Overkill

[PallentisLunam]

So I was chatting with a friend the other day and he brought up a story about a haunted house that I had built in D&D a while back. This particular haunted house was a one off that utterly destroyed my party, more than once. But I had pregenerated multiple characters so my group and I spent all night throwing PCs at this house. They even tried burning it down once but it reformed within a few days. Long story short it was great fun but the players never actually beat the house.

Being that this was a fairly high-level bit of screwing around my friend, in all seriousness, asked if it would have worked to have gone and collected a shpere of annihilation and the corresponding talisman and then erased my house from existence like marks on a chalkboard.

My question to you folks is what is the most ridiculous level of overkill you have ever witnessed in a game?

[Quertus]

My question to you folks is what is the most ridiculous level of overkill you have ever witnessed in a game?

Hmmm... Tough call.

Eating a monster's remains, to make sure it didn't regenerate / come back?

Building a church over top the location where a (relatively minor) evil was slain, just to make sure no corrupting influence leaked out?

Speed eating a bunch of possessed food, to make sure that the evil doesn't escape (followed, eventually, by a holy water chaser)?

Casing a spell every round for 2 hours straight to prove that the party doesn't need to worry about your stamina?

Unloading half your spellbook... to deal with a band of hobgoblins?

Leaving an animated object to hit someone, dealing that someone around 1,000,000 subdual damage, just to make sure that they don't wake up?

Dropping a flying castle on a village that tickled you off?

Wild surge for x3 powered lightning bolt, clever positioning + bounce off walls for ~750 damage... to kill a kobald?

Fireball self and party to kill annoying insect?

Blow up space station / fake own death to avoid second date with psycho stalker?

Manipulate time itself to summon 3 large batches of monsters (over 20 in all) and hasten them, all in the same round, to deal with a stalker no one else has noticed, that, OOC, you realize is actually the PC of the new player? Bonus points: your next action is to disintegrate all her clothing...

Ripping out someone's heart to win a friendly sparring match?

Destroying all magic in the world, to get the enemy army to surrender?

Breaking the world, to become court mage?

Helping armageddon along so that you can write the exclusive?

Sacrificing the world, to power your epic spell?

Scimitars of speed + weapon mastery + haste spell + potion of speed + magnified accelerate?

Full cheese full power attack full attack on troll captives + sadism?

Frenzied berserker + masochism?

Kinetic control + robe of blending (set to liquify)?

[Gastronomie]

That one session in Call of Cthulhu when we couldn't prevent Cthulhu from re-awakening.

Yeah, all the players were killed in the first round, but the whole human civilization was wiped off the face of the earth anyways, so...

[ImNotTrevor]

I had a friend who was playing a wizard (Mystic Theurge, technically) in D&D 3.5 about a decade ago.

He got stabbed by a goblin after he was already pretty high level. (Goblin got lucky, I don't know the full story)
So he cast Disintegrate on it.

There was also the time when he killed a guy, resurrected him, and then killed him again.

[5ColouredWalker]

Not DnD, but Champions.

An orc army was coming, and being as rich as we were, decided that splurging would be the way to deal with it.

Our bricks, armed with rings of flight and belts of strength held a large wooden raft, upon which roughly 14 soldiers stood with longbows, and lots of explosive arrows (Doing effectively 3d6 damage in a 50ft radius, in a game where armor is done as DR and most foes sit around 15 HP.).
I, the mage, having focused on teleportation, could teleport everyone around at such speed that we moved at roughly 50MpH by making lots of short hops, despite moving about 2 tons of stuff.

Invading Orc Army was met by what was, in effect, a modern bomber, which proceeded to obliterate them and scatter the ashes from roughly a kilometer up.

[Knaight]

I was GMing a space opera game, and the PCs had a small starship. It was only about 30 meters long, but with how it was designed it was practically a 30 meter long ship built around a single 30 meter long railgun clearly made for a significantly larger ship, with everything else about the ship undersized to accomodate (pretty small cargo bay, smaller other weapons, etc.)

At one point, said railgun was used to pick off one particularly disliked NPC. They were out in the open - this wasn't a case of punching through buildings, or dealing with their ship, or anything like that.

[Lawleepawpz]

Maximized Empowered Twinned Repeating Chained Empowered Burrowing Split Disintegrate.

There were a few kobolds in the way who were NOT worshipping this monstrosity

[comicshorse]

In a 'Fading Suns' game the P.C.s were fairly sure a Symbiote had made planetfall on a planet via an escape capsule. So they 'nuked the site from orbit as it was the only way to be sure'

[PallentisLunam]

Maximized Empowered Twinned Repeating Chained Empowered Burrowing Split Disintegrate.

There were a few kobolds in the way who were NOT worshipping this monstrosity

Double empowered?

[sktarq]

When our Corp bosses were being pushed out of the city in shadowrun. . . We nuked the capital, the main economic hub, and the city in question.

[Icewraith]

I had a 3.5 epic campaign where a cleric PC miracled for a wish to blow up a souped up Colossus of some sort. Little did the players realize (despite me saying things along the line of "It looks pretty beat up now, but it's still moving") it had very little in the way of HP remaining.

However, the player was so scared of this thing he was willing to spend 10k xp to kill it (maybe he thought I made it Tarrasque-like?). Mimicking an acid orb at CL 20 would have finished the thing off, but I played nice (and gave him time to carefully write out his wording) and had the spell drop a small sun on the enemy, the players had to run from the explosion. Nothing increases table tension like someone risking a wish beyond the spell's normal limits.

IIRC the same player spent several spell slots nuking dead oozes when I described their deaths as something along the lines of "the ooze stops moving and starts to bubble". That player also emptied most of his spell slots at an orc cheiftan that was holding up some kind of spear whenever he cast, and the spell would fizzle out about ten feet from the orcs when the cheiftan waved the spear. The orcs were laughing their heads off at the PC, and the player didn't figure it out after casting detect magic and being informed there was absolutely nothing magical about the spear and no magic whatsoever happening around the orcs, even though the spear looked really impressive and probably should be magical. The character saw no magic anywhere near the orcs.

Yeah the Orc cheiftan had a decent bluff check and a readied action to wave the spear around impressively at the right time, and they were standing inside the edge of a local dead magic zone while the mage wasted spell after spell. I think he thought the spear was a rod of absorbtion or something, and he was trying to burn out or overload it. I was rolling really well, and I had to make a bluff check every time the PC cast... granted sometimes I randomly roll dice so my players don't metagame and start making detailed spot checks whenever I start rolling for some reason.

In terms of over-damage, I had a player as some semi-homebrew druid variant that could wildshape into just about anything, and the players were exploring this cold-themed area filled with frost giants. The eventually came upon a heavily guarded cavern radiating cold damage containing, at the very end, a human-sized azure orb of some sort- slightly oblong. The druid turned into some kind of thing that had 15 foot tentacles intending to go play bomb squad... the thing happened to take double damage from cold. So as soon as he touched it, the Xixecal Egg exploded and he took a ridiculous amount of cold damage that was then doubled. The rest of the party barely survived but his PC... sheeeesh.

[Tentreto]

Mine was, for want of a nail, completely destroying the largest raider base in half a continent almost down to a man.
No one even helped, the base just imploded. (metaphorically)
The worst part was that they were the ones paying my character...
But it also happened to destroy machinations of ethereal beings, so, net gain?

[Kane0]

DM: "A man steps out of the shadows, he appears to be holding a rolled up-"
PC: "Disintegrate"

But to be fair, almost every enemy in that campaign pretty much required overkill to defeat.

[RazorChain]

I once destroyed the known multiverse by mistake....as a player. This was in Amber RPG.

[PallentisLunam]

No no no. You can't overkill by mistake. For an action to be overkill you must intentionally apply overwhelming force to an underwhelming problem.

[Icewraith]

No no no. You can't overkill by mistake. For an action to be overkill you must intentionally apply overwhelming force to an underwhelming problem.

For instance, since I didn't directly state the numbers, I had a PC blow 10000 experience in 3.5 to deal ~36 damage.

[RazorChain]

No no no. You can't overkill by mistake. For an action to be overkill you must intentionally apply overwhelming force to an underwhelming problem.

Ok let me rephrase that then. I destroyed the entire multiverse to kill one guy. This was in Amber RPG.