Lamest Character Death

[Cieyrin]

It's been a while since I last came out of Homebrew but I felt inspired to share and hear your stories, from whatever game system.

My two are as follows:
1) A wizard breaks a staff of power with 1 charge in a retributive strike, dealing 8 points of damage to himself and being utterly destroyed b/c he failed the "thrown to other plane" check.

2)
Time to create character, with stats and back story in Basic D&D: 3ish hours.
Time till character death, after tripping and falling down the stairs of the dungeon into a kobold nest: 30 seconds.

Post yours, so we can all share your pain!

[Yukitsu]

I have a high survival rate. The lamest death I've had is my only one, where my wizard druid mystic theurge got caught by a huge air elemental, and was killed by the wall of fire my team mate put up beside me. Since I was level 9 at the time, I don't hold it against myself.

[The Neoclassic]

Not death, but it nearly was...

Our party's low-level druid got knocked out (and would've died if the paladin hadn't rushed over the next round) by a lamp. Yes, a boring ol' stand-alone animated lamp. Slammed into her and spilled some flaming oil onto her, and a couple of bad rolls later she was on the floor. Highly lame, but hilarious for the rest of us.

[Myiven]

My all-time favorite was someone else, but I had a chance to indirectly cause it.

The party member was playing a chaos mage in Unknown Armies. Basically, they gain powers by taking risk. His favorite way to take risk and gain power was to play Russian roulette.

So, he asked to borrow my gun. I gave it to him. He pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger. He forgot that I used a semi-automatic.

[ReluctantReaper]

Well i had a cleric who was currently pinned by an areanea, the spider people whatever. We had just defeated the mini villian and all his associates except two of these spiders. So my pal the barbarian who plays a barbarian like a pro (intelligence wise that is) picks up the +4 mighty composite longbow then shoots the arrow rolling a nat 1. We allow fudges like that so a roll to hit me he of course rolls the 20 and i get crit. So he ends up doing around 27 damage total and i died. Luckily my cleric was a friend of a 15th level cleric and had a ring of sending or messege to him and quickly called out that i needed his help.

I got ressurected and have not played as the character since but i feel confused on how to act towards the barb. Any suggestions

[Sinfire Titan]

Two Words: Snake. Napalm.


The full story is long and complicated, so I'll try to be brief:

A very poor DM once ran a campaign. After much talk, I managed to get him to allow me to play a Warforged Paladin.

Ignoring the fact that he thought DR 2/Adamantine was overpowered, I rather enjoyed that character. At least, until one session.

A trap let roughly 400 snakes down on me. I was the only one in the party to even carry a lantern, and had the common sense to buy oil for it. One of the players (a Wizard/Cleric aiming for True Necromancer) happened to remember it. He casts Flare, a 0 level spell, while I am buried under the snakes.

The entire pile goes up in flames. Now, this wouldn't be a problem for me, as I'm a Paladin with a good Con score and a decent Cha score and being on fire deals 1d6/round.



Not with this DM. He makes me roll percentiles to see how much of my body is on fire. First 100% of that entire campaign, and the DM rules that I have 2 rounds left to live. I do the smart thing: Get out of the fire and try to put myself out. Oh, but the DM limits me to a single Move action by saying that my Adamantine body is partially melting. For those who don't know, an open bonfire does not approach the temperature required to melt Steel, much less a metal that can only be forged by magical flames.

So the party's Spontaneous Cleric decides to cast Create Water. You would think 15 gallons of water would be enough to put out a small fire like this, especially when the water is created from thin air and then poured in gratuitous amounts over the flaming object, but no. At this point, it becomes abundantly clear that the DM is trying to take this character out.

So I drop. Before the other players even start "mourning", I decide to look up the spell Flare.
















It's heatless. I got killed by a cantrip that couldn't even light a fraggin cigar.

[Gorbash]

my pal the barbarian who plays a barbarian like a pro (intelligence wise that is) picks up the +4 mighty composite longbow

He plays like a pro, yet he shoots into grapple without Improved Precise Shot?

[golentan]

This was an NPC, but I think he bears mentioning.

Killed by a 12 year old hostage. The NPC was holding a knife at the hostage's throat, the hostage figured "I'm a gonner anyway, I'll take him with me," and sets off an explosive. The Hostage makes his save and takes 1 point of damage, but the NPC failed and lost an arm, bleeding to death before he could be saved.

[Kylarra]

Not me, but a campaign I was in.

Player charges into spider's nest and gets trapped in web, commence battle with spiders that leaves him alive. but in negatives, unfortunately the party decides to burn him free... doing exactly enough to kill him.

[erikun]

Not a death, but a AD&D 2nd edition "straight up" campaign.

For those who don't know, "straight up" character creation means rolling 3d6 six times, keeping the stats rolled. In order. My luck with characters tends to fall into either "awesome" or "terrible", and this roll ended up in the latter.

My highest stat was a 13, and was in Constitution. My second highest was a 9, and was in Wisdom. All other stats were lower than that. (I think Intelligence was next, at 8.) Now, for people not familiar with AD&D 2nd ed., you needed a minimum score to qualify for a class. Needless to say, my character couldn't qualify for any class. Heck, the lowest class minimums were 9 in one relevant stat - certainly not making it in this case! Much like D&D 3.x, you needed 10 + spell level to cast spells, meaning I couldn't even play a caster.

Feeling sorry (or perhaps amused) for me, the DM let be exchange ability points in a 2:1 ratio - loose two from one stat, and one to another. I believe I took a hit on Con and perhaps Int to get up to 12 Wis - it was my best stat after all, and a lot more survivable than a first level mage! With that out of the way, our little group rolled up our hit points. I don't remember what everyone else's stats were like, but I do remember our HP values.

The fighter rolled 2 HP.

The mage rolled 3 HP.

I rolled 1 HP.

Yep. My first level cleric was just a papercut from unconciousness. Our heartiest warrior was the guy in robes. My opinion?

"Well, at least I won't need to waste healing on myself."

(Sadly, we never got to play the first session with these characters - which is about the only reason I'm not talking about their deaths. A stiff breeze would probably knock this party out.)

[penbed400]

I was DMing my first RuneQuest adventure, it was on Griffin Island for anybody who plays. So they went down south of the island in order to deliver this message to some random guy and went through this huge adventure that I had planned out including an orc camp and some assassinations.

They were on their way back to the port where they started to rest up and find something else to do and I thought, "Hey! Let's spice things up a little bit." And rolled on the random encounter table for while they were travelling. It landed on the cherry bomb tree. I thought that was cool because they could use the cherries as they saw fit for a acouple of days, maybe they'll pop maybe they won't, great fun all around. So they find the tree, pick some cherries, one bites one and takes the damage. That's when they got the idea, I don't know why but they decided to chop the tree down together.....TPK....bastards.

[Xallace]

Giant zombie leech fell on me. Worst part was the set-up:

DM: "You make it to the lift just in time as the manor comes crashing down around you. Suddenly, there is ignition; the entire building explodes into flames just behind you. The lift just barely out-paces the explosion... but then (!), rising from the inferno, horrible acid dripping from its circular mouth, the Leech Queen rises above you and... falls on [Xallace]."

PCs: "...WHAT."

[Tohron]

My all-time favorite was someone else, but I had a chance to indirectly cause it.

The party member was playing a chaos mage in Unknown Armies. Basically, they gain powers by taking risk. His favorite way to take risk and gain power was to play Russian roulette.

So, he asked to borrow my gun. I gave it to him. He pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger. He forgot that I used a semi-automatic.

Something like that has actually happened in real life.

http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2000-04.html

[waterpenguin43]

Two Words: Snake. Napalm.


The full story is long and complicated, so I'll try to be brief:

A very poor DM once ran a campaign. After much talk, I managed to get him to allow me to play a Warforged Paladin.

Ignoring the fact that he thought DR 2/Adamantine was overpowered, I rather enjoyed that character. At least, until one session.

A trap let roughly 400 snakes down on me. I was the only one in the party to even carry a lantern, and had the common sense to buy oil for it. One of the players (a Wizard/Cleric aiming for True Necromancer) happened to remember it. He casts Flare, a 0 level spell, while I am buried under the snakes.

The entire pile goes up in flames. Now, this wouldn't be a problem for me, as I'm a Paladin with a good Con score and a decent Cha score and being on fire deals 1d6/round.



Not with this DM. He makes me roll percentiles to see how much of my body is on fire. First 100% of that entire campaign, and the DM rules that I have 2 rounds left to live. I do the smart thing: Get out of the fire and try to put myself out. Oh, but the DM limits me to a single Move action by saying that my Adamantine body is partially melting. For those who don't know, an open bonfire does not approach the temperature required to melt Steel, much less a metal that can only be forged by magical flames.

So the party's Spontaneous Cleric decides to cast Create Water. You would think 15 gallons of water would be enough to put out a small fire like this, especially when the water is created from thin air and then poured in gratuitous amounts over the flaming object, but no. At this point, it becomes abundantly clear that the DM is trying to take this character out.

So I drop. Before the other players even start "mourning", I decide to look up the spell Flare.
















It's heatless. I got killed by a cantrip that couldn't even light a fraggin cigar.

Ouch, what an idiot DM, flare can't even start fires and he made like, 50 rules to kill you with.

[Civil War Man]

Let's see...Lamest death.

Technocracy one shot. The interdimensional ship we were on crashes in the arctic. Turns out we were being targetted for death by rivals in the Technocracy for some reason. We manage to slaughter the vat-grown supersoldier death squad sent to kill us (something about a Void Engineer with dots in Time with my very high-level Progenitor pumping her full of Life magic). We steal the vehicle the death squad came in, and make a run for it. Unfortunately the rivals send a space bomber after us.

For the record, these bombers basically take no damage ever. The only way to defeat them is to lure them to Earth and bombard them with missiles until the bomber accrues too much Paradox from not taking any damage. Our driver (Iteration X agent) ends up crashing our vehicle into a snowbank or something. Then the bomber explodes from the Paradox and crashes right on top of us.

Everyone except the previously mentioned Void Engineer dies instantly, and she slowly freezes to death.

Granted, that all sounds pretty awesome, but we were doing so great up to that point that it was disappointing when the dice suddenly declared "Rocks fall, you all die"

[Random832]

[snip]

...

The Leech Queen?



Was there an eye (or perhaps an "i") for the macguffin?

[Dyllan]

First level characters, and I'm DM'ing the Sunless Citadel. Fairly early in, you have to climb 20 feet down some vines. It's a DC 0 climb check. I describe it as looking like it would be easy to climb. So the fighter decides to climb down in his armor... his total climb mod is only a -2.

He rolls a 1, and falls 20 feet... I roll high on the 2d6 damage, and he goes into negatives. Then the single enemy at the bottom of the hole does a coup de gras.

Death by failing a DC 0 climb check.

[horus42]

My lamest character death:

We were playing a nWoD mortal chronicle. Most of us had loved ones who had been killed by this vampire, blah blah blah, and we went off to kill him. We managed to defeat all his minions, and then it came down to the final fight with the BBEG.

We -should have- won. But the GM decided that the vampire somehow magically healed all his damage, and we all suddenly had heart attacks and died.

Actually, one of us survived. The character who eventually became suicidal after his daughter died was made immortal, just as a "the GM screws you over" thing.

Yeah. That ending sucked. It wasn't even an avoidable thing, it was pretty much literally "rocks fall, everyone dies."

[kyuubigan]

Not mine but still pretty funny.

Our party was adventuring in an active volcano. Next to a pool of lava, there is a magical trap that attacks the lead member of the party. The trap 'suggests' that it would be a good idea to take a dip in the nice refreshing pool of magma.

Guess what.

The lead character at the time (a Half-Orc grappler build) fails his Will save spectacularly, and hops right in. The rest of the party tried to pull him out (he survived the first round of damage by the skin of his teeth) but his Grapple Modifier was so high none of us could drag him out.

And that was the tragic end of Barry the Half-Orc.

[Wind d8/d12]

In a 2nd edition Earth-based game, I called a kids barmaid mom a guy and got critted from behind with a hot fire poker. We weren't very high level but the high level Rabbi we were meeting resurrected me and gaved me a stern talking to about manners. And he took all of my armor and weapons until we did a long boring fetch quest for him to teach me a lesson.

A few years down the road the boy had grown into a barkeeper and he recognized me. By then the game had become 3.5 and my rogue was now a rogue/ninja so I soaked a coin in poison and convinced him it was an unconvincing fake, so he bit it to see if it dented.

Revenge is a dish best served subtley.

[GoatToucher]

Our first game of 3.0. I make a sorcerer (three spells at lvl 1? Sweet!) and the campaign gets under way.

In the second battle, I expended all three of my spells from the back of the wagon. I then pull out my short spear and take a poke at the neatest baddie.

Natural one.

Reflex save? Failed.

Roll to hit myself? Natural 20.

Roll damage? Boxcars.

I had 2 hitpoints at the time. Took me down exactly to -10.

The description was that I tripped and fell out of the wagon, impaling myself on the spear.

Lucky for me, char gen is my favorite part of the process.

[Xenogears]

Made a rather nice Frenzied Beserker who managed to one hit every enemy the DM threw at me (I was the only character since it was just me and the DM. Then he threw a flying enemy with a bow at me and i realised I forgot to buy a ranged weapon.....

[ghost_warlock]

Fallout-style game played with the Alternity ruleset. Apparently, there were also Predators (as in the move Predator).

The party was climbing out of their bus about to go about their business when out of nowhere (with no dice being rolled) the DM says to one of us:

"A predator spear materializes in your chest. You take...50 mortal."

The average Alternity PC can take about 4-5 mortal damage before being killed. And never mind that the base damage for a predator spear in the hands of a PC is something like 2d4 mortal + Str mod (no such thing as Sneak Attack or similar types of precision damage in the system).

Of course, this particular GM is (in)famous for "rocks fall - you're the only one that dies" situations.

[maniakmastah]

I was DM'ing a game and one of my players had to chase one of the BBEG's minions, a psychopathic killer who was actually a Daemonette, and keep her from killing an NPC they were looking for. After she beat them to him, she killed him (but not before making her and the PCs go through a trapped theatre) then decided she wanted to play with the PCs. Now one of her deadliest attacks is a venomous kiss, and she decided she was gonna kiss the Wild Elf Fighter, so she makes a grapple check. Now he's a pretty strong guy at a 20 strength, so i have no doubt he can get free, i roll for her, 19 + her grapple, which was altogether 28. OK so she got pretty high, now he rolls, gets a 2 for a total of 17. Somehow she over powers him and kisses him on the lips, so he makes a Fort save. Now i trust my players enough not to check or do their stats for them, so i ask what his Fortitude was, he says it was a 7......a 10th level fighter with a 7 Fort. I ask him what his Con was, he said 11. Yes, a fighter with a con of 11. Now the save DC for the poison was pretty high for the party, at DC 23, but i can't let him die like this, so i fudge it down to 19. He rolls his save, nat 1. He takes 2d6 con damage, and i roll, trying to make it low. a total of 4. so he's at -6. Now when it comes time to make another roll to save, i tell him roll high, he rolls, gets another nat 1. Now i be nice and let him reroll it, and he rolls, a 2. now the secondary damage, and i make one last ploy and lower the secondary damage to 1d6, so i'd need a six to kill him, and i roll..........a 6. His character dies from a kiss before she gets away.

But it gets worse, i made a custom reincarnation chart. I told him he can use raise dead, but he wanted to be cheap and go this route. So he comes back as a female animated doll, in other words, DESU!! So he hams it up and roleplays it funny. Then they finally track her to her lair and fight her again, ad despite trying to be nice but keep it challenging, she hit like crazy and he wouldn't retreat, even though i gave him the advantage or, not being able to be sneak'd or poisoned, a wand of Repair Moderate Damage to heal him, and small size to make it harder to hit him, he ended getting killed again, and once again gets reincarnated, this time as a physical copy of the party's Paladin. We still laugh about that.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Took a random laser beam to the chest in CoC (****ing Mi-Go). My girlfriend almost suffered the same fate from a random Deep One claw to the chest tonight, but we were able to stabilize her and she will likely make a full recovery by the next time anything actually happens.

It's not so much the dying that bugs me (this is Call of Cthulhu we're talking about), it's the anticlimax. Is it too much to ask to be melted into a puddle of goo by the RAW POWER OF THE UNIVERSE like that NPC was? (CoC protip: befriend curious, academically-minded NPCs and send them in first).

[mcv]

I once had a character die in a session where I wasn't present. Of course everbody else survived.

This was during a WFRP campaign where my characters had a life expectancy of about 2 sessions (which started after my first character ended up as the sacrificial victim in Shadows Over Boegenhaven. And I was the only one; the others had no problem surviving, and one was a practically immortal Free Lance with an ungodly amount of Fate Points. (Until a substitute GM decided to take him out.)

[RTGoodman]

I've told the story several times before, so here's the gist of it.

Playing a half-orc monk, dungeon-crawling with the rest of the party. DM has a ghoul/ghast and a troglodyte cleric ambush from behind, and I'm the rear guard in marching order. One claw attack later, I'm paralyzed, and next round the troglodyte uses a coup de grace. The party couldn't even get near enough to do anything about it because of the narrow corridor and whatnot.

Next session, I'm rezzed, and we continue exploring. Rather than walking across a living floor that forces saves when you walk on it, I use my obscene Jump mod to jump across it to the wooden elevator/platform. One failed Reflex save later, the DM's rolling 12d6 falling damage. Only good part of the story? With low damage rolls, slow fall, Tumble, and all that, I only died by a few HP (I was at like -16 or something).

[Callista]

Random pit trap. Splat.

[Tengu_temp]

First level characters, and I'm DM'ing the Sunless Citadel. Fairly early in, you have to climb 20 feet down some vines. It's a DC 0 climb check. I describe it as looking like it would be easy to climb. So the fighter decides to climb down in his armor... his total climb mod is only a -2.

He rolls a 1, and falls 20 feet... I roll high on the 2d6 damage, and he goes into negatives. Then the single enemy at the bottom of the hole does a coup de gras.

Death by failing a DC 0 climb check.

Couldn't he take 10?

[The Dark Fiddler]

Our party of all first time players (including me) was: a Fighter, a Ranger, and my Druid. The town we're in is in an Orc raid. The Fighter runs off. Fights an unarmed Orc. Orc attacks:

DM: Ok, he got a crit... roll for confirm... *rolls* 20... uh... make a Fortitude save.
Fighter: 1
DM: Uh, yeah. He smashes your head in. You're dead.

He later comes back (we were all level 1, so no access to any Bring Back The Dead spells) by fighting 20 Orcs. He kills them all.