Best character death?

[jaappleton]

Like the title says, what was your best death?

I'll lead off:

So, my Cleric died last session. It happens, I'm not broken up about it. I'd kinda been wanting to play something else, so it worked out. The party Monk failed a Dex save, and started falling. It was 400ft to the ground below. And no... nobody had Feather Fall...

So my Eladrin Cleric swan dives after him, and using (Volo's) Eladrin's Fey Step, was able to channel their Fey Step to the Monk and teleport him to safety.

Then I plummeted the whole 400ft...

DM: So your body lands here.
-points on the map-
DM: And after the impact, your skeleton lands here. :smalltongue:

[Trask]

Not my character, but a friend of mine lured a weretiger that had murdered several of our characters already into an abandoned farm house loaded with explosive materials, lit them and grappled it. The explosion killed them both.

[Rafaelfras]

My character also fell after failing a dex save. But i was saved by our fighter lighting lure, happiest 2d8 damage i took.
On character deaths, on a previous campaing my wizard cracked a staff of power in Sammaster´s phylactery after he had killed half of our party. I didn't die (got the 50% chance and got transported to another plane of existence), but to the survivors it was like i did (and had no body to be resurrected) it made our victory against the lich a bittersweet one.

[ff7hero]

I stabbed the Raven Queen...

Let me explain. The Raven Queen sent out party to retrieve an Artifact Dagger that she seemed afraid of. In the tussle of the combat that followed, my Bardadin ended up with said Dagger. Now this Bardadin didn't care too much for the Raven Queen. As far as he could tell, the Shadowfell's issues pretty much began with her.

So, when she was rewarding us for getting the dagger out of the hands of her enemy, I made a point to get up next to her and then "I stab the Raven Queen." No one else at the table, DM or Players, saw it coming. It was great. I managed to stab her once before she Power Word: Kill'd my a%$. Good times.

[VonKaiserstein]

One of my players had been playing an old school Holy Knight, a paladins paladin, and was getting very upset at the heresies of the party's CN cleric, especially his wife. Though a series of unlikely circumstances, involving a breeding scheme fronting as a brothel, this cleric was married to a medusa, who always wore a veil and turban, so as not to petrify anyone accidentally. They'd also kept the nature of his wife secret from the party.

So while the cleric was off training, the paladin decides it's time to kill this monster. Again, doesn't quite know what type of monster it is. So he kicks in the door and dramatically poses, then launches into a speech. And fails his con save.

The cleric returns to find a statue of his party member in the center of town, covered in pigeon droppings, and his wife spreading birdseed around the base.

[MoiMagnus]

(Not 5e, but a D&D-like homebrew)
We were a group of high ranking generals in a rennaissance-fantasy world.

We were captured by the enemy, and the DM prepared special "torture" session that attacked the (mental) weakness of each of our character, in order to make us leak some very important information.

Our Paladin was torn apart between its vow of not betraying our kingdom, and its vow of protecting us.

Since my character (the mage) having the highest will-power, I was the less likely to leak information, hence the most "disposable", and the evil general took the two of us in a room, basically saying "If you don't talk I kill the mage".

You could see on the Paladin's player a big moment of hesitation, unsure of what to do. He asked, half jokingly, "Is it ok if I let you die?". I immediately and without thinking answered "No problems!". (I realized few seconds later that it was probably not the best answer to give)

The evil general immediately killed my mage with a bullet in the head as an example, to show that he was serious, and no other joke comment would be allowed.

(I was resurrected later, after the rescue group freed us and managed to find my body. The rescue group was a set of lower level character we created and played and were send to liberate/resurrected/warn our main characters each time we f*cked up)

[birdboye713]

A bit of backstory first. I had a Human Protection Cleric that joined the party late because I wasn't able to join the campaign right away. Very early on my character became the dad of the group, probably because my character was (relative to average racial lifespan) the oldest party member. He became especially close with a half-elf bard in the party, who was 17 years old. After loosing an arm and then getting a replacement wooden arm (it's a long story) we finally got some downtime. Well, that's what we thought. Turns out, the half-elf had an amulet that was protecting him from a revenant that was out for his life. (his father killed the revenant in life) And it broke in the last session.
So, regardless of the fact that revenants don't typically seek out help to kill their target and that a revenant typically dies if they don't get revenge within a year (it had been far longer than a year), we woke up to assassins at our throats, and the half-elf was choking. (note: we were level four, and that encounter was a total of ~20,000 exp. that's way over a deadly encounter for us.) I quickly handled the assassin (probably because our gnome wizard was sleeping under my bed), but by the time I was done with mine, our warlock died to poison, and our rouge had died to the revenant (he got done with his assassin first). I ran in to the half-elf's room to find a revenant crushing his skull. Needless to say, I was distraught. I decided I would go no holds barred. (another note: the half-elf had a magical rapier) I ran in, used my channel divinity on myself to make it so the next attack against me would deal damage to the attacker, and I summoned my spiritual weapon. It took the form of a rapier. The attack with my spiritual weapon got a nat 20, but it wasn't enough. On the revenant's turn it attacked me, killing me. But my channel divinity was still active, so a radiant version of my self came out of my dead body and punched the revenant. Still wasn't enough. I was given no last words. At this point, the only two remaining were the wizard and the barbarian. The wizard was out of spell slots, and the barbarian was out of rages. So they ran. Apparently, the revenant caught up, even though the barbarian was faster. The DM proceeded to describe them getting torn apart limb by limb in the street. He later told me that I nearly killed it, but apparently he decided to buff the revenant. For some ungodly reason.
That was my first TPK. May you be forever remembered, Lucius.

[Warped Wiseman]

Sounds like your DM just really wanted to kill you all, birdboye713.

[birdboye713]

Honestly, he probably did want to kill us. I also learned later that the main BBEG was going to become a Tarrasque around when we reached level 10. I mean, we were supposed to run, but still.

[Misterwhisper]

Funny version:

Over the years I have had 4 different characters die from being teabagged to death by a large critter that was killed and fell on me.

Cool version:

Half orc champion 4 / berserker 14 charged the BBEG caster starting 85 feet away. I had 267hp.

First round he hits pretty much everything with a meteor swarm. Everything gets nuked and is burning he rolled well and I failed the save ended up taking 158 damage, end of my turn of running I took an extra 7 from the fire. Rough terrain slowed me down

I am now 45 feet away and have 101 hp.

Next round I dash again to get 5 feet from him and the dm asks how many hp I have, I told him a little less than half. He does not take a chance with a power word kill so he throws an 8th level disintegrate at me, all in all I failed the save and take 88 hp of damage. End of my turn and I took 6 more fire

Next round he blasts me with an upcast magic missile for 45 damage.
This knocks me to 0 and my half orc trait kicks in and I go to 1.
My initiative I step up to him and put a great axe in his chest. First swing hits but no Crit, I did 18 damage. Second attack I do crit for 64 damage. I am not sure what he has left byt it is not a lot. I bonus action attack and roll a 19, critical, I do 62 damage this time which is enough to put him down but not dead. Since he is now unconscious and in our games that makes you essentially an object. I grab him by the leg and pull him into the fire with me. End of my I take 5 more fire damage and fall over. We both die in the fire.

[jaappleton]

Mistwhisper,

Slow clap to a standing ovation!

[No brains]

Not my character, but a friend of mine lured a weretiger that had murdered several of our characters already into an abandoned farm house loaded with explosive materials, lit them and grappled it. The explosion killed them both.

What was their impending explosion taunt of choice? A Vincent Price laugh or quoting Moby ****? :smallbiggrin:

[MadBear]

We were at the top of a tower when an ancient dragon appeared. My fighter jumped off the ledge to perform a full attack at it's stupid face with my great sword (I was low on hp, so my goal was to attack it, fall with the wizard casting feather fall so I'd land at the bottom safe from harm).....

only, that wasn't an ancient dragon.......

it was just an illusion of a dragon.....

and after I passed through it the DM ruled that the wizard couldn't see me (failed his DC check to realize it wasn't an illusion, so I just kinda vanished), the wizard assumed I must have teleported and didn't cast feather fall as I fell to my doom.

[Miz_Liz]

The party had made a long line of mistakes and ended up in combat with multiple demons. The only two left were my druid and the bard. The two of them had become good friends, and the demons were making also sorts of awful remarks about how they had no plans to kill us, only to enslave and... use us (I guess I should note we were the only female members of the party.) Not wanting to be a demon's plaything, my druid hugged her friend, said a tearful goodbye, and cast "call lightening" down on both of them. I rolled really well for damage and totally incinerated both characters. No slaves for you, Mr. Demon.

[FrancisBean]

This was not my character's death. This was my wife's character deaths... Both directly caused by me; one as a player and one as a DM. Neither one was under 5e rules, but that's not so important.

The second death was in a slapstick 3.5 game where "Rule of Drool" was a binding thing. If it made people laugh enough, it played. And I was a player summoning a Celestial Bison. But because of action economy, I wanted to summon it above the BBEG so we'd get the first round damage as it fell on him. My DM said "Sure, why not...." And then he proceeded to pull out the exact definitions of the 3.5 Celestial template and apply it to a Bison as depicted in wikipedia. Proceeding tipsily according to the rules of HD increase and size increase and so forth, he arrived at a 30' diameter bison which materialized, as I'd specified, 45' above the BBEG.... and my wife's character., who had single-digit hit points at that point.

It was a long, cold night on the couch.

The first one was in 1e, and was her epic PC swan song. It's a long, involved story, which ended with Demogorgon sending first an army of 1000 spectres (unlike in 5e, in 1e they're among the stronger undead), then animating all of the dinosaur fossils under their country as undead dinosaurs, then coming to their world personally. She played an epic Paladin of a God of Martyrs. She got hold of an artifact -- basically a homing beacon -- for what her deity called The Hammer of the Gods. She took it with her and engaged Demogorgon in single combat. She lasted about 2 rounds.... Just long enough to make it too late to dodge the comet summoned by the artifact to level her character, Demogorgon, and the western mountain half of her country.

For some reason, that one didn't offend her. I guess death by bison is too ignominious for some players.

[Seclora]

Only had a character die once, it was my first character. He'd come back from being an NPC for a really big session with multiple fights across what amounted to a fortress(Mad Scientist/Wizard's Oil Rig, but irrelevant).

He and his friend, the Party's Barbarian, were moving to intercept a Lycanthrope on its way to the power source for the base and the Barbarian got their first, was promptly intimidated, and proceeded to escort his new boss back toward my bard. I readied an action, hiding behind the corner, to use one of my scrolls. I had a scroll of Modify Memory, and I knew that the Lycan guarded a specific door in the BBEG's lair. So my thought was that I could subvert the defenses in advance. I had a butt load of custom magic items, vest that made me immune to metal weapons, High saves and AC, and Immunity to most spell damage types. I wasn't even remotely worried about his safety.

Turns the corner, fails his save, and I specify my conditions. As soon as he sees us in the BBEG's lair, he would remember the Barbarian as a close childhood friend he trusted without hesitation.
DM asks if I'm sure.

Like an idiot, I said yes.

He bit me in half. The DM gave me a chance to change my mind and I said no. Alfred knew what he was doing, and he knew that his life was an acceptable price for victory. I also stated that he expected to be Resurrected at the party's earliest convenience. He was not a martyr, just a chessmaster.

[Osrogue]

I’ve really only had one character death so far. The short version is that my party broke into my home with some hired mercenaries and stabbed me to death because I started world war 1.

[Bannan_mantis]

College of valour bard sang country roads as a diversion so the party could escape. It was a do or die scenario where a entire castle they were in was surrounded by zombies and everyone was looking not too hot except for our bard who played mostly defensive. When it came down to it he used magic to increase the volume of his voice and with a high performance roll every zombie around started to run towards him. He used his magic to mostly deal damage and control the hoard so the party had enough time to escape.

Edit: okay just realised this has to be your character and this was my friend's...but I'm a real sucker for this so I'm putting it here anyway

[jaappleton]

Noticing an awful lot of Bard death in here!

[Tiamatwing]

Not mine but in a 4e game we had a kenku barbarian, Formerly psion which came back wrong from a resurrection after they decided to walk through a wall too long after being told “are you sure” by all players at table twice.

We are in the ultimate library situated in the astral sea and the control structure was a chair at the center, we have been here before so knew that the chair dominated the weak minded and required high arcana checks to control properly, said barbarian starts moving towards the chair, my character says “don’t sit in the chair let someone else” our maximum crit damage build sorcerer says “don’t sit in my chair” due to combined lingering effects of the last time he sat in the chair and the megalomaniac split personality madness he is developing, barbarian proceeds to sit in chair *insert groan here*

Barbarian proceeds to then fail needed checks and lashes out at the intruders in their library aka us and 1 round later we have the barbarian partially beaten and incapacitated on the floor of the room, the dm asks the sorcerer to make a arcana, religion, and an endurance check and pass one of the checks, the dice rolls are a 1, 1, and a 2, and the split personality takes over and the sorcerer player told to kill the barbarian, sorcerer proceeds to point at the barbarian in character and use one of his at wills/cantrips and do over a 100 damage in a single shot taking the barbarian from around a quarter health to past his negative bloodied value (half health value) and instantly killing/microwave cooking the poor idiotic bird.

[Wizard_Lizard]

I almost TPK'd the party I was DMing for...
theywere lvl 1 and I rolled a random encounter table...
turns out a kracken attacked them!
And instead of fleeing and leaving the boat to it's doom, they attcked it!
It took some tomfoolerry with a gnomish wizard and some magic cannons to stave it off, but during the fray the dragonborn paladin (INT 6) jumped at the kracken swinging his sword... ... and missed! He fell into the ocean and drowned inside his heavy plate armour.
Turns out water is the most dangerous enemy of them all...

[Bannan_mantis]

Mistwhisper,

Slow clap to a standing ovation!

Maybe it's cause most bards are more comfortable with death if it means it's they're biggest show of all

[Glorthindel]

I was DMing a Ravenloft adventure where the party were being held in an island mental asylum, being targetted every night by different magical and psionic experiments. One of the experiments involved the high-Dex Half-Elf Rogue and the very low dex Earth Genasi Fighter having their personalities transplanted into each others bodies (this was only a termporary effect that wore off after a couple of hours every morning).

After several failed escape plans, the party managed to bust out the asylum, and flee towards the docks. However, the docks were located at the bottom of a steep set of cliffs, with a hand-cranked lift down to the dock. Most of the party piled on the lift while the Rogue (in Genasi body) operated the crank at the top, with the party Wizard staying with him as back-up. The party had nearly reached the bottom (they could safely jump from the lift at this point), where they intended to operate the lift to send it back up for the two at the top, when a bunch of enemies flew in to attack the group at the top (the asylum was operated by a strange vampire breed that drank cerebral fluid and transformed into seagulls instead of bats... don't blame me, this was a printed module!). Without thinking, the Rogue ordered the Wizard to jump (he had Featherfall memorised, but this was AD&D, so one target only), then, forgetting he wasn't in his normal nimble body declared he would jump off the cliff, onto the rope holding the lift, and slide down it to the rest of the party. To a chorus of facepalms he leapt off, missed the rope completely, and splattered messily to his death.

What makes this story even funnier is the Genasi - his backstory was that he was on a mission to avenge the murder of his wife, and rescue his children which were sold into slavery. But now, with his true body reduced to a fine mulch, even if he ever found them, they would never recognise him.

[some guy]

My barbarian held off a water elemental so his two teammates could get away. I was the only one with a magic weapon (only time I ever used a trident, even though the DM house-ruled tridents to have a better damage dice), the other pc's had not very effective cantrips and were very low on spell slots, everyone was low on hp. Thanks to rage I bought the team enough time to get away, I was brought to 0 hp, made my death saves, but then was drowned by the elemental.
When the party returned to my barbarian's body, they fed it an unidentified potion in the hopes of it being a potion of reincarnation. My body grew gills and continued to be dead. I enjoyed that irony very much.

[MThurston]

Playing Rolemaster we had to answer 3 riddles. We did so and the beast that was guarding a door attacked us anyways.

I had been playing a Knight for 4 years and on the first attack from the BBEG I had my neck broken. It was a lucky roll on the DMs part and you could see the DM didn't want to do it.

I told him that it is what it is.

The party defeated the beast and took my body to my family. Everyone at the table was upset.

Fast forward 6 months and I am running the new campaign because my character dead and the DM wanted to play.

My old character shows up in town as the Keeper of Souls. Before my evil character leaves, the party is all KO'd and the dwarf was grappled and used as a shield.

The party had to find out how my old character was possessed and had to defeat him. It lasted for 1 and a half years with the party returning his body to a sealed chamber.

[x1372]

So, my first time playing D&D, I created a Lawful Good halfling life cleric, joining a campaign a decent ways in. By the time of "the event," I'd been in the group for 6+ months and the campaign itself had been running for over a year. My character considered himself the group's protector (despite another cleric in the party who clearly knew what she was doing better than I did) and personally blamed himself for all of the PCs who'd died (around 9 at this point, all happening while I was unable to intervene). The session before the event, the longest lived PC in the group had just died to a trap.

So with 3 PCs left, we, inevitably, triggered another trap. Wisdom save, failed. Roll Percentile. The DM pulls me over behind the screen to read the effect. Madness. Sees everything as a threat, must fight to the best of my ability. The DM whispers in my ear "I expect you to be brutal."

Due to a quirk of the dungeon, teleportation spells did something different and nasty here. I'd recognized this earlier in the dungeon, but I don't think the rest of the group had. But there was certainly a look of horror on the DM's face when my opening move was to cast Banishment on the other two party members with me, my first (and last) use of a 5th level spell slot.

One failed Charisma save later, I was in a duel to the death with the other party member while the one who failed the save... was ultimately never heard from again. And despite low spell slots, I managed to burn through two wild shapes worth of druid HP to kill him too, only to die fighting our NPC guide right before the madness would have worn off.

It didn't help the ridiculousness of the situation that a wand of wonder attack during the battle turned my halfling blue for the duration. But yeah, the lawful good halfling life cleric, low on spells, skin turned blue, TPKed and ended a year long campaign. "Brutal" indeed.

Merric my small friend, you went out with a bang.

[jaappleton]

So, my first time playing D&D, I created a Lawful Good halfling life cleric, joining a campaign a decent ways in. By the time of "the event," I'd been in the group for 6+ months and the campaign itself had been running for over a year. My character considered himself the group's protector (despite another cleric in the party who clearly knew what she was doing better than I did) and personally blamed himself for all of the PCs who'd died (around 9 at this point, all happening while I was unable to intervene). The session before the event, the longest lived PC in the group had just died to a trap.

So with 3 PCs left, we, inevitably, triggered another trap. Wisdom save, failed. Roll Percentile. The DM pulls me over behind the screen to read the effect. Madness. Sees everything as a threat, must fight to the best of my ability. The DM whispers in my ear "I expect you to be brutal."

Due to a quirk of the dungeon, teleportation spells did something different and nasty here. I'd recognized this earlier in the dungeon, but I don't think the rest of the group had. But there was certainly a look of horror on the DM's face when my opening move was to cast Banishment on the other two party members with me, my first (and last) use of a 5th level spell slot.

One failed Charisma save later, I was in a duel to the death with the other party member while the one who failed the save... was ultimately never heard from again. And despite low spell slots, I managed to burn through two wild shapes worth of druid HP to kill him too, only to die fighting our NPC guide right before the madness would have worn off.

It didn't help the ridiculousness of the situation that a wand of wonder attack during the battle turned my halfling blue for the duration. But yeah, the lawful good halfling life cleric, low on spells, skin turned blue, TPKed and ended a year long campaign. "Brutal" indeed.

Merric my small friend, you went out with a bang.

My goodness... Hope that the other party members were able to handle that well.

Unfortunately, some people wouldn't. We all know what I'm talking about.

[x1372]

My goodness... Hope that the other party members were able to handle that well.

Unfortunately, some people wouldn't. We all know what I'm talking about.

It actually went surprisingly well. After PC the death the previous session, the group's players had briefly chatted about possibly asking the DM to start a new campaign anyway, with me being the least in favor because I wanted to see how my little cleric met his end. "The event" certainly made that decision for us, though. We're doing a new campaign now with the same DM and time slot and we're all having a blast with it so far.

Despite me and my characters being the least inclined to violence in the group, between this and a 3.5 campaign we started, I've certainly caused the most destruction.

[Whit]

My paladin lvl 12 dove into a pit with an evil artifact to destroy it as we were losing vs the main boss.

Or a friend’s monk found a few explosive magic orbs that you can use. He decided to strap them on his belt and was hit by a wall of fire with a failed save. Kaboom!

[Wizard_Lizard]

My paladin lvl 12 dove into a pit with an evil artifact to destroy it as we were losing vs the main boss.

Or a friend’s monk found a few explosive magic orbs that you can use. He decided to strap them on his belt and was hit by a wall of fire with a failed save. Kaboom!

And that, is why you never carry explosives.