Most Spectacular PC Failures/Successes

[Bobby Baratheon]

In a fit of nostalgia, I put on my rose tinted glasses and thought back to some of my old parties (a few of which I DM'd). To no one's surprise, the most memorable events were either amazing, flat-out improbable successes that no one could have have predicted, or spectacular failures. Every party has had a few of these, where munchkins overeager players go balls out and try a bit too hard, and fall short in hilariously awesome ways. Alternatively, the players come up with a needlessly complex scheme, which almost goes off without a hitch. Almost. As they say, the candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast, and so forth.
The following story is about my first DMPC. . . I have since learned my lesson
One of them that comes to mind was a particularly munchkined up DMPC that had combined an unholy number of templates (including the unseelie fey, which gave him flight) and classes and had exploited the language of the anima mage in order to have, at 5th level (IIRC, it's been a while), 7th level sorcerer casting (thanks to loredrake and a lucky roll on the dragonspawn abomination charts), the eldritch blast of a 5th level warlock thanks to a creative interpretation of practiced spellcaster and the binding of a 3rd level binder with the cheesy vestige James Jacobs wrote. The addition of stalwart sorcerer, battle sorcerer, thunderlance, and an ungodly charisma score (and some other stuff I don't really remember) made for a dangerous combination of melee and spellcasting that had absurdly high spell DCs and could basically roflstomp anything the actual party could face. Hypothetically.

The first session, the party (all 5th level) intervened in a fight between a manticore and some bandits, handily killing the rest of the bandits. The party lured the manticore into a trap, and one of the party casters sticks it with glitterdust, which is basically game over for the manticore, while the others take pot shots at it with their muskets. The cocky DMPC walks up to the blinded, partially wounded manticore. He showboats on his first attack, but rolls . . . a one. We used critical failures, so we ruled the manticore got an attack of opportunity. It then proceeds to roll a twenty, and tear through a significant chunk of the DMPC's health. Immediately following that, it was the manticore's turn, who then proceeds to roll another twenty. Boom, the DMPC's in the dirt, choking on negative hit points while the rest of the party sniggers. The party fighter kills the beast, and the bard reluctantly used a cure light wounds to revive the embarrassed DMPC. Good times :smallamused:

Anyone else have any such stories of good times and magnificently awesome PC victories/failures? I'm sure that we can scrounge up a few between the playgrounder's considerable experience with D&D/other roleplaying games (some CoC stories would not be amiss).

[Clopin Silk]

Mine are nowhere near this good, and the successes are from another player, but sure.
It was my first ever session, I was keeping watch, and some wolves approached. I rolled to intimidate. That's right; I rolled to intimidate wolves. Pretty sure that's not even possible, but the DM let me. I failed. Badly. This wouldn't be noteworthy if it weren't for the DM. See, he went ahead and decided to get creative with his rulings. To be specific, he ruled that the wolves laughed at me. I'd like to just clarify that these were perfectly normal wolves. And they laughed at my attempt to intimidate them.

This led to a fight with the wolves, which led to a brilliant moment for the party fighter... once he managed to wake up. The rest of us had needed to gang up on individual wolves to bring them down, but our fighter, well, he just swung at one with his big ol' hammer, and killed him a wolf in one hit. Killed it so effectively, in fact, that the DM ruled that the wolf had been utterly torn to shreds by the force of the blow.

Later on, that same fighter got his hands on a magic hammer that made him better at killing undead... right before we found ourselves fighting skeletons. I myself managed a raher nice kill, decapitating one with a dagger, but then the fighter swung his shiny new hammer, and rolled up a crit. And maximum damage. Throw in his strength bonus and the bonus damage inflicted because his enemy was undead, and you get such brutal overkill that the DM ruled that there was nothing left of the skeleton but dust.

[Thurbane]

Playing RHoD, our Warmage managed to Sudden Empower a Orb of Cold against a Red Dragon, do over 50 points of damage, and the dragon rolled a natural 2 against the save vs. massive damage. In the first round.

The DM was gobsmacked.

[stanprollyright]

Fail:

This scenario has happened to me so many times it deserves its own trope: "low level party crossing body of water."

Sometimes these bodies of water are small enough to jump over with a decent check from an average party member. Sometimes they are not intended to be jumped over at all, but the monk (or whomever) rolls high and does anyway. Or maybe this party member can swim just fine (usually the one who makes the miraculous jump can also swim). If the first party member could tie a rope to something on the far side, everyone could cross no problem. This never happens. There is always a second party member, usually in light armor, who thinks they can swim/jump across. The second party member always fails, falls in the water, starts to drown and/or is carried away by the current. Everyone else scrambles to save the second party member, with one of them tying a rope to themselves and diving in. The heavy armored Fighter/Paladin/Cleric, who is rightly afraid of the water, volunteers to stand on the shore and hold the rope. This character always fails their strength check to pull up their friends, and subsequently sinks like a stone. The character who originally fell into the water will start succeeding all of their checks as soon as the other characters are in danger and will ironically be the first to reach safety. Even more ironically, they will be the worst equipped to save everyone else, while the good swimmer who has been trying to save everyone will eventually need to be saved. Complicated plans involving spells, boats, poles, and even more rope will be executed before the entire party can breath air and dry off - except now they're all back on the original side of the water.

My first session of D&D ever (3E): monk makes the jump over fast flowing river. Rogue fails. Current carries Rogue towards a waterfall. Fighter (me) sprints down to a downstream dock and lowers a pole. Monk commandeers a halfling fisherman's boat with the halfling still in it and goes after Rogue. Rogue hits the boat and rocks it, Monk fails his balance check and falls into the water. Rogue gets into the boat and tosses the scared halfling overboard. I save the halfling with my pole, but the Monk pulls me into the water. Rogue catches up and saves me in the canoe, but the monk fails to grab onto the oar and goes over the waterfall. Pretty sure that's the only time I've seen Slow Fall save someone's life.

Fail: Rolled a 1 on a Wisdom check; saw the leader of a friendly group of mercenaries with a horned helmet and assumed it was my archrival because he also wears a horned helmet. I attacked, killed their archers and scouts, entangled most of them, and nearly killed the commander before I realized my mistake.

Success: My LE wizard (level 9-10) used the threat of an invading army to plot and execute a political coup and seize the means of production for a small country inside a week. Within the next several weeks, I bankrupted the city treasury on a quicken rod and scrolls. I conscripted all the magic crafters to build me Dr. Xavier's Cerebrum to expand the range of my Mindbender telepathy. When the army arrived, the rest of my party fought at the front lines while I coordinated the entire battle, decimating the enemy army with Pyrotechnics, Cloudkill, Wall of Fire, and then hiding counterattacks with Fog Cloud (after they were good and scared of Cloudkill). 'Twas a glorious day, and as a result I was able to secure the political allegiance of three other countries and set up a council of 5 nations with myself at the head, making me the de facto ruler of a continent within a month.

Fail: knocked a party member unconscious with Color Spray, while all the bad guys made their saves. I told him to close his eyes!

Success: Skunk familiar sprays the BBEG, who rolls a super low Fort save and becomes nauseated instead of sickened on the first round (the DC is a static 11).

Success: party member's riding dog mount gets possessed. I enlarge the skunk. It grapples and pins the dog until the effect is dispelled. Seriously, Stinky the Skunk was the MVP of this party.

Success: missing party members just so happen to make up our entire front line. My Bard picks up the slack and melees like a boss, all the while making wood-based puns (perform (humor), fighting a wooden construct with an axe. the one-liners wrote themselves). DM goes, "why haven't you been doing that this whole time?"

[Bobby Baratheon]

Success: Skunk familiar sprays the BBEG, who rolls a super low Fort save and becomes nauseated instead of sickened on the first round (the DC is a static 11).

Success: party member's riding dog mount gets possessed. I enlarge the skunk. It grapples and pins the dog until the effect is dispelled. Seriously, Stinky the Skunk was the MVP of this party.


That skunk sounds pretty legendary. It's always funny when tooled up, overpowered bad guys underperform and get stomped by the party. Speaking of which . . .
Success/Failure (depends on your perspective)
When I was DM a couple campaign backs, I made this doppelganger monk/clawlock/rogue/other stuff I don't remember villain that was absolutely murderous in close combat, and was as sneaky as you would expect from a doppelganger, along with having all the mobility invocations that warlocks get. The plan was for him to harass the PCs in a crowded place by shapeshifting and sneak attacking them every time they lost him in the crowd, then running away and blending back in. He was going to be a long term antagonist that was supposed to be frustratingly hard to find and very dangerous when backed into a corner. First encounter with him, the PCs get lucky and score some hits, while he almost oneshots the party ranger in melee. He tries to fly away, and gets zapped with a dispel magic. He falls to the ground, and the PCs dogpile him and roll (I kid you not) like six natural twenties in the first round of the aforementioned dogpile (we use autocrits). He ended up a thin red paste. He was ten levels higher than the party, and Tzeentch the dice gods cast him aside like an empty cheetos bag. :smallfrown:

[Bobby Baratheon]

Playing RHoD, our Warmage managed to Sudden Empower a Orb of Cold against a Red Dragon, do over 50 points of damage, and the dragon rolled a natural 2 against the save vs. massive damage. In the first round.

The DM was gobsmacked.

Those are always fun moments (for the players). One of my players once one shotted my ettin warlord with a munchkined up Dalamar's Lightning Lance. This, mind you, was supposed to be a climactic battle between the warlord of the beastmen horde and his elite Minotaur bodyguards and the players, who were defending a mostly helpless village from the onrushing horde. After seeing their leader get fried, the bodyguards hightailed it (get it hurrhurr) and the horde just sort of disintegrated. After one round of combat. *sigh*

[Baldin]

In our current campaign we were fighting against a few enemies, one of them a Monk (Pathfinder style) and another a ranger/dextrous fighter. Our warmage thought it was a good idea to put the enemies in a sleet storm. Now that ain't so bad in and of itself, however the entire party was in the storm aswell. Suffice to say the monk and fighter couldnt care less about the storm while my character (a summoner) failed and fell. The monk and fighter moved to me and finished me off. The fight was as good as won for us, but nope he had to cast the sleet storm. It did more harm to us than it did to them.

[Korahir]

Failure:
A Paladin trying to throw a rope to a sinking wagon full of gnomes, which was derailed by kobolds and landed in a river. Rolling a natural 1 on the throw attempt our GM ruled that the rope hit a gnome and knocked him into the river. He was never seen again.

Playing kingmaker and fighting a plague, we invested 16 BP to get +10 to our check. All we needed was 3+ to succed on the d20 roll. We rolled a 2, almost losing our whole kingdom in one turn.

Success:
A dwarfen ranger soloing a nasty fey creature (pretty sure a custom brew of the kingmaker adventure path) that paralyzed every other party member by continuously succeding on will saves (i think DC 18 with a bonus of +5). Pretty sure he did crit her too with a Earthbreaker (so crit range is 20).

A drow wizard disintegrating a drow matriarch (those natural 1s on save or die are always fun).

A lvl 5 monk grappling a green dragon who pissed us off with flyby attacks (i think it was large?).

[Cascalives]

Failure: low level campaign, maybe 2 or 3. Our halfling sorcerer runs out of spells and pulls out his hand crossbow for the one remaining baddie, whom the rogue is actively spanking. Another player warns him against firing, as he could hit the rogue. The player proceeds to mime aiming his crossbow saying 'I never miss'. Rolled 1 below baddie's AC, and almost killed the rogue.

Failure: We were running a one-shot at 5th level. Ran into some villagers that were mind controlled. Now, we were using a crit chart, where you roll a percentile for special effects on a crit. A farmer with a pitchfork rolls a critical on a drunken master monk who had just cleaned house in another fight. Guess who rolled the only instant kill effect on a 1/100 chance.

[Thurbane]

Had an interesting one in this weeks game (me as the DM).

Party facing off against the end of mini-module boss: a Wraith with Wizard Levels.

Party is Human Favored Soul 6, Human Ranger (archery) 6, Aasimar Paladin 5 and Human Warmage 4.

After battling their way through the boss's guards (4 ghouls, 2 wights and 1 shadow), they take on the boss.

Boss gets up a Mirror Image, rolling max images (5 extra images). Party starts to attack (we play MI as a random roll: i.e. roll 1d6: if it's a 1, it's the real deal, otherwise it's an image).

Party proceeds to roll FIVE 1s on their d6 in a row (i.e. not a single attack hit an image), and every attack managed to successfully roll against the incorporeal miss chance!

They made pretty short work of him... :smallbiggrin:

[Bobby Baratheon]

I don't know if it's the most spetacular failure, but one of my players recently had a pretty funny one. His character has average charisma, but the rest of the party (a paladin, a binder and a sorcerer) have much better charisma and thus jokingly tease him for his obviously disgusting character, who at this point is basically Nurgle in terms of how we talk about him.

Trying to buck the narrative, the player tried to put the moves on a female suspect with blatantly low standards (the campaign involves a lot of investigation). He rolls his check . . . and gets a 1. We do crit failures, so the woman interrupts him right when he starts speaking, tells him off, and throws a drink in his face. That . . . did not help his reputation among the group. The character (not the player, obviously) is basically the Jerry of the group at this point. He is pretty nifty with a shotgun, though, so he's got that to fall back on.

[Lormador]

This is both success and failure in one. I was playing, just not the star of these events.

The lawful evil PC monk, prestige-classed into a bunch of evil abilities, is drawing from a Deck of Many Things in a vast arena on a holiday, Sheildmeet, before most of the assembled city of Calimport. The DM has really outdone himself for this encounter, and we are using a physical deck of cards and a customized list of outcomes. The vizier requires us to declare our number of draws before drawing any: and my fellow PC goes for two.

The first draw: a card that requires him to do battle with an alignment-reversed copy of himself.

He stomps his chaotic good counterpart into the dust, quite predictably, as he has access to all sorts of abilities that depend on his evil alignment. His CG opponent isn't able to do much of anything. I think the DM ruled that even some of his regular monk abilities were off the table.

The PC proudly asks, "Is this the best I can do," spitting on the corpse as it's dragged out of the arena.

The second draw: the card that reverses your alignment.

All this before the eyes of half his monastic order.

[Bobby Baratheon]

That's actually pretty hilarious.

I've always wondered it would feel like to have your world view arbitrarily turned on its head . . . you'd be conscious of the change, but what would that feel like?

[ExLibrisMortis]

Well, as a second-level erudite, I was at 0 hp and 1 pp, my crossbow already fired (a miss, I believe), and in a room with an ogre. Through some stupid luck, nobody in the party had been able to damage the ogre for a few rounds, but it was nearly dead (exact hp unknown). So I used my last pp manifesting crystal shard, which, being a strenuous action, knocked me unconscious. My character woke up a few rounds later, and found that the shard had pierced the troll's brain stem, dropping it instantly (not a crit; our DM lets players call their killing blow, and it seemed an erudite-y target).

Not a big victory in the grand scheme of things, but it felt suitably heroic. Sometimes, a few rounds of rolling badly really sets up the next success, even if it's an average result.

[mistermysterio]

This is both success and failure in one. I was playing, just not the star of these events.

The lawful evil PC monk, prestige-classed into a bunch of evil abilities, is drawing from a Deck of Many Things in a vast arena on a holiday, Sheildmeet, before most of the assembled city of Calimport. The DM has really outdone himself for this encounter, and we are using a physical deck of cards and a customized list of outcomes. The vizier requires us to declare our number of draws before drawing any: and my fellow PC goes for two.

The first draw: a card that requires him to do battle with an alignment-reversed copy of himself.

He stomps his chaotic good counterpart into the dust, quite predictably, as he has access to all sorts of abilities that depend on his evil alignment. His CG opponent isn't able to do much of anything. I think the DM ruled that even some of his regular monk abilities were off the table.

The PC proudly asks, "Is this the best I can do," spitting on the corpse as it's dragged out of the arena.

The second draw: the card that reverses your alignment.

All this before the eyes of half his monastic order.

Sorta similar (and didn't involve any dice rolling):

Had a deck of many things. Party member pulled from it and got Knight - so he got a level 4 fighter cohort (we were a good-aligned group, so the cohort was also good). He told the fighter to pull from the deck, and the fighter pulled the Jester. Naturally, the fighter pulled two more times. First he pulled Moon and earned himself 4 wishes. Then he pulled Balance, became evil, wished for his own kingdom, and vanished.

Now we are all constantly waiting for him to pop up again as a BBEG or something. Couldn't have planned it better :O.

[Matrota]

I play a spellsword in one of my campaigns, and a certain situation came where I was possessed by a fire creature that was burning me from the inside out. Now, I was alone in a trial, and as a frost elf with the cold subtype, I was gonna take a lot of damage from this thing. Thinking quickly I shapechanged into a fire elemental, becoming immune to the fire damage it would otherwise deal for the time being. As caster level 21, I had a decent amount of time to think before the shapechange would wear off and I would start taking damage again. At this point, I scoured my prepared spell list, trying to think of any way I could become freed of the creature. I then got a brilliant idea that was likely one of the riskiest things I've ever done in D&D.

I asked the DM if I could technically cast a ranged touch attack against the creature possessing me, as it was visible within me though moved along with my body. He thought for a bit and confirmed, which that in and of itself may have been a misjudgement. After that point I cast dimensional anchor on the creature possessing me, barring it from extradimensional travel. Then, I cast greater heroism on myself just in case, and dimension doored 400 feet away. Matt, the DM, told me that the monster was bound to my soul, so teleporting without the effigy might rip my soul out of my body as well. I didn't realize that until it was too late, and had to roll a will save, meeting the exact DC, only because of that greater heroism I had cast on myself earlier. I then proceeded to forcecage the being for the next 21 hours while I dealt with the next enemy in the trial. Problem solved.

[Blu]

Fail: My swordsage outmaneuvers a ogre using a lot of acrobatics(and getting really high results) goes in for a charge, rolls a 1 and gets smacked almost to death...

Sucess: Players see my swordsage being destroyed and almost s*** their pants. Rogues scores a 20, 20, confirmation on her attack and the problem was solved

[Dagroth]

Success. Archer spec Ranger had been showing off a bit, firing into melee and otherwise bragging about his skill. Monk says "what's the big deal?" Ranger says "It takes a lot of feats to be this good!" Monk picks up a bow from a fallen enemy, shrugs and fires an arrow at an approaching foe. Rolls a 20. Confirms with a 20. Triple maximum damage including strength bonus because it's a Strength bow. 33 points, enemy drops.

Monk looks at the Ranger and says "what's the big deal?"

[Das_Tabby]

Another success/fail situation:
We fought 2 golems, I can't remember which kind, but they inflicted damage that was hard to heal and they were a really tough fight
The success: my shadow sun ninja actually succeded on comet throwing one of them through the hall
The skinny, middle aged human with strength 8 actually tripped this large metalthing (and successfully counter charged him before, man I love this dex-based maneuvers, they produce so nice mental images)

Now, same fight and the time I failed: you have to know that my group has some luck to reduce enemys to 1 or 2 hp and then struggle to finish them off
This time too.
Only one of our enemies was still standing, i knew he had a very low touch ac and that a 2 would be enough to hit him
I tried to deliver a touch of the shadow sun
...and rolled a 1...
The next time it was his turn he finished me off x.x