Describe your most humiliating defeat

[threshel]

GMing this one in an Eberron campaign:
[snip]
That kind of killed the campaign right then and there.

LOL.
No joke, straight out of our last Ebberron campaign:
All of us are casing a horse-drawn carriage, one we very badly wish to catch. My Talanta Fighter/Rogue and our party's Shifter Ranger pull up alongside it and leap aboard from horseback, ready to take the carriage by guile alone, when we hear from the party Druid...
"I cast Warp Wood...
...on the front wheel."
The whole carriage endos, just flips right over at breakneck speed. The Ranger and my Talanta survive (through high dex, max ranks in Tumble, and judicious use of Action Points...there may have been some begging, too), but it nearly ended the Druid's campaign then and there.

From days long past, in 2E:
5 of us are captured and stripped of our gear, which lies tantalizingly out of our reach past the Sergeant (3rd level fighter) and 6 guards (0 level commoners, remember them?). The Sarge is giving us the third-degree, when we decide to just rush for our stuff (I don't even remember how we weren't tied up, all I really remember is what follows). Now, we've taken some hits, but we're all about 2nd or 3rd level, and we've each got our weapons and are ready to kill everyone in the room to get out. There's just one problem. They won't die. None of us are rolling higher than an 8, and the one guy we need to take down on their flank to start moving towards the door starts a string of crits with his KNIFE. With the exception of the Sarge, whose doing a mighty good job beating my dwarven fighter senseless, all of these guards are 1-hit-1-kill opponents. We didn't hit a single opponent for 3 rounds. Now, we're way beyond recompense, here. There's no way to keep our heads off the block if we quit, so it's fight or die.
We fight and die. I've got the most hp's, so I'm keeping the Sarge busy hacking through my thick skull while on my left, we die one by one at the hands of a 0 level guard with a knife. It gets brutal, and we get desperate. We're so beat up that the "rush the door" strategy is no longer viable. We'd collapse or be overtaken before we hit the gates. Finally, all of the guards have fallen except for Sarge, and knife-boy, who hasn't been hit, and is still critting us to pieces.
Let me point out that our DM makes his dice rolls in the open. There was no question of fudging.
Three of us are left, and two of us (my dwarf is one hit away from death's door) gang up on the Sarge, and we send the third against the knifer. Our third is slain that round, I drop from the Sarge's blow, and my partner kills the Sarge. Knife boy crits my partner next round, and he is the only one to walk out of the room alive. Alive and untouched our DM points out with glee.
TPK'd by a 0 level guard with a knife.

J

 

[dungeon blaster]

Ouch, that last story is a doozy.

I've got one that ended in a horrific defeat to the DM. To me it was a great victory!

I'll set the stage here: we're playing 2ed, our PCs are in a duergar city, deep in the underdark...we're being forced to fight in a grand gladitorial match against the worst fiends the drow have to offer - a battle royale so to speak. My character, being a drow fighter, is particularly hated by the locals. Our first opponent: a hideous skeletal female robed in black. We're lucky enough to watch as another gladiator spars off against her...if you could call it sparring. She reaches out, makes a gesture, and the poor sap coughs up his heart. "oh crap" we say. The bell rings, round 1:

DM: you guys have initiative, what do ya do?

ME: Um, take a couple swings at her with my sword (of sharpness). ::roll:: CRIT! sweet!

DM: She loses her left arm to your sword and begins frantically preparing to cast a spell

ME: ::2nd roll:: CRIT! Yeah! There goes the other arm!

DM: :anicking:: she begins casting another spell, a POWER WORD.

PC2: My turn! I called shot to her mouth! A hit!

DM: Arg! Alright, her jawbone goes flying off her face, right off the edge of the platform. She stares at you with eyes that could only mean "awww...f****"

PCs: We pick her up and toss her over the edge of the platform. NEXT!

With our victory we got pretty cocky. Next up: a bulky duergar fighter with a magic warhammer. He looked like he meant business.

DM: He has initiative! Ok, with a mighty roar he spins around and hurls his hammer at you (me)!!

ME: I've got gloves of missile snaring! ::roll:: I caught it! Um, I toss it back his way! ::roll:: Hit! How ya like that?!

Suffice to say, he got beat down in two rounds, much to the chagrin of the thousands of duergar watching the fight. It didn't help that we made fun of them as we were beating him to a pulp.

There was one other encounter with the champion, a half-spider minotaur. Really cool monster. All I remember of that battle was that we actually took some damage, but managed to toss him over the edge of the platform.

 

[DeBracy]

I'll make it short (it IS humiliating after all): last summer we had some D&D/Warcraft sessions, at the end we enter an arena battle for XP (we don't usually go all munchkin so it was great fun!) and my super cool pistol and rifle-wielding Ironforge Dwarf got beat... by a Gnome Barbarian.

 

[spyscribe]

There must be something about Eberron

I was playing the "intro to Living Eberron" module at GenCon SoCal last year.

We had a pretty good DM, and fun bunch of folks at the table. And when we get to the final fight at the end of the module, we can't successfully roll to hit the floor.

Five first-level characters facing off against maybe six goblins (who were only supposed to be the warm-up to the real bad guys). In an embarrassingly short time, the fighter is the only character conscious, and he's at zero hit-points.

So, surrounded and with no access to any sort of healing, he does the only thing he can to save himself and the rest of the party.

He surrenders to the goblins.

We all look at the DM.

"Umm... excuse me, I have to go consult with the head goblin to see what happens next."

At least it gave us something to laugh about while he went off to consult with the RPGA guy.

##

It was ultimately decided that the goblins tied us up, brought everyone back to consciousness, and let us watch while they completed their nefarious plan.

Afterwards we report back, and are asked by our superior at the Adventurer's Guild not to discuss with others what we have witnessed.

At which point one player turns to the DM and goes, "Yeah... like we're going to be spreading this story around!"

 

[twofalls]

My Sweet Gorgeous Wife

I was in my junior year of high school and graduating (early) with my fiancée. We had recently become engaged and I was very flush with excitement over it all. My high school had a closed circuit TV system and the school Television Department did daily shows with high school candid interviews. We were on the front lawn taking lunch with our friends who were all graduating with us and the "Roaming Reporter" (who happened to be a friend of mine) came up and asked the question "What is the most exciting thing that has happened to you all year." He went though a number of others who all said graduation of course, then he asked me. I lovingly looked into my fiancée’s eyes and said, "Getting engaged". Then he asked her, and she said quickly "Oh graduation". Apparently the expression of shock on my face was rather classic.

That interview aired the next day in every classroom of the school. I was sooo humiliated and took a lot of good natured abuse from my friends over it... and she felt so bad about answering without thinking. That was twenty years ago and I will never let her live it down so long as we live.

Oh, yes we are very happily married and have two beautiful children. But she will never live it down, no sir, not a bit...

...oh... was this supposed to be about my old wizard character Glendor Rofsick instead??

 

[Evilhalfling]

2nd ed. I was playing a gnome professor (bard kit) enormous fun, but utterly useless in combat for at least half the time I played him. The party is fighting hard against some named henchman to the BBEG - and our fighter skewers one with a spear. My gnome stands up (from hiding) and applauds. The villian pulls the spear out and tosses it at me in irritation. - crit he actually pinned me to the tree. I applauded for him as well.

 

[Ds Da Man]

Playing 2E, Stone Angel was DM with dungeon that has one card from the deck of many things on the doors, we were like 3rd or 4th level. First guy draws Minor Death, starts fighting him, rest of us playing character have no knowledge of DoMT, so we go in to help pal, all of us die in minutes. I think we had played for maybe an hour that night!

 

[Monte At Home]

I was playing in Chris Perkins' amazing D&D campaign a few years back, and we were supposed to rescue this dwarf that knows some important stuff from a medusa sorcerer. We only discovered that he was held by a MEDUSA by rushing in, fighting a lot of grimlocks, and then we see her coming from afar. I tell everyone we should run, and come back later, using stealth. And we do.

We sneak into the prison quietly and everything's going great. We rescue the dwarf, and ask him a bunch of questions. He's a little slow, and not answering very coherently. We're not getting what we want out of him. The whole time, I'm telling Chris that my character is holding onto the dwarf's shoulder protectively. It's all taking too long, and I'm getting worried. Finally, I get up really close and stare intently at the dwarf and say slowly and quiety, "Do you know where the medusa is?"

The dwarf responds, "Yes, I do."

And then the medusa drops the spell making her look like the dwarf and Chris describes how I'm staring intently into the eyes of a snake-haired woman, hanging onto her shoulder to hold her very close.

I've never been so completely bamboozled by a DM's ruse. I deserved to get turned to stone. My statue, I'm sure, had its mouth forever hanging open in shock and surprise, just like mine was.

 

[the Jester]

Old skool 1e Vampire: the Masquerade. I was playing a dumb Nosferatu. I was a grave digger in Mexico... anyhow, I was out hunting one night and I ran into some supernatural creature- a demon of some kind. I tried to kill it, but it was way too powerful. And since my character was both stupid, stubborn and macho, he fought too long (which is to say, for 2 rounds). Oops, dead grave digger Nosferatu.

This was the 1st session of the campaign. :\ Oh well.

 

[Tric]

Undoubtedly, this situation:

I was trying to leap across a 50 ft. chasm with my character that had no ranks in jump. I rolled a natural 20 (We still don't know if natural 20's on skill checks mean automatic success, but we've always used that rule on all d20 checks), so I basically flew across the chasm. The DM didn't like this, since I wasn't supposed to get over the chasm, so he made the earth start to crumble under my feet (afterwards he told me I was supposed to fall into the chasm). I got a reflex save to get away, natural 20. The DM started to get annoyed bigtime, I just laughed and went with it. Then he improvised for a while and I had to get to my friends so I had to dig through a thin layer of dirt and rocks. I made a strength check, got a 1. Then I tried again, failed, then I took 10, still didn't succeed. I took 20, and when I finally got through half an hour had passed and I was some 20 minutes to late, my buddies all being pretty dead. My character tried to use survival checks to get up to the surface again, and the DM rolled in secret. Afterwards, he told me he rolled a 1, meaning I fumbled pretty bad. I just went off, and eventually wandered straight into a nest of earth elementals (due to fumbling)...

What started so well turned out so incredibly bad.