Crazy ways characters save themselves

[Sigreid]

In our last session the party wizard got snatched up by a roc and carried off. To try to save himself he cast wall of force directly in front of the roc causing it to plow into the wall like a bird into a skyscraper window and the two of them to plummet over 500 feet to the ground.

At this point one of the other party members says "he's got feather fall, right?". Nope, wizard doesn't have it in his book and wouldn't have memorized it anyway. Wizard is knocked to 0 but doesn't die and stabalizes before he dies.

What crazy ways have characters saved themselves from certain doom?

[Corpsecandle717]

There's a castle in FR that is under constant bombardment by high level spells and what not. Each time the castle is destroyed it reconstructs itself. My DM was running a 3.5 campaign and made the mistake of reading about the castle as part of the flavor text for one of the regions we were traveling through. Naturally we made a bee line straight for it, despite the DMs repeated hints that this was a bad idea. Long story short, one of those high level spells limits teleportation and we're trapped in the middle of the castle while it's being torn apart again with the DM looking at us with a, "Well what do you want me to do?" shrug. So with our last few rounds remaining we grabbed the party portable hole and the rogue's bag of holding and put one inside the other hoping out for that narrow chance to get a rift into the Astral Plane. DM drops dice in front of us, and lo and behold, we started our Astral Plane arc.

[Misterwhisper]

Long story short.

3.5game playing a fighter 4/barbarian 4/ frenzied berserker I think 7 at the time.

On a crashing starjammer. All 5 other people in the group are full casters. The wizard and sorcerer teleport, the Druid changes into a bird of some kind and carries one cleric, the other cleric casts d-door.

I look at the group and kind of go, “hey, not a caster here.”

Groups essentially tells me to cowboy up and take it.

While falling at terminal velocity plus, I spot some critter on the ground but can’t tell what it is from the distance.

I stand on the front of the starjammer and scream, “I am taking out my pent up mundane anger on... THAT THING!!!”

As I dramatically point and break into deathless rage and did my best to use a crashing starjammer as a massive club.

I even use the feat power critical to make It look good.

One massive impact and a very shocked and dead t-Rex later and I am climbing out of a crater

[ImproperJustice]

Different game, but we were running a WW2 espionage game, where our group was in occupied France trying to divert/ delay or destroy a massive munitions and supply shipment that was being prepped at a well guarded rail car.

The party consisted of:
A Nazi Double Agent
A French Resistance Agent
A British member of the OSO
And an American Commando from Missouri

The opening infiltration went pretty well, with the Commando and British agent getting into the train yard.
The French Agent concealed herslef and was using a signaling system via her compact mirror to call out guard positions, while German Agent was busy trying to delay the office from his final inspection before the other two agents could plant explosives.

Unfortunately, the Office became suspicious of the double agent, which resulted in a knife fight, and the capture of the double agent.
Alarms were raised and the british agent was swiftly surrounded and apprehended as he wa in the middle of the enemy barracks at the time and needed that delay to get through.

Leaving the Commando surrounded by Nazi troops on all sides while he was trapped inside a munitions car, which was the last objective.

Seeing no way out, he took a nearby grenade, just as the guards broke into the train car, pulled the pin and said “God Bless America”.
He then saluted and dropped the grenaded in a crate full of other explosives.
The resulting blast shook the surrounding countryside for miles as the whole depot went up.

Meanwhile, a tiny French woman slipped away, got onto her bicycle with tears in her eyes and carried the story of the team’s untold bravery back home.

So maybe not so much saving themselves, but maybe ties into that desperate do or die type actions that some PCs get stuck into.

Makes for some great memories and stories.
At least for our group this is one of our all time favorites.

[Trask]

Not that crazy, but I once saved myself while playing an Oath of the Ancients Paladin by using my Nature's Wrath ability to grab myself as I fell down the side of a bottomless pit.

Also we once rode a wave of lava on a Leomund's Tiny Hut.

[Danielqueue1]

"A line's point of origin is not included in the area of effect unless you decide otherwise."

Level 4 Party was captured by the villain's army and separated. The rogue got out by being a rogue and lured a pack of wolves towards the camp to cause a distraction. (Amazing nature roll btw) rogue was able to free the paladin but they couldn't find the sorcerer or bard. They eventually decided to leave and come back for them.

The bard and sorcerer were Bound hand and foot with gags to stop their spells. Sorcerer used subtle spell to cast gust of wind. He included the origin (himself) in the area. He literally blew himself and the bard (was between sorcerer and exit) out of the camp. Subtle magic missile on the guardsman prevented the alarm from being raised.

[Bubzors]

This was back in 3.5 days. One of my players was a dwarven wizard runesmith or something (I forget exact at this point). The party was fighting a group of mind flyers and the poor bard was about to get his brain sucked out.

At this point the dwarf, having a better save to possibly escape the mind flayer, asked if he can use benign transposition to swap with the poor bard. I agree and now he is two steps away from dieing.

Sadly he does not make his next saving throw and starts to panick. If I remember correctly he would die if he failed one more save. Suddenly he remembers he has a snake familiar that he never uses for anything wrapped around his arm and desperately asks if his snake can attack. I say yes, thinking this snake can do like 5 damage at most.

Now as an aside we have a long standing house rule of three nat 20's insta-kill anything. So guess what happens... yup his stupid snake familiar rolls three nat 20's and insta-kills the mind flayer. The whole table flips out and laughs. They mop up the rest of the encounter no problem after.

One of those moments at the table we still talk about over 9 years later

[NecessaryWeevil]

Not D&D but pretty cool.

My magic-slinging superhero and his teammates are fighting vampires on the top of a tower. One of my teammates has already fallen off the tower and I'm using my telekinetic powers to keep her from splatting on the pavement below. Not looking great as I'm now largely alone on a narrow railing with vampires. Then I notice my forcefield, do some quick math in my head....
and smile at the vampires, give a cheery wave, and step off the tower. ...BOOM. Superhero landing (literally).
If it can block a supervillain's massive punch, it can also protect from a 100-foot fall.

[Trampaige]

I was the only party member to fail a save against the fact the sun had become a conduit of eldritch madness, and the DM took me aside to tell me that the only thing I felt was the endless disgust of living flesh. I was told to, at an opportune time, murder everyone else and then myself. I was playing a barb fiendlock, party at lvl8.

So opportune time came, I dropped the cleric to death saves, caused the monk to run, and the wizard had only a couple of spell points left. His solution to everything was to fireball it, so he spent his last points fireballing me.

I was at only 20 or so HP, and I failed my save. But tomb of levistus had just been released in UA. It causes you to become entombed in a block of ice with fire vulnerability, but the ice gives 10THP per warlock level.

With vulnerability, he hits me with a 76 damage fireball. The ice evaporates in a mushroom cloud and I take... 6 damage.

Sadly, the monk ran in and landed a stunning blow following that, I was subdued, tpk avoided, and we learned how to avoid the sun. But surviving that fireball was worth taking the invocation.

[Finback]

Leaping onto a harpy, to kitesurf down a cliff face. It was considered a controlled descent, so we halved the falling damage, and then rolled dex for the landing, a successful one took no damage.

[MrStabby]

Party bard surrounded and seperated from the party. Lost in a dungeon with no idea what was around her. Low on HP.

Aware only that she was underground she dimension door to go straight up. She took lethal force damage but was pushed to the surface then passed her death saves to stabilise whilst the rest of the party found her.

[Wryte]

Playing Curse of Strahd, we'd gotten on the bad side of the Burgomaster of Vallaki and found ourselves surrounded by the town guard, about to be slaughtered on the spot. My warlock stepped forward and intimidated them into backing down, by assuring them that they, the guards, would probably win the fight... but that we'd definitely take a lot of them down with us, so the question wasn't whether they felt luckier than us... but whether they felt luckier than the guy standing next to them.

They stood down and we walked free.

[Man_Over_Game]

My players had a jailbreak for their first session, being arrested by some corrupt/racist king, yada yada. They find an old dwarven tunnel under the compound they were kept while being chased by guards.

After running a ways, they encountered some corrosive slugs that jump on you and deal acid damage, but straight up killing them causes them to dissipate into an acidic gas that continues to deal damage. The gas is easily burnt away with any source of fire damage, but they never found that out.

With the acid slugs in front of them, and the guards audibly behind them, the Paladin decides he's going to go...up?

I scramble through my notes, not prepared for THAT. They're about equal chance of directly underneath a village or the bottom of a lake, so I just decide it with a d20, high roll is good for the players.

I rolled a 2. So I had them dig out of their hole with two sleeping ogres on the outside. They managed to get away (barely) but it was quite a rollercoaster.

[PopeLinus1]

There was a particularly nasty fight we were in, At level 1 where our Ranger (Who was very bow focused) Our Barbarian, And the Boss were still standing. The Boss and the Barbarian were in a brutal melee that had just caused him to go unconscious.

Our ranger's bow had been shattered when he had been forced to fight a bunch of melee enemies, and his quiver had been knocked into the ocean. Normally we didn't count ammo, but we deemed that despite him having infinite arrows, they were in his quiver. He had picked up a spare bow from an enemy earlier in the campaign in case something like this happened, but he had no ammo.

So we have a melee focused boss, who on their next turn can kill the parties barbarian, and is about 60 feet away from the only conscience party member, who has no way to engage him at range, and is terrible at melee.

What does he do? He grabs a piece of his broken bow, nocks it as an arrow, and fires it at the Boss. Nat 20. Goes right through the guys neck.

[Sigreid]

Some cool stories here. :smallbiggrin:

[Finback]

Oh, I forgot one where we were being attacked by Baba Lysager. She cast whatever spell makes the battlefield just a noxious wasteland of poison gas*, and we are going down hard. Our bard's player had retired to another room to rest with a headache, but left me in charge of her sheet**. When it came around, I looked at her spells, and said "Cast Dispel Magic".
<DM> Well, it doesn't w-
<me> ON BABA LYSAGER'S FLYING SKULL.

and that's how an old lady took a lot of falling damage into a poison cloud, officers.



* "Kill Archduke Ferdinand"?

** we had this happen once before, when the bard was in some sort of trance (real world: player was overseas, but we didn't have a good narrative out). We described it as wielding the gnome like a pump-action shotgun that casts spells. *chk-chk* VICOUS MOCKERY! *reload* TASHA'S HIDEOUS LAUGHTER! DM even said the player holding her had a +2 shield bonus.

[NRSASD]

So the players had been shunted to a floating island in the plane of Elemental Air, irritating the local winged grungs. The locals called for reinforcements, resulting in a paratrooper style assault (complete with giant, flying, poison spitting lizards as aircraft) while the party holed up in the locals' ziggurat. As the PCs were being to get overrun by frogs, they noticed another one of the giant flying lizards returning for another pass, a girallon berserker coated in glowing runes clutched in each scaly paw.

The PCs took one look at the girallons and collectively said "screw this, we're leaving" but discovered they couldn't planeshift out. So they decided to do the next best thing: summon a quetzalcoatlus and hijack the flying lizard transport. The grungs shot the PCs' mount full of holes and it took the full blast from the flying lizard, but the players had enough momentum to board the lizard. After an intense grappling brawl over the bottomless void, the party took control of the beast, captured and executed the grung king, and declared themselves the rulers of the surrounding villages for the next couple months until they were able to bribe a djinni into sending them home.

All this happened at 5th level haha

[Jophiel]

At this point one of the other party members says "he's got feather fall, right?". Nope, wizard doesn't have it in his book and wouldn't have memorized it anyway. Wizard is knocked to 0 but doesn't die and stabalizes before he dies.
We were on a third floor balcony with a heavily trapped staircase as the way out. With the unconscious druid failing death saves and me not having an action to waste stabilizing her before the enemy fired off some AOE blast, I just rolled her over the railing with a Healing Word and a bit of shouted advice to tuck and roll then jumped after her. She got to wake up just in time to slam on the ground unconscious and I ate the fall damage to finish dragging her out.

[Laserlight]

I stand on the front of the starjammer and scream, “I am taking out my pent up mundane anger on... THAT THING!!!”

As I dramatically point and break into deathless rage and did my best to use a crashing starjammer as a massive club.

I even use the feat power critical to make It look good.

One massive impact and a very shocked and dead t-Rex later and I am climbing out of a crater

I'm undecided whether the reply to that should be So you're why dinosaurs are extinct or and that's the moment you switched to playing Exalted.

Bravo.

[sightlessrealit]

We were against the big bad who put everyone in a forcecage while they went to town on our previously pc now NPCs. It wasn't a fight we were going to win. Now my character loves chaos & random chance. she has a hombrewed version of the want of wonder. So she uses it and the effect was that time in a 15ft radius around her stopped for 3 days. So when the 3 days past the bbad was gone.

[manyslayer]

In 3.5 I was running Legacy of Fire (the last Paizo adventure path before Pathfinder). In the big fight against the gnolls that had been raiding the region, they ended up fighting waves of gnolls, mutant gnolls, and their leader, the Carrion King. In the course of the fight the bard had summoned an air elemental (elemental gem). When the last foe fell, the party was in the following state (in 3.5 character lose a hit point per round when below 0 until they expire at -10):
Warmage across a pit at -9
Battledancer nearby at -2
Ranger down a flight of stairs but stable at 0
Bard at 1 hp

Since the bard did not have enough movement to go around the pit to get to the warmage, he commands the air elemental to sweep him up and carry him across to the warmage. This requires a Reflex save or take damage from the elemental's whirlwind. Just made it and gets to the warmage in time to feed her a healing potion and then had enough time to get to the others and revive them.

[Wuzza]

Not that crazy, but I once saved myself while playing an Oath of the Ancients Paladin by using my Nature's Wrath ability to grab myself as I fell down the side of a bottomless pit.
.

That's my fave so far. Just picturing the "Helping Hands" from Labryinth. :)