Dying without a fight?

[Jon_Dahl]

How often have PCs died without a fight in your games if you don't count traps ("traps" in the D&D context)?

We had a game session today and the PCs (an elven 10th-level wizard, a dwarven 6th-level expert/8th-level horizon walker and a human - not-so-sure-about-this - 2nd-level fighter/7th-level wizard) wanted to stop the endeavors of a powerful bandit group. The elf successfully cast Scrying on the PC enemy wizard and then teleported the PC-trio to attack the bandits. I secretly rolled a teleport check ("viewed once") and they ended up in a similar area, that being a swamp that had a single cottage in the middle of nowhere. Once they realized that they were in the wrong place and possibly in the wrong swamp, they headed north since north seemed like a good direction.

In order to speed up things, the horizon walker used dimension doors, although due to the limited visibility it was difficult. They ended up in the middle of a patch of quicksand. The dwarf with his heavy armor and the weak elf sank right away and the human wizard almost effortlessly swam to the "shore" and got up. The dwarf grabbed and clang to the elf because he wanted to use dimension door to teleport them both away, but he was hindering the elf's attempts to get back to the surface. The dwarf noticed that his weight was keeping the elf down, so he let him go. The dwarf noticed that it was difficult to use dimension door submerged in quicksand since I ruled that he was effectively entangled when it came to using his spell-like abilities. He managed to teleport out of the quicksand after five attempts and he had not been even close to drowning due his extremely high CON. He had teleported himself quite far from the quicksand and now he approached it very carefully and very slowly.

Meanwhile the human had tied a rope around the strongest looking tree. Holding the other end of the rope, he jumped back to the quicksand to save the submerged elf. However, this time swimming proved quite difficult. The dwarf came to hold the rope which was tied to the tree. The human dived to save the elf but swimming was very difficult. The elf tried and tried to swim to the surface but to no avail. The human grabbed the elf and yanked the rope. The dwarf tried to pull his friend out of the quicksand, but he failed his STR check. At that point the elf was already at -1 HP and then he drowned.

The dwarf and the human got the dead elf out of the quicksand and I said that they could try Heal checks to resuscitate the elf. They tried to succeed in a Heal check DC 15 a couple of times but they were so bad that they gave up, stripped the elf of its magic items and tossed the body back to the quicksand.

[Quertus]

Awesome. That's what D&D should look like.

Sadly, most of my recent parties have been too competent for anyone to die like a chump that way. :smallfrown:

[Ghen]

Zero times, but I've had a close call that I feel deserves an honorable mention.

One of my players nearly starved to death in a dungeon they were trapped in. Getting out was a bit of a puzzle, but they kept ignoring the puzzle, not realizing that this was the way out. Finally figured it out, and ate on the rotting grizzly bear carcass that she made on the way into the dungeon. She then got a disease of some kind and nearly died from that, but if I remember right she got healed or something in time to save herself. It's been a few years and the details are a bit fuzzy.

[Talverin]

One you pretty much never see - Old age.

We had a Myconid alchemist in our party. Well, Myconids are a peculiar breed of Mushroom-people. They're a very interesting race that even has the ability to telepathically communicate via spores they can emit as a racial ability. Cool fluff for them too.

Well, downside. They cap out at... right about age 35.

Even the DM didn't realize this, when we were going through a labyrinth between time and out-of-time... and aging 1d10 years every night.

Four nights later, he brought in a new character; but not before he released all his spores for the day to create a bunch of offspring!

We were in a tunnel leading to a gate to the Plane of Elemental Wind. They got sucked off into the portal. I don't think they survived. We didn't have the heart to tell his character that before he withered away and died of old age.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Talverin
…a peculiar breed of Mushroom-people….

They cap out at….

I see what you did there.

:smalltongue:

[Fizban]

The dwarf tried to pull his friend out of the quicksand, but he failed his STR check. At that point the elf was already at -1 HP and then he drowned.
There are no rules for hauling weights, but those rules that do exist governing weight and moving weights do not involve strength checks. Str checks are for breaking and unsticking things, not reeling in a rope. Unless this was magical sucking sand that actually pulled back, the only question on retrieval there should have been how long it would take to pull the rope in, not how many failures.

They tried to succeed in a Heal check DC 15 a couple of times but they were so bad that they gave up, stripped the elf of its magic items and tossed the body back to the quicksand.
And this is just sad. Once again, even when I find fault with your rulings it doesn't matter because the players were worse.


For mine, it depends on how you take "dying without a fight." I've had a wizard standing at the back of the battle while out of spells get ganked by a Night Hag from behind. After that the Battle Sorc, who had up to that point basically refused to cast spells, started spamming Scintillating Spheres centered on self because he "refused to be taken alive." This caused enough damage to the enemy that they could have won, but when the healbot brought him back up he just blasted himself again, so the remaining two ran for it.

[Elkad]

I've had a couple players die attempting Cleric Feather Fall (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0806.html), but the damage dice were hot.

"The Evil Overlord jumps off the cliff, Feather Falls near the bottom, and starts running down the canyon with the Princess over his shoulder screaming and kicking."
"I've got 85hp, I'll just jump and drink some potions".
I rolled 20d6 at once, in front of the players, for over 100 damage.

[Crake]

I had a party that was once one-by-one picked off by a monk/assassin while we were in town, does that count? We were level 2.

[Talverin]

Fizban,

I agree with his roll, actually. Now, in that case I might have let them go, just because... Well. Players dying to a quicksand trap sounds awful, especially after the million other steps they took to GET to the rope-using point. But in that same situation, my usual response is "Give me a strength check." Whatever other characters are present can do stuff to give bonuses. Sure, by pure RAW it's not called for, but even most DMs I have gamed with do the same. In fact, am I mistaken to say that the assumption is a strength roll is required, until someone actually reads the books enough to discover what you don't have to roll for?

PS, most successful quicksand trap in probably the history of D&D. I'm gonna remember the 'Hard to cast while entangled, isn't it?' bit.

[Jon_Dahl]

There are no rules for hauling weights, but those rules that do exist governing weight and etc.

Read the rules ("rescue"): http://www.d20srd.org/srd/wilderness.htm#marshTerrain

[Fizban]

Read the rules ("rescue"): http://www.d20srd.org/srd/wilderness.htm#marshTerrain
Addendum: I disagree with whoever wrote that rule, because they don't know anything about quicksand. Wiki page clearly states that a human can't actually sink more than halfway, so if it's sticky enough to require a strength check you can't drown. If it's loose enough you escape with a swim check, there's no reason you would ever have to make a strength check.

In short, the DMG quicksand is wrong, and will be placed on the list of bad rules to ignore.

[Nifft]

Addendum: I disagree with whoever wrote that rule, because they don't know anything about quicksand. Wiki page clearly states that a human can't actually sink more than halfway, so if it's sticky enough to require a strength check you can't drown. If it's loose enough you escape with a swim check, there's no reason you would ever have to make a strength check.

In short, the DMG quicksand is wrong, and will be placed on the list of bad rules to ignore.

The DMG's rules are clearly meant to represent Loony Toons quicksand, which is deadly to all living creatures.

[RaiKirah]

My very first session ever we were sneaking into an island and decided to approach from the side with sheer cliff faces to avoid sentries. We went to swim to the cliffs and my character proceeded to fail his first swim check so hard (no ranks, str 8, armor, rolled a 1) that he sank to the bottom. Subsequent swim checks (and climb when I walked to the cliff-face under water) were so poor he drowned. DM then killed off my second character (almost complete tpk) on the same island :)

[BWR]

We nearly TPK'd after an off target Teleport landed us in the middle of the ocean in a raging storm. The GM was nice and said the heavy armor clad-guys who brutally failed their Swim check didn't sink so fast the wizard couldn't catch them before casting another Teleport.

[Crake]

Oh, oh, I have another one. There was once a giant "wraithstorm" as my players decided to call it, a tear between dimensions, where the shadow and the material melded and became one, causing all sorts of shadow creatures, though primarily wraiths, to swarm the area. One of my players had boots of teleport, and was trying to teleport around it for tactical reasons, only to mishap, and land right in the middle of it on his last use for the day, resulting in him being swarmed by wraiths and promptly dying a horrible death. He was recovered later on, but it's become folklore at my table, along with the warning "be careful of wraithstorms" whenever anyone uses regular teleport.

[Telonius]

We've had a couple of near-deaths due to stupidity recently. "The drop doesn't look that far, and I need to get down there stat. Jump check!"

[Thurbane]

I know it probably counts as a trap, but...

https://thewonderwaffles.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/gloryhole.gif

[Ghen]

Scratch what I said earlier. I do have one that I had forgotten. It's also pretty old though.

Basically, one of my player died of metagaming. I had designed a little encounter map that showed the tunnel that the characters were in gently descending into acid, that at first was shallow, and then got deeper and deeper. The players knew that this was acid ahead of time. Now, one player noticed that, on the map, I had drawn out in the acid a couple of flat bits of rock, where the floor of the tunnel rose above the shallow acid for a bit, to form a couple of tiny islands. So he looks at this and says something to the effect of "Hey, I bet there's something out there. I'm going to go check it out."

At which point I tell him "You can't see anything out there. It just looks like the natural cave floor rises out of the shallow acid at that spot."

And he says something to the effect of "Nah, you wouldn't have put a little island out there with nothing on it. I'm going to go check it out."

So, having a pretty good climb check for a level 2 character, he proceeeds to climb laterally across the cave wall to get to the little island. The climb checks are no problem for him, but the acid is. I'm away from my books, but breathing the air directly over acid causes some damage, and he wound up taking a lot of it getting over there. By the way, I gave him a little warning when it was clear he was at the point of no return, where if he kept going out to the island and kept losing HP at the same rate, he would not have enough to make it back, but he chose to keep going anyway. Just to note.

But hey, he makes it. Only to find out that there is indeed nothing on the little rock island. Knowing that he doesn't have enough HP to get back across, we work out that he's going to jump as far as he can back the way he came and grab onto the wall to keep from falling into the acid. I rule that he can do this with a DC 15 reflex save. His reflexes aren't that good, but he makes it anyway! We think that he's going to go all the way, and he's boogy-ing back across the wall with great climb checks!

But then sadly, the last few rolls of the damage for acid vapors turned up max (or near max) damage, and he dropped to the negatives. Lacking diehard, into the acid he dropped, and that was the end of him.

Well, until the good pc was brought back by a cleric of Laduguer, but that's a story for another day.

[dude123nice]

I've had a couple players die attempting Cleric Feather Fall (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0806.html), but the damage dice were hot.

"The Evil Overlord jumps off the cliff, Feather Falls near the bottom, and starts running down the canyon with the Princess over his shoulder screaming and kicking."
"I've got 85hp, I'll just jump and drink some potions".
I rolled 20d6 at once, in front of the players, for over 100 damage.

OMGROFL that must have been the funniest scene ever. The evil overlord escapes the party, turns back to taunt them, then the clerics slams down in front of him, dead, and he is like "....what?".