I like it when my PC dies! Share your coolest death!

[jester47]

This thread is for people to brag about how their character's may have gone out. Was it the Paladin that held off a dozen hobgoblins while the rest of the party escaped? Were you the guy that got bull-rushed off a cliff? Was he the last hold out in a TPK?

I once read a story about a guy who kept making a wizard and getting killed in a dungeon. He said the game wasn't very much fun because it was him and his buddy and he kept dying.

Thats not what I am talking about.
I'm talking about cool deaths. Deaths that you remember. Deaths that really enhanced the game and gave the rest of the characters somthing to talk about and develop around.

But I DO love it when my character dies. It has the same feel for me as rolling that critical 20 that saves the day. Its actually exciting!

In my most recent group, I had a cleric of Cuthbert who in the hanging ship in the styes, went to check a door. While he is listening at the door, the rest of the party was outside, and silently three suhuagin rose up out of the pool behind him. He never had a chance. He got pinned to the door in one round. But that is not what made it great. It was the vengeance the party executed afterwards that really made it special. That and the DM did not pull any punches for my character being gung ho.

What was your coolest death?

 

[Asmor]

Both of my favorite PC deaths were sort of voluntary because I was sick of the PC in question...

The first, my Dragonborn Fighter/Paladin named Thotheoterosthix, jumped into a rift to hell to chase after a demon that was trying to escape.

My second, in a d20 Modern game, was a priest named Alvin Morris. I forget his actual classes, but it was something like Dedicated Hero/Adept/[Magical gunslinger prestige class from a web enhancement]. I don't remember exactly what we were doing, either, but it was the climactic fight in the story...

We're in a penthouse, fireballs and grenades and all the fun stuff. Right before something's about to explode, he runs, jumps out a window, casts spider climb in mid air, and smashes into (and sticks to) a building across the street. The DM ruled that he was barely conscious, but I let him slip into unconsciousness and fall to his death... Not that it mattered, in this case, because that was the last session of d20 Modern we played.

 

[Satori]

I created a Duergar Psychic Warrior for a game I had just recently joined...and then I realized how remarkably ineffective and un-fun Psychic Warriors are if you focus purely on short term buffs. I'd spend three rounds buffing only to have the combat end on the fourth round.

So, I set about trying to kill the character off in a relatively noble, interesting way...

...except that he was a Con-Maxed Psychic Warrior with Augmented Vigor, a Psicrystal, Full Plate, Tower Shield, and Share Pain.

Hence, he had a HUGE AC and over 200 HP effectively (Share Pain + Shared Vigor + Psi Crystal = Double HP).

My calculating, self-serving (and un-fun) Duergar became a berserk, altruistic, gung-ho charger...and simply would NOT die!

Our entire group would cheer when I got hit, and I'd groan when someone missed or when the damage was too pitiful.

I eventually had to stop healing, leave the buffs off, and square off against a Flesh Golem to finally get pounded into paste.

Never have I been so entertained by getting hit...in fact, it prompted me to start looking for a "Masochist" Prestige Class that gets more powerful as it takes damage.

Good times!

 

[Merkuri]

This wasn't my character, but I thought it was a pretty memorable death. The party was a ragtag group of adventurers who worked together because they were in a dangerous situation and there was safety in numbers. One of us was a goblin rogue named Theseus. On his person he had a talking dagger named Wossname (well, it wouldn't tell us its real name, but it continuously forgot the word for what it was trying to say and kept using "wossname" as a filler, so we dubbed it Wossname) that we found out later was going to be the DM's way to give us information in characer about the place where we found ourselves.

After adventuring for a bit, we tracked down a wizard of sorts who was trying to summon demons from another plane (I think... this was a while ago). He had opened a one-way portal to let the demons in, and we had to try and close it by suceeding on concentration checks, while at the same time fighting the wizard and the demons that were coming through.

Poor Theseus fell victim to a suggestion-type ability of the wizard, who convinced him to jump into the one way portal - going the wrong way. No less than three of his comrades attempted to grapple him to get him to stop, but he wiggled out of each attempt and leapt into the portal to be immediately splattered across seven demensions.

I think the death was memorable because the player's next character was not a rogue, leaving us without a trapfinder, and it took us almost a year of real time to find another player who could competently play a scout/trapfinder without making the rest of the party wait ages for each roll. We play online. I think many of these people were watching TV or playing another game and because it would take them forever to respond with what was going on in our game. When everyone is waitng for the scout to return to the group with his intel and it takes him two minutes to respond to every question or comment of the DM then games become very boring very fast.

Also, Wossname was terribly entertaining. We missed him/it. Talking daggers with an attitude are fun, though the talking, bloodthirsty, CN axe we found later was even better.

 

[Darkwolf71]

Ahh, Poor Shadow. My Hanozee Rouge who would have been a Shadowdancer.

I think he got to level 3. The DM for this campaign likes to convert-on-the-fly older edition modules and this time we were running The Secret of Bone Hill. Or as one player calls it, Bone you in the *** hill.

Anyway, we wandered into an underground room where we encountered an ogre. Shadow's plan was to get to the ogre's chest and sack it while the rest of the party had him distracted. (Me sneaky like that. ) Well, the fighter got hit with a crit and nearly went down. At which point everyone bolted for the surface. Problem... The ogre was between me and the door. So I hid and was going to sneak out. (Smart too, right?) Ogre closed the door and... There were no lightsources left in this underground celler type room. Hanozee do not have darkvision. Ogres, of course, do. Two rounds later. SPLAT! No more Shadow.

And so was born my Human Arcane Trickster...

Heh, who reached level 10 before haveing a bad experience with everyone's favorite artifact, The Deck of Many Things. The party now, along with my temporary character the Aventi Paladin, is searching for the Trixters trapped soul. hahaha

That's been an interesting campaign.

 

[Tiberius]

To me, my character's death represents a fundamental failure on my part: a failure to recognize a danger, a failure to employ proper tactics, a failure to guess which spells to prepare, etc. Thus, my favorite character death was when my wizard Jorgen became a lich.

As a note: +4 LA? SO worth it for this template.

 

[Minicol]

I don't die often, but my coolest PC death I think was when my ninja character fell from the rooftops of Castle Ravenloft.

Not the death itself, but the DM flavour speech.

Though I have to say, the best death I ever saw comes from one of my friends. while playing a rogue, he .... showed ... .... to a main baddie looking at him through a magic mirror while delivering a villain gloat speech.

The text of the adventure specifically stated that anyone interrupting the speeech got a 20 d8 flamestrike. He could only fail on a 4, and if he saved, no damage (evasion).

1st roll : 1
2nd roll (burned a LGH favor) : 2

Shame on him, the Golden Badger award was already awarded for this session of the con. Otherwise, I'm fairly certain, he would have beat the other contestants.

 

[Evilhalfling]

I DM so I have had more intersting NPC deaths than PC.
my one memorable PC death was a sorcerer with an int 6, wis 6 char 18.
he was a blast to play as he never learned from mistakes, once something worked he would try the same thing over and over, sometimes it was useful sometimes not. His favorite tactic was to summon a mount to use as cover in any fight. Or to get the druids wolf to scout by throwng a stick.
He was abandoned by the party in a city of brown gorger ratmen. I deceided he just did not have the brains to survive by himself a quick conversation with the DM and he died and was eaten off camera. The party scryied on him later, and got a large stew pot.

One NPC (halfling) who was cursed into a undead state for betraying (and eating) his friends managed to save the life of a PC paladin. The paladin closed a Far Realm Vortex by sacrificing his magic sword. Although the PC thought it might be his own death, the halfling teleported the paladin out just as the Vortex exploded. So really it was his second death, and stolen from a player, but it still got a cheer.
The rest of the party surived in thier anti-magic shell at the bottom of a 100' deep crater. (I always wanted to leave a huge magical explosion crater)

 

[Ry]

My Warlock Dzaulgrandcntsh (or "Saul" as the other players liked to say) was slain by the bone fragments of another PC's exploding corpse. The spell was cast by a Cleric of Pelor who another PC had given the Book of Vile Darkness to keep it out of the wrong hands.

 

[robertliguori]

The PCs were defending an elven city against an army of orcs and tanar'ruks, led by a fey'ri half-fiend. As the last line of magical defenses fell, and the fey'ri was swooping in, one of the PCs who was down to his last handful of hit points (and also had flight capacity) flew up and initiated a grapple. The PC died on the way down due to an Enervate spell-like ability, but the fey'ri was unable to pull out in time, and ate 20d6 falling damage. Afterwords, the elves put up a statue to the fallen PC, and a later campaign in the same world had the party (and the PC's action) come up in bardsong.