A poor death for a warrior

[DungeonmasterCal]

Well, aside from a fighter decapitating herself with a greatsword on a fumble, there's this one.

The party is attacked by trolls. Since trolls regenerate, they don't fear getting hurt in getting a meal. The party is on a narrow mountain ledge, when the trolls attack from above, using their own weight to drag the PC's off the ledge and into a crevasse below. By luck of the roll, only one player is actually hauled off the ledge. He took an astounding amount of damage from the fall and the jagged rocks. The trolls, also hurt, are enjoying that Fast Healing ability and getting up to drag his body away.

The party mage, looking down, decides to fireball the trolls ("They don't regenerate that"). The rest of the party protests, so I tell him to roll initiative to see if they can stop him. They can't.

The trolls save for half damage. The fallen party member---fumbles his save and dies.

 

[frankthedm]

Both the wizard and the fighter are surrounded by a wall of force and choked to death by an Evard's black tentacles,

Sounds like a higher level version of the spell, the 4th level one leaves orifices alone....

The first sesion for a player who went through many a character sheet...


The party is ambuhed from behind by a minotaur in dence woods. His rogue attempts to withdraws from combat, but drops his guard to draw out a smokestick. The AoO winds up being a critical hit.

And so went the first PC for Character Sheet Chris.

A chaotic character he would play later, affectinatly reffered to as "The G.reen H.aired G.oon" was wanted for murder a few towns back [his idea for backstory].

The Character [& player too] had QUICKLY proven himself to be incompetent to the rest of the party and wound up being left behind by the party in an orc encounter. His next character was the twin of the GHG. The party had aquired a bounty hunter[played by the selfish bastard of the game group] shorly before GHG #2 joinded us. This GHG was delivered to the local athourities by the bounty hunter within the first sesion of play.

 

[John Morrow]

No brave last stands or hideously planned traps. I wanna hear about 12th lvl PC's freezoing to death, falling to Cyrulean flu or choking on chicken bones.

I've had two PC magic users in my game die from standing too close to the bad guys. In the second case, the sorcerer was stupid enough to stay within a 5-foot step of a monster that had many very nasty attacks and the monster decided that it was tired of being hit by magical spells from the sorcerer. One round. Very dead 7th level Sorcerer. The players seem to have gotten the message now about magic users anywhere near the front lines.

 

[Arcane Runes Press]

Take one mid level fighter

add

1 (apparently really) skittish horse

and add

1 300' high cliff

and

1 slightly above average-sized frog

then mix well with

1 failed ride check at cliff's edge

equals

Plate Mail Pancake

 

[Drakmar]

I spent about a month real time making the culture for my human barbarian to come from... then when the game starts.. 1/2 into the game we encounter a party of orcs... in the first round my barb has his leg cut off and goes into shock. (Rolemaster)

The other party members who survived.. we later feed a strange meat dish by the orcs.

 

[Aeric]

Our party entered a seemingly empty room of the dungeon. In the middle of the room was a pile of gold. Okay, we all thought, this is obviously a trap of some kind, or maybe a Mimic. Everyone in the party was content to leave the gold alone and pass through to the next room. Everyone but the half-orc, that is. The half-orc fires an arrow at the gold.

A booming voice from above us says, "DON'T TOUCH MY GOLD!!!!"

A red dragon was invisible and upside-down on the ceiling, presumably using a Spider Climb spell.

The dragon breathes on the party, doing fifty-some-odd points of damage (it might have been exactly fifty). My cleric fails his Fortitude save vs. massive damage and dies from shock.

The party drags his body out the way they came in and closes the door, while the dragon laughs inside.

 

[Darkness]

Sounds like a higher level version of the spell, the 4th level one leaves orifices alone....

I'm sure there are interesting variants of this spell out there, maybe in Japan or somewhere.

 

[Amaroq]

The party has gone to sleep in the Inn, whereupon the Bad Guys sent four assasins using dust of disappearance to take care of the new 'problem' in town.

Though my character saw them put on the dust of disappearance (being out lurking around town at night, rather than sleeping with my compatriots), I was unable to get back to the Inn in time to raise the alarm. A good number of the party died, their throats slit in their sleep; several others managed the ignoble death of being burned to death in the Inn when the wizard ignored the DM's hints about how much alchohol and flour were present in the inn's kitchens and cast fireball.

I don't think those of us who survived ever did reach the Bad Guys' base to pay them back...

 

[Amaroq]

Far too many 'failed saves' here I think. I was hoping to see some really good non-combat fatalities. Like the failed ride check.

My favorite happened to a player in a game I was DM'ing. Having spent months wandering around the frozen north, the fighter took passage on a boat down a (not frozen) river.

While on the boat, the boat was attacked by pirates; despite the PC's assistance, the crew was being overrun and began to surrender. Shortly, the PC found himself the last man still fighting, and decided to dive overboard. Well, before his character can do such a thing, I give him a Wisdom check, which he makes, prompting me to remind the player that:
a.) the pirates seem to be accepting surrender by the crew,
b.) he was wearing metal armor,
c.) he can see chunks of ice floating on the river surface,
d.) there is a featureless snowy plain as far as he can see,
e.) there isn't a village in sight, and
f.) he doesn't have his pack and gear.

"Are you sure?"

"Uh... Yeah!"

So the fighter dives overboard. He barely manages to shuck off enough armor to succeed at a Swim check. He barely manages to make enough Swim and Constitution checks to reach shore, thoroughly exhausted. He crawls up on the snow. But there his luck runs out: unable to start a fire, in rapidly-freezing wet clothing, with no sword and no armor, he begins to freeze to death.

He survives an hour or two of that, which was long enough for a 'random encounter' to pop up.

Would it be a patrol, arriving just in the nick of time to save him?

No.

It was a pack of wolves.

As though 'twere a Jack London novel, we left the ignoble encounter twixt the near-icicle and his wolves 'offscreen' while we began work on the player's next character concept.

 

[frankthedm]

worst end for PCs was when i was playing an evoker named Untouchable William. The party had an [plot]artifact sword and dagger set that my mage recognized as being able to command any price. He had suggested selling them but the good aligned players would not because an evil cult wanted the set very badly.

William was not a nice guy, had little respect for life, felt the weapons were FAR to dangerous to hold onto and i had even dropped several in-character hints that he might be a danger to the party if the weapons were not going to be sold.

After speaking with the DM on a few occasions on the subject he finally agreed with me that the players were guilty of metagaming, ignoring the warning signs and assuming i was trustable because i was not an NPC. e even decided the party would be worth EXP should i defeat them and claim the weapons.

When the party was battling some orcs in a cave and had been weakened, i lobbed a dagger that erupts into a fireball into the fray.

the only character still standing after that[the rest were in the mild negatives], still acting like someone playing a game, rather than someone almost murdered by a betrayer says, "warn us before you do that next time"

I ask "sorry, are you badly hurt?"

stabilizing friend with cure minor wounds, "yeah, almost uncounsous."

I cast magic missile to finish the job. I make sure all are dead, loot them and burn the bodies.

The other players were not ammused, I was.