Your Saddest Moments In D&D 3.5

[Bartmanhomer]

What were your saddest moments in D&D 3.5? *starts crying* Ready Go. :frown:

[SLOTHRPG95]

I once played a monk.

[Bartmanhomer]

I once played a monk.

That's a sad joke. :amused:

[ZamielVanWeber]

I had a dread necromancer with a custom ACF someone made on these boards. So I am really liking him and we run into a custom boss encounter who is immune to literally everything he can do except for one thing, his touch attack had a rider I forget now. So I go to close to melee and turns put the boss was ALSO protected by Forbiddance. I fail the save by 1. The DM rolls damage so astronomical that he beats the massive damage threshold through False Life by 1, then I fail the save vs massive damage by 1. Then the DM rolls my negative hp (custom rule) and gets a 10. If the dude was not immune to DN's, I would just continued trying to debuff him, if the DM had not rolled 68 damage on 12d6, if I had not failed save after save... I really liked Valefor too. I shed a manly tear for him.

Side note the DM sets massive damage to 3x Con so my current character is a dragonborn ice paragenasi. My Con is 28! No more of that drama!

[Bartmanhomer]

I had a dread necromancer with a custom ACF someone made on these boards. So I am really liking him and we run into a custom boss encounter who is immune to literally everything he can do except for one thing, his touch attack had a rider I forget now. So I go to close to melee and turns put the boss was ALSO protected by Forbiddance. I fail the save by 1. The DM rolls damage so astronomical that he beats the massive damage threshold through False Life by 1, then I fail the save vs massive damage by 1. Then the DM rolls my negative hp (custom rule) and gets a 10. If the dude was not immune to DN's, I would just continued trying to debuff him, if the DM had not rolled 68 damage on 12d6, if I had not failed save after save... I really liked Valefor too. I shed a manly tear for him.

Side note the DM sets massive damage to 3x Con so my current character is a dragonborn ice paragenasi. My Con is 28! No more of that drama!

Oh no. How awful. *Wiping my tears with a tissue.* :frown:

[Kelb_Panthera]

Made a warrior type character to go through an eberron version of RHoD. In his first combat, on his first foe's first turn; the very first melee attack ever aimed at him; he eats a scythe crit and gets freakin' bisected on the spot. I asked the other PCs to drag the body back to the nearest city for a raise dead because I refused to have his story begin and end in such pitifully tragic fashion.

[StevenC21]

*six months into campaign*

"How do I power attack again?"

[Biggus]

In 3.0, I played a Weapon Master specialised in doing massive critical hits. I played him for 3 levels, during which time he scored a total of 2 crits, despite threatening on an 18. Then he got dragged off to Hell.

[KillianHawkeye]

So this was actually for Pathfinder, but it could happen in any D&D-style game.

In the last adventure I ran, the final boss was something along the lines of a half-dragon sorcerer. His specialty was fire spells. Now this was a villain who was bent on world conquest and such, and I had this idea to give him a brief moment to try and tempt the PCs into joining him, so I let him have a wall of fire up between himself and the stairs where the party would come from in order to make them pause long enough for a few quick words.

Well they were able to figure out that it was some kind of fire before actually entering the room because it was the top of a tower and there wasn't a wall or any doors at the top floor, just the room. So they figured out they should cast some fire protection spells before confronting the Big Bad, who then lost the use of half of his spells. :smallfrown::smallsigh:

Luckily, it was still a decent fight. :smallamused:

[Calthropstu]

Not so much 3.5/pf but gm being a jerk.
We had gone from level 1 - 14 over the course of 3 years. We had 2 powerful custom artifacts. 1 was a deck of many things rewritten by the gm. The other was a crystal labeled "The Orb of Infinite Knowledge" which recorded all the knowledge of a long dead race which once challenged the gods.
My character, a mythic oracle worshiper of the custom world's LG sun god (forget the name the dm used) was told to destroy those artifacts during a commune.
So, when the elven wizard in our party decided that it was he who should hold onto the orb instead of me, I shattered it while it was in the elf's hand. It promptly turned into a sphere of Annihilation. The other wizard (The GM's wife) decided to save the elven wizard by sacrificing herself.
We found a tool to shut down the sphere and were able to quest for the soul of the slain wizard. But now it was time for me to destroy the deck. After destroying the orb, they no longer trusted me with the deck. They wanted it back from me.
Having the Orb's destruction go so badly, and having divined that the deck would need deific intervention for destruction, I plane shifted to the realm of my god so I could give it directly to him.

So here's how it went down:
Me: "With Bestow Grace of the Champion active, I take the deck and place it in my glove of storing."
GM: "Ok, make a will save." (The deck required a will save of anyone handling it to avoid drawing a card.)
Me: "Ok, with the bonus from grace, I get a 29."
GM: "Grace wore off, you don't get the bonus."

After a long argument I draw a card. I get "Get a follower and a castle." So I suddenly have an aboleth as my cohort instead of the person I had been grooming to become my cohort over the course of months of gameplay and planning.

Me: "This is bullcrap but whatever. I planeshift."
GM: "And the oracle is never heard from again. Make a new character."

The GM decided that (on the spot btw) that time in the sun god's realm flowed differently and I disappeared for 300 years. He decided that because the rest of the party (read: his wife and his friend) wanted to keep the artifact, that me destroying it was bad for party cohesion and it was best for me to make a new character. Nevermind the fact that it was MY GOD that told me to destroy them.

That mess ended a long friendship and an otherwise good campaign.

[Crake]

More of a story sad moment, rather than meta sad/annoyed moment that seems to be the main thing going on in this thread, but I once ran a game that had a lot of very fleshed out NPCs in a guild that the players were a part of, to the point where the players were very heavily invested into them. One of the characters, Aquilo, had a backstory involving a Xixecal that destroyed his village, which left him almost always drunk at the bar late at night. As the party grew in strength, so too did the NPCs, and when the party hit about level 14ish, Aquilo suddenly disappeared. Investigating his quarters, they found research that he had been doing, involving stripping away the Xixecal's cold subtype, thereby causing it to kill itself with it's own cold (gm fiat basically), but the issue would be surviving it's barrage of attacks..... That caused the NPC's girlfriend, Lucy, to gasp in horror (she was an alchemist, and the guild's nurse, and their relationship had actually been fostered by one of the players, so it actually meant something to them), and as they rushed up to her lab, they discovered one of her experiments missing: an incomplete elixir of life (essentially a potion of that one spell that allows you to not die of hit point damage for rounds/level, I can't remember what it's called). It wouldn't last long, but... it would last long enough for the ritual to be performed, even while he was being pounded on directly by the Xixecal's colossal fists.

The players rushed north (via teleport) just in time to see Aquilo engaging the Xixecal head on, only to be confronted by the Xixecal's dragon cohorts, causing a massive battle to ensue, in which the players were ultimately victorious, including the ritual to kill the Xixecal, which froze into a giant icicle before everyone's eyes, but by that point, Aquilo was basically a dead man walking. Nobody in the party had any means of healing the egregious wounds he had sustained, let alone bringing him back from the dead, so the reality of this was really beginning to set in as Aquilo spoke his final words to the players, but also to Lucy, telling him he was sorry, but that he couldn't live a complete life while the beast roamed free, before dying in her arms as her very own, incomplete, elixir of life faded, and the life left him.

The table was left completely silent for a good while as the whole scene went down, and I think it was by far one of the most powerful moments I've ever DMed. The story does have a happy ending though, as Aquilo was actually a homebrew snow variant of the sand shaper, and the fight with the Xixecal was enough to level everyone up to 15, so he managed to hit the capstone where if he's buried in snow (which he very luckily was :smalltongue:), he would get resurrected. I gave it enough time for everyone to mourn, he didn't just suddenly spring to life, and at first the party actually thought it was one of his simulacrums, they almost refused to believe such a miracle could have happened, but the celebration when they finally realized was just as much of a high as their previous mourning was a low. Definitely one of my proudest arcs as a DM.

[Lvl45DM!]

I was playing a LN half-orc Fighter/Thief in first edition, who joined the party to avenge his dead wife, killed by a minor recurring antagonist. I had this fluff that I had a +1 sword because I tempered the blade with her still cooling blood and swore a blood oath of vengeance.

The DM was pretty cool, and about 5th level I fought the minor atagonist's pet demon and thus freed my wife's soul from his embrace. Due her blood infusing my sword the soul then flowed into my blade and she could give me advice and the sword became +3, the most powerful weapon in the party at the time, with the disadvantage the my wife didn't like being used in backstabs, so I had to use a lesser weapon if I wanted to be sneaky. I thought that was pretty fair, and flavourful.

By level 7 we had saved the realm from a great vampire lord and the High Priests of the White Council granted everyone a boon. I got my wife resurrected, and I bought me and her a little castle with the loot and retired from adventuring. The rest of the party however, headed to Hell to rescue one of our party who got stuck down there. I rolled a new character, joined up and we had a few sessions fighting devils, before it all went pear-shaped.

The whole party got captured by a pit fiend. The cleric sent out a call for help which reached the White Council priests and they sent out the call for new heroes. My Lawful Neutral character felt it was his duty to save his former companions who had done so well by him.

Leading the new party, we managed to sneak past the Pit Fiend and free the party, including the guy they were there to save originally. The portal back to the world beckoned, but devils can teleport. The paladin and I stood fighting it while everyone else got the original heroes out. The paladin got knocked out, and the wizard Dimension Door'd him away and they were about to come back for me when the Pit Fiend dispelled the portal.

As Tyrion Stark, Goat of the Shield Lands faced a foe far beyond him, with no way out, he knelt, grasped his sword and said goodbye to Lily Stark. Maybe it was the magic of the sword, maybe it was a blessing from the gods, or maybe it was the strength of true love. But she heard his goodbye.

Goodbye, my love. I failed you again, and I am sorry. You will not see me again, but I shall see you whenever I close my eyes, always.

Before the Baziel killed him with his poisoned tail, Lily sent back

Bugger that! I'm coming to get you!

Unfortunately that was the last we ever played with that DM.

[Saintheart]

I once played a monk.


That's a sad joke. :amused:

What, the monk or that he played one?

[Bartmanhomer]

What, the monk or that he played one?

He was saying it sarcastically.