to death over 3 gruelling turns.

The player was not bitter, fully realizing that he had no one to blame but himself.

[Ieagleroar]

My 1st Lvl Halfling fighter got into a drinking contest with our party's Dwarven cleric. After many 'remain on your barstool' checks, my Halfling emerged victorious. To celebrate my victory, I leaped upon a table, and started dancing and declaring to the whole bar that dwarfs were horrible drinkers etc. finishing with the exclamation that 'It's a wonder Thor doesn't fall out of the sky after one pint.' Returning to our inn for night, I was struck by lightning. Thor sucks...

[danielxcutter]

My 1st Lvl Halfling fighter got into a drinking contest with our party's Dwarven cleric. After many 'remain on your barstool' checks, my Halfling emerged victorious. To celebrate my victory, I leaped upon a table, and started dancing and declaring to the whole bar that dwarfs were horrible drinkers etc. finishing with the exclamation that 'It's a wonder Thor doesn't fall out of the sky after one pint.' Returning to our inn for night, I was struck by lightning. Thor sucks...

I think that was more DM tyranny and less stupid.

[Long_shanks]

How did that kill you? Sure, you can't move anymore, but on a psion that's actually not such a big problem.

Yeah, come to think of it... Our group had just started playing (we were all nobbs except the DM who had a little bit of experience) and there was a misunderstanding about the rules on what happens when a stat hit 0 (we thought it was insta death. Anyway, I was about to retire the character because he was way too overpowered for the group. (Also, that cape was a metagaming gift from another party member, who just happened to know I had 9 str and knew about that cape from the books... Lets just say I've never accepted any gifts from that guy ever again (that's my metagame kwirk)).

[Tainted_Scholar]

I think that was more DM tyranny and less stupid.

There are rules for getting struck by lightning in a storm. So it's possible that he just got unlucky.

[Telok]

Here's one, we still talk about it to this day in my group.

So the rogue died and we didn't bring him back from the dead. No problem, the player whips out a quick basic barbarian build in order to keep playing. About ten minutes later we get into a fight. The barbarian that our party just met wins initative and charges a wizard. About half way there the DM calls for a bull rush check against the invisible warforged artificer. The barbarian fails and is stopped in mid-charge.

The artificer is next in initative and blows a dozen charges off a wand to do a twinned, maximized, something, something, Scorching Ray. Rolls 20s on the attacks, confirms the crits. Something like 180ish damage to a 80ish hit point character.

The barbarian burned from full health to beyond dead ten minutes in and after making exactly one roll. We were unable to salvage any gear from the ashes.

[danielxcutter]

Here's one, we still talk about it to this day in my group.

So the rogue died and we didn't bring him back from the dead. No problem, the player whips out a quick basic barbarian build in order to keep playing. About ten minutes later we get into a fight. The barbarian that our party just met wins initative and charges a wizard. About half way there the DM calls for a bull rush check against the invisible warforged artificer. The barbarian fails and is stopped in mid-charge.

The artificer is next in initative and blows a dozen charges off a wand to do a twinned, maximized, something, something, Scorching Ray. Rolls 20s on the attacks, confirms the crits. Something like 180ish damage to a 80ish hit point character.

The barbarian burned from full health to beyond dead ten minutes in and after making exactly one roll. We were unable to salvage any gear from the ashes.

Okay, that has to be a DM's Smite Player or something.

[PacMan2247]

We had a wizard, a ranger, and a monk (I don't remember our levels exactly, but it was probably somewhere around 8) facing off against a werewolf (I have no idea what class levels were added to it) and its underlings in a tavern. Werewolf and monk can't hit each other, but are fully engaged nonetheless, while the ranger and wizard wipe out the underlings. By the end of that, the wizard is low on useful spells and the ranger is low on hit points (definitely wouldn't have survived another round with the werewolf) so they're both hiding behind an overturned table. Wizard says his only spell left is fireball. Monk says to drop it directly on his location, because evasion. Sure enough, werewolf fails its save and the monk makes his.

Unfortunately, neither the wizard nor the ranger made it out of the tavern as it collapsed in flames.

[Seto]

During my very first game of D&D, our grasp on the rules was a bit shaky (basically our DM had critical failures and asked for a lot of unnecessary rolls that made even mundane tasks deadly at level 1), but it made for some very funny deaths.

- Our Rogue, covered in blood and dust, decided to remove his armor, take a dive in the moat (still, unthreatening water) and clean up before entering the town. He proceeded to... drown, after failing several successive Swim checks. I dived in to save him, and almost died as well. I was rescued by none other than the heavily armored Dwarven Fighter. We laughed a lot that day.
- The enemy level-3 Wizard (first boss) was taunting me from the edge of his pit trap, in which I had fallen. I successfully cast Sleep on him, he fell in head first and broke his neck.

Low-level deaths are often embarrassing, really.

[Story]

Unfortunately, neither the wizard nor the ranger made it out of the tavern as it collapsed in flames.


The ranger I understand, but was the Wizard low on hitpoints too? Because non magical fire is only 1d6 per round. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0243.html)

[Inevitability]

The ranger I understand, but was the Wizard low on hitpoints too? Because non magical fire is only 1d6 per round. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0243.html)

Being hit by a collapsing roof seems like it'd be a bit more damaging.

[Stealth Marmot]

Drowned during a noncombat scenario.


Been there. In one game I decided to have my character test the depth of a pool by walking slowly from the beach down to the bottom, using the heavy armor they were wearing as an anchor.

Turns out the beach only went on for a few feet before dropping off an underwater cliff.

[Stealth Marmot]

Charging the BBEG and impaling yourself on his spear
Accidentally getting 1 shot by the party rogue who was hiding in a pile of books
Illiterate Barbarian mistaking acid for healing potion and pouring it in your mouth
Kleptomaniac rogue putting on an amulet of strangulation
Brain eaten by worms from a favored spawn of Kyuss
Claiming to be a great thief and getting killed by a rival thieves guild member
Forgetting a winter coat
Getting executed for attempting to assassinate your party leader during the night
Everyone was tied to a tree so we wouldn't go flying away during a storm. We forgot to untie someone and left them there...
Getting a javelin to the chest after opening the party face's front door
Accidentally poisoning your towns water supply

Some of these make me question your definitions of "accidentally" and "forgot".

[Calthropstu]

I entered a tournament, certain of victory. One shotted by a maxed critical disintegrate. In round 1.

When playing a barbarian, it is important to remember: Yes you can charge an enemy horde and easily get there faster than your party members. Don't.

When fighting a grind, do not try to take out everything in one go. You can rest and come back. Running into the boss with no spells, no healing, no potions, and no plan: suicide.

Do not try to rescue your party member from the evil cleric... as a level 1 sorcerer. With an 8 AC. Alone. Because 2 party members ran away from fear, and the third one was dropped.

This was someone else: If you use a repeat tactic, expect the BBEG to be prepared for it. That Maximized Empowered disintegrate that tore through the evil wizards minions like paper... yeah, the BBEG teleported in with spell turning. And our wizard had dumped con in favor of boosting his save DCs. Killed by your own spell.

One of my favorites: Captain YOLO. This was a PFS game I played in. This kid shouted "YOLO" before doing something stupid. In one PFS session he:
Triggered 3 combats at the same time.
Set off a trap, got stuck. Got freed, triggered the next trap in the same hallway.
Ran ahead of the party, and triggered the boss fight alone. Nearly resulted in a TPK.

This has inspired me to actually create a PFS character named Captain YOLO who does stuff like this.

I once witnessed someone wake a sleeping dragon by peeing on it. At 4th level.

I also once witnessed (same player) someone trying to climb onto the tarrasque and yell "giddyap"

I also once played in a game where the place had a teleportation system. You would hit an orb on top of a pillar and be teleported to a specific location. They were color coded for ease of reference. Red, orange, yellow, white, blue... We came across a color we had never seen before and wondered where it went. It was black. Yes, our entire party willingly placed their hands directly onto a sphere of annihilation.

[Malimar]

The ranger I understand, but was the Wizard low on hitpoints too? Because non magical fire is only 1d6 per round. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0243.html)
Being hit by a collapsing roof seems like it'd be a bit more damaging.

Something on the order of 8d6 damage (Reflex halves) plus other effects for being buried (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/dungeons.htm#caveInsAndCollapsesCr8), I'd say. Though that's technically for cave-ins, so a wooden tavern might not be as bad.

[Stryyke]

Playing a full Ogre with an INT 5. My group leader was talking and waved me away, saying "just go get something to eat." I went outside to the stable and grabbed a horse. What I thought was a horse. It was a centaur. It lived long enough to call the guards. I killed 12 guards before they finally downed me.

Playing a monk, my party was crossing a bridge in the underdark. The first one to cross the bridge found out there was a knockout gas of some sort. As we stood there trying to figure out what to do, some oozes came along and started eating the one on the bridge. Since I had the best fort save, I volunteered to run up there grab her, and get back. I passed my fort save, but started to feel woozy. I grabbed the pixie and tried to throw her to safety, since I had dimension stride boots, I could get back on the instant. I picked her up, and threw her. I rolled a 1, and a second 1 on my reflex. I accidentally threw her in the pit, and then fell in myself. The GM ruled that the gas overwhelmed me during the throw, so I couldn't dimension stride to safety.

[ComaVision]

The party rogue failed his balance check then reflex save and fell to his death off a rope bridge. Everyone else crossed fine.

[Goladar]

Town mob tries to burn a Warlock at the stake. The Warlock let them set her on fire, breaks free from the ropes soon afterwards (They took damage from the fire) and kills the towns folk while still on fire. After putting herself out, she goes looking for a healing potion, and falls down a flight of stairs and kills herself.

How does that work?

[atemu1234]

How does that work?

100% sure the DM had some involvement with that.

[TheifofZ]

I had the unique pleasure of working with someone who was all kinds of special. Here are a few of his tales of sordid sorrows.


He tried to use a scimitar as a Grappling hook to fasten a rope to a tree so that he could cross a raging river.
7 rounds later, exactly 1 round after he drowned, we managed to fish him out.
He tried to cross a desert while carrying only a single waterskin as a human fighter in full plate. Suffice to say, we left him for the vultures.
He had a flying mount, and tried to use it to fly to the top of a Wizard's tower when we knew the wizard was a mindflayer. The mount failed it's save against the stun.
He... well. Splashed.
And the story that takes the cake; the DM for the group liked fumble rules and included a scatter chart if you fumbled badly on a thrown weapon. So this guy gets downed (unconscious and bleeding) by an orc, and none of us can reach it in time to stop it from killing him next turn. The barbarian, in a desperate bid to save the guy, throws his greataxe. 2 natural ones, a natural 1 on a d100, a surprisingly precise result on the scatter chart, and 4 natural 20s in a row later, and it turned out the level 3 Barbarian managed a rather astounding 80something damage to our party member, more than enough to kill him from full health twice over, and he was already at -2. The DM just ruled it that his head was literally split in half. After that, everyone agreed that the Dice Gods just really wanted that particular character dead.

[atemu1234]

And the story that takes the cake; the DM for the group liked fumble rules and included a scatter chart if you fumbled badly on a thrown weapon. So this guy gets downed (unconscious and bleeding) by an orc, and none of us can reach it in time to stop it from killing him next turn. The barbarian, in a desperate bid to save the guy, throws his greataxe. 2 natural ones, a natural 1 on a d100, a surprisingly precise result on the scatter chart, and 4 natural 20s in a row later, and it turned out the level 3 Barbarian managed a rather astounding 80something damage to our party member, more than enough to kill him from full health twice over, and he was already at -2. The DM just ruled it that his head was literally split in half. After that, everyone agreed that the Dice Gods just really wanted that particular character dead.


That's odds of... 1/6,400,000,000.

Thats the same odds of randomly selecting your father from the population of earth at random in the year 1980 or so.

Edit: Scratch that, it's 2004/5 or so.

[Soranar]

A paladin fighting a ghoul

High CON, high CHA , the only way I can fail the save vs paralysis is a natural 1

guess what I rolled

_______________________

our rogue is out of comission and we have to deal with a trap so I use the 10 ft pole method
... the resulting explosion caused a TPK (just a normal fireball trap but we were so weak it finished us off)

________________________________

finally I died from falling damage after rolling a 1 with my wand of feather fall

[Green Elf]

Tomb

Of

Horrors

[atemu1234]

Tomb

Of

Horrors

I'm pretty sure I've filled a binder or two with casualties from that.

[Katrina]

So is the Embarassing part of Tomb of Horrors playing the module more than twice? :smalltongue:

I was playing an elven rogue in Forgotten Realms. The party was investigating strange sounds and general oddness at a graveyard. After finding a surprisingly deep cave, we found and defeated a Drider. In the Drider's loot were two unlabeled vials. My elven Rogue commented that the vials were probably drow sleeping poison. The Ranger decided that he had to test this, and takes a sip. Sure enough, falls out unconscious. This is stupid, but forgivable in some circles. The Cleric then decides to test the other vial. Also out. So I did what I felt was best. I robbed them both and left them for the Drow hunting party. They did not appreciate it.

Ran a game where a player built his favorite character, an orc barbarian that was known to tank everything. Supposed to be really tough, prone to challenging enemies to single combat. The game was tenth level. He challenged a Goat-man (Monster Manual 5 if you're curious) with two Barbarian levels to a single duel. One natural 20 and confirmation later, he should be dead. I quickly crunched the numbers and then modified the damage after finding that the Greataxe crit should have killed him. I didn't want to kill him in the first Combat Encounter of the game.

Played a game where I was a human Rogue this time, and we had gotten into a big fight with a bunch of Kobolds. The fighter was whiffing attacks due to just low rolls, but I was on fire. Didn't have a single attack below a 15 and was tearing them to pieces. Killed three of them before finally being dropped by a lucky spear. (I was first level. ) The Cleric used the rest of his magic healing the fighter back up to full and so I was forced to go through the rest of the quest with one hp. Through lots of sneaking and refusing to get in the fights, I survived the dungeon only to fumble a climb check, fall off a wall and die trying to get out of the cave.

[Telok]

So we were doing a mid/high level one-shot where I was playing an archery cleric with True Strike, DMM: Reach Spell, and abusing the Revenance + Revivify combo. Someone else was a sorcerer and we had some melee brutes.

What we call the R&R combo is this: Someone dies in combat. If you can reach them within one round you can cast Revivify on them and get them back to life on the cheap. But it's in combat and they'll need healing since they come back at one hit point. So in comes Revenance. You have a CL in rounds to cast it on the deader, it brings them back at 50% hit points, and lasts CL in minutes. They go back to being dead at the end of the duration. So the trick is to Revenance in combat, win, and wait until it wears off afterwards to cast Revivify.

Well we had made a mistake, a couple of our guys had died and were doing the R&R combo. We won the fight but alerted some other nearby enemies and we were almost out of most of our resources. Time to withdraw. My character cast Word of Recall and grabbed a couple of the others, we went back to my temple in our home city. The sorcerer cast Teleport and took two of the others... to a different city...

DM: "Ok, so you adn the sorcerer are in the other city. You have about five minutes right?"
PC: "Whu?"
DM" You're Revenanced right?"
PC: "!@#$"

And all out of Teleports.

[Yahzi]

Have to mention the classic: The head of Vecna (http://www.blindpanic.com/humor/vecna.htm)

[ShurikVch]

From the Saddest TPK's you've had as players or while DMing? (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?408027-Saddest-TPK-s-you-ve-had-as-players-or-while-DMing)


So I always enjoy reading player stories and I'm interested to see what moments you've had in DND games where everything goes wrong for some reason or other.


I might as well start off. In a campaign with three players they were given the fearsome task of clearing a storeroom of some rats. The players are all second level with the party consisting of:
A Wizard
A Swashbuckler
A Archery Based fighter

All is looking well before they enter the store room. The wizard prepares burning hands and the DM smiles knowing that 75% of the rats can all be killed in one spell as they all have 1-2 hp. What can go wrong?

As they enter the room the wizard hangs back waiting to blast the hell out of anything that moves. The two other players move into the middle of the room and the rats appear.
The wizard doesn't use burning hands
cause she doesn't want to hit her friends. The rats move into the squares of each player and do their maximum damage of 1 hp.
The wizard still doesn't use burning hands.
The players each attack one of the rats and kill them. The remaining rats all do 1 point of damage each. This repeats.
All players die because they have no healing and cant kill the rats quick enough.
Everyone laughed at how pathetic the situation is with the whole party being decimated by several small vermin.

The players then rerolled characters found an extra player and went back to that storeroom just to have the small victory of killing the creatures that killed them.

[TheifofZ]

Since I've alittle more time, here are a few more tales of 'Oh my god, we died like that?'


I was DMing this one. Entire party of six 7th level characters vs a single skin kite (CR 3). They fail to identify it, panic, and flee.
20 rounds later and I have something approaching 50 nesting skin kites, and one singular party member with more than 0 Cha, who was hiding in the basement of the nearby abandoned temple.
A group I was in just finished a long, combat heavy campaign, and so we were rolling a one-shot. The bard's player -really- wants to do more roleplaying, so the DM lets the do a couple hours of it in town, and promised next campaign would feature more of that, since most of the rest of us wanted more of that too. Turns out the bard was alot more desperate than we thought; after we cleared the short dungeon to kill the Black Dragon that had been terrorizing the local village, as per the quest, the bard begs the dragon to eat him and let the rest of us go. So that's how that one-shot ended.
Our 'special' friend was playing a 10th level Fighter and decided to take a shortcut by jumping down a cliff, figuring that max fall damage was lower than his max HP. It was. But the two CR 9 monsters at the bottom had enough damage to finish the job while the rest of us, with max HP values that were -not- higher than the max fall damage, took the stairs.



That's odds of... 1/6,400,000,000.

Thats the same odds of randomly selecting your father from the population of earth at random in the year 1980 or so.

Edit: Scratch that, it's 2004/5 or so. (Did you mean 5 in 2004? And if you did, did you remember to factor the 1/9 from the scatter?)
Regardless, the odds were low enough that we felt justified in stating that RNGesus (or whatever your group's preferred superstitious belief is) specifically touched that moment to ensure that particular character was definitely, for sure, ultra dead.

[nijineko]

Attempted to cross a drawbridge to a deserted castle. Giant toad hopped onto the bridge. Conflict ensues. Wizard dies on first hit due to having 3 hp total.

[Stealth Marmot]

Attempted to cross a drawbridge to a deserted castle. Giant toad hopped onto the bridge. Conflict ensues. Wizard dies on first hit due to having 3 hp total.

When you have 3 hp, death is never embarrassing since frankly, you could be killed by someone using spicy mustard instead of mayo.

[Xaroth]

In my very first D&D campaign, I was playing this big tall Dragonborn that had high Con and high Str, but he'd just been in a really hazardous fight, and was quite literally teetering on 1 HP. We had no potions, so I was really heavily wounded, going to our next area, which was...a small, poor town.

Now, any number of things could've happened. I could've been mugged. I could've been slapped by someone. Someone could've thrown a rock at me for being a Dragonborn, or something of the sort.

What happens?

I go to kick open a brittle wooden door, blunder, and break my foot, dealing enough damage to send me into the dying state. There was nobody around capable of healing me and I died.

[Stealth Marmot]

In my very first D&D campaign, I was playing this big tall Dragonborn that had high Con and high Str, but he'd just been in a really hazardous fight, and was quite literally teetering on 1 HP. We had no potions, so I was really heavily wounded, going to our next area, which was...a small, poor town.

Now, any number of things could've happened. I could've been mugged. I could've been slapped by someone. Someone could've thrown a rock at me for being a Dragonborn, or something of the sort.

What happens?

I go to kick open a brittle wooden door, blunder, and break my foot, dealing enough damage to send me into the dying state. There was nobody around capable of healing me and I died.

How much XP did the door get?

[Xaroth]

How much XP did the door get?

300.

I made sure to destroy it with my next character.

[CaPtMalHammer]

Here a couple that happened we found funny!:)

1) Halfling Rogue, walks up to a sleeping dragon and tells dragon you have till the count of 3 to get off "my" treasure.. never saw the poor Rogue again.

2) A barbarian was grappling with a Wyvern.. Killed the Wyvern in flight.. they crashed to the ground and Barbarian somehow survived. A round later before healing could get their the Barbarians raged wore off and he died :)

3) Party Fighter got swallowed by a wurm and didn't take a dagger... Note to self always buy a Dagger.

4) Party assassin wanted to steal money from another party member. The Cleric placed a Harm Spell on his purse. poor Assassin.

5) Evil King.. Invites party to a dinner engagement. Most the party are aware its a trap except the Bard with no Sense Motive at all. King serves a Black Pudding Desert. The Bard died by living Pudding.

[Braininthejar2]

A black puddinge dessert... That's not stupid.

failing a spot check and walking into an immobile gelatonous cube would be stupid.

This was awesome in its absurdity

[Stealth Marmot]

300.

I made sure to destroy it with my next character.

Did you kill the gazebo afterwards?

[Berenger]

Pointing at a random chest on a junkyard and joking "Oh, look, a Mimic!" for no actual reason.

As it turned out, the chest really was a Mimic. It bit my adventurer and the roll against poison showed, naturally, a Natural 1.

[atemu1234]

(Did you mean 5 in 2004? And if you did, did you remember to factor the 1/9 from the scatter?)
Regardless, the odds were low enough that we felt justified in stating that RNGesus (or whatever your group's preferred superstitious belief is) specifically touched that moment to ensure that particular character was definitely, for sure, ultra dead.

No, that was the year when the world's population was roughly 6.4 billion.

[D&DPrinceTandem]

Literally you could rename this thread Leroy Jenkins and everything would be the same


https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.M82defd1381090b6bd8165d28327f6132o0&pid=15.1&P=0&w=208&h=151

another way is standing to close to the guy claustrophobic wizard (lets just say it didn't end well)

[Falcon X]

Had a wizard. During character creation I gave him a single rank in autohypnosis because it seemed appropriate.
Around level 3 I did something stupid. I tried to trick a goblin camp using song and illusions. It didn't go so well.
Next thing I know, me and our cleric are running at full speed away from a hoard of stampeding goblins, at least 100 strong.
I toss every spell and think of every skill I know to throw at them. It was all marginal because there were overwhelming numbers.
Finally, I use autohypnosis to "calm my nerves." Rolled a critical miss, fell asleep, got trampled by the goblins.

[Cascalives]

I was running a high level campaign and the party was fighting 2 Balors. The paladin had done massive damage to the first one, the other one was using implosion on random members, paladin rolled a nat 1 on fort and died. Paladin's cohort used revivify. Party finished off the second balor, which exploded, killing the first. Paladin can't save, and cohort is caught in both blasts and dies. His cohort was the only cleric. Not so much stupid as unfortunate lol.

In our first campaign together, BBEG shows up to taunt us early in the campaign, we weren't supposed to be able to get to him. DM didn't think about my warlock's at will dimension door. I took our fighter across the barrier to attack, and he got turned into putty by the BBEG , who had about 15 attacks.