Yeah, I also once had a PC in my game choke a dragon. He was swallowed whole, and I let him make a roll to see if he could get off a spell while going down its throat. He did, and cast mount. The dragon died of a horse throat. *rimshot*
As to actual heroism, though, one PC, her name was Harley was depressed.
Around December of 1999 in the real world, in the game, Harley was feeling somewhat useless compared to her companions. Her friend Allar was a much more skilled warrior and she was just a coward who would often run away from battles, so even if Allar tried to convince her she could become more confident, she wouldn't listen. She nearly got all of her friends killed when she fled a fight because she thought everything was lost, and she just wants to go back to her life before adventuring.
Then, the party is lured into a dungeon by a villainous water elemental who wanted to destroy them, and in the dungeon they are his pawns. Through dozens of traps, flooded chambers, and terrifying darkness they chase after the villain, since they have to stop him. Throughout it all, Harley feels her terror mounting, and by the end she almost has to be dragged along by Allar and the others.
They lose sight of the elemental, and decide that they just have to try to escape now. On the run for the exit, Harley even helps fight a few of the monsters, beginning to think they might be safe. They have nearly managed to reach the exit when they reach a huge bridge over a vast chasm of fire, with a 10-ft. gap in the middle. 15 ft. above the gap, a stone coffin hangs from the ceiling. Paranoid of all the traps in the dungeon, eventually Harley volunteers to risk the danger to examine the coffin, using a grappling hook and rope to climb up to the coffin, while Allar and one other of the party swing over to the far side of the gap.
Suddenly, the entire dungeon shakes, and the character holding the grappling hook's rope end loses his grasp. Looking up, they spot the water elemental churning across the ceiling, heading toward the chain from which the coffin dangles. Feeling something evil churn in the stone coffin below her, Harley realizes that the water elemental must want to release whatever is inside it. Holding back her fear, she begins to slash at the chain in an attempt to drop the coffin in the flames below, even as her friends shout for her to get away from the elemental.
The elemental drops onto Harley, pushing her off balance, and she falls, barely able to catch a lip of the bottom of the coffin. Dangling hundreds of feet above a pit of fire, she tries desperately to reach for the hanging rope from the grappling hook, but it's on the opposite side of the coffin, and she can't reach it.
The warrior next to Allar starts tying a rope to an arrow to shoot for her to catch, and the others use what few ranged weapons and offensive spells they have left to try to stop the elemental, but they aren't fast enough.
As the elemental starts to force its way through the cracks in the coffin to release the evil within, Harley thinks to herself about how her one attempt to be heroic has failed, and that now she's going to die. Rather than try somehow to fight whatever is in the coffin, Harley chooses to run away in the only way left to her. She closes her eyes and lets herself fall.
Seeing her drop, Allar leaps across the gap, slamming bodily into Harley in mid-air and shoving her away, sending her close enough to one of the ledges that her friends manage to reach out and grab her. Harley's eyes snap open in surprise that she stopped falling, and she looks down to see Allar plummeting toward the flames below.
For an instant, it seems like Allar is gone, but he just manages to snag the end of the rope from the grappling hook, though he has to drop his sword into the fire in order to grab on. By the time the elemental tosses the grappling hook off, the warrior with the bow has fired his rope-tied arrow to hoist Allar up with.
Harley's friends pull her onto the bridge, where she lies in shock for the rest of the fight, while the others desperately try to destroy the elemental and the chain. They manage to destroy it, and when the coffin and elemental plummet into the flames below, the dungeon begins to flood, water bursting through its walls, a final trap to kill any intruders. On their last legs, the party struggles through rising waters to reach the exit, finally emerging, exhausted, into a flooded field, covered waist deep with water for miles.
Slowly, the water drains away, but before Harley is able to reconcile her new lease on life, their main villain -- an Illithid mastermind -- appears, teleporting in. The entire dungeon had been a ruse to weaken them, because the Illithid wants something from Allar, and he nonchalantly kills the man psionically.
In a rage, Harley tries to attack the Illithid, but it simply stuns the rest of them, gathers Allar's body, and teleports away. When the group recovers, they're in shock from what has happened. After trying so hard, and coming so far, their efforts didn't matter.
The water that surged up out of the dungeon has finally drained away. Though too weak and broken of spirit to move, she glances around, and sees that the torrent of water had deposited Allar's sword on the ground beside her, though he had dropped it into the pit of flames. Picking it up, she feels its hollow weight burdening her, calling upon her to become its new wielder and follow Allar's guidance.
The story goes on from there, with Harley slowly overcoming her fears and cowardice, sometimes almost breaking under the strain of trying to make sure Allar's death was not in vain. True, there was no single act of heroism that marked the turning point in her character, but I was surprised to see such development and growth in a character. I think that it was because of Harley and what happened to her that I came to realize the real range of what gaming can be.
