May Your Character's R.I.P

[DM with a vengence]

My first character ever was Kuun-lan the Elven Ranger. We had gone through a short dungeon fighting drow and picked up a magical sword that gained more bonuses if you, uh, stroked it, although if you stroked it too hard it would lose all of its abilities and go floppy. (This is what you get when you play with perverted high school students.) Then we got teleported to the distant past, where I befriended a Velociraptor to use as a mount.

"You see a raptor looking at you, it looks friendly."

"I attempt not to antagonize it."

"It walks up to you and nuzzles you, maybe you could ride it."

"I don't think so, I have no ranks in Animal Empathy, Handle Animal, or Ride."

"You're a Ranger, you can ride it."

I gave in at that point, and went scouting with my new raptor buddy. I spotted an Ogre guarding a cave, so I snuck up to him and tried to hit him with my bow. I missed, and in the interest of RolePlaying decided to curse in Orcish. The DM decided the Ogre heard me and threw his spear at me. It hit me in the cest dealing 20 odd points of damage and killing my 3rd level 11 Con Ranger in one hit.

In short, roleplay screwed me over, so my next character was a munchkin assassin PvP Ftr/Rog with two 18s, three 16s, and a 14. To the best of my knowledge he is still wandering around Feudal Japan killing stuff with his kewl abilities.

 

[NiTessine]

I've never run a character long enough for him to die, actually. I've always been the DM.
But, let me recount the tales of those four tattered, burnt, bloodstained character sheets on my door.

First, there is Turandar, an elven fighter from the days of 2E. I ran that game to a bunch of people in a mental hospital, and this player showed it a big more clearly. He was insulting, and disruptive to the game. So, a four-armed sahuagin stuck him through the back with a trident. Later, his head got smashed, and he was resurrected as a zombie, and chopped to pieces, and thrown in the Rauvin. A long story.

Then, there is the esteemed Bright Mage and engineer Azholf Stolf, from a 3E Warhammer campaign. He poked the wrong body, and the ghast that it was throated him.

Gurnik Gurnisson, a dwarf barbarian from the same campaign, paid the price for stubbornness. He stood his ground against some thirty zombies, and their insane leader. Stupid, stupid, dead.

Then, finally, there is Thielf, the halfling rogue, played by my little brother, a terrible pest. The rest of the party convinced him to get a sword off a suspicious corpse coated in yellow mushrooms. Now, you know what happened. A few rounds later, his Con score was -6.

There are others, whose character sheets were archived, or given to their owners as memorabilia.
Hodalh and Talindra, a human monk and an elven druidess, were another two casualties of the Warhammer campaign, slain by a freak portal accident (one of the players wanted to start a new character and the other never showed up in games).

Speartip, a RuneQuest character, fell in an icy river. Three rounds and lots of bad rolls later, she had drowned.

 

[Frosty]

I died a meaningless death last saturday. After been defeated and humiliated by a guardian creature my friends pull me out of the hot zone. My weapon gets left behind. As a player I hated that weapon as it made me possessive about it as a side-effect of being +1. That meant I was unable to upgrade the weapon to something better. My character of course loved the weapon dearly.

When my friends had brought me back to consciousness I announced I was going back for my weapon. They didn't try to stop my but they mentioned that it wasn't such a great idea. I assured them it would be fine. So I walked back to the monster and stated that I was just back for my weapon. The guardian warned me about approaching for in his mind he had won the weapon fair and square. I said that it didn't matter as I was just back to get the weapon I left. I reached for it and - wham! Save or die. I died, even though I used my Good Fortune-ability.

Well, at least the weapon was lost.

 

[JESawyer]

/me dies laughing

Amazing!

And I thought my old "my horse was murdered by an evil cow" story was weird!

The larger circumstances made the situation even more humorous. My previous campaign ended in player rage because they felt I was being a killer DM. Okay, so I did have the super-streamlined team of six perfectly-complementary Red Wizards of Thay beat the hell out of them. My bad. I decided to run a more epic, ROELEPLAYEINGE-oriented campaign the next time around.

The "Seven Sorrows" campaign took the characters from Procampur to the Old Empires. They managed to go almost a dozen sessions with only four or five battles and tons of exploration, roleplaying, and intrigue. NO KILLER DM HERE, FOLKS.

They entered a tomb in the Plains of Purple Dust. They had occasionally seen weird peacocks off in the distance, watching them. Naturally, this seemed a little odd, but they weren't too concerned. It made no sense to worry about them when there were behir running around everywhere. After all, what could a peacock do to a party of 8th level adventurers? LOL ROFL OMG BBQ!

Ahem.

They were standing in the tomb at the edge of a gorge. Three undead peacocks were staring at them with little red eyes. One of the PCs moved towards the edge of the gorge. The peacock started acting weird. It fanned out its tail and hypnotized the sorceress. She fell into the gorge, but was saved by her feather fall. A fighter followed her, but he simply survived through massive hit points and a good fort save. Then the fighter/rogue decided to step up and provoke the other two peacocks. He fell. He took 52 points of damage. He blew his saving throw for death by massive damage. CLASSY.

 

[Umbran]

This one happened some years ago...

Bunch of freshmen guys in college, getting togther for the first time on an Satruday afternoon. Brand new campaign. We go all go through character generation (took a while, what with 6 guys and only two PHB's). Then, ther party sets in on it's first adventure. The usual "young heros save village from band of orcs" kind of thing. Having a great time crawling through the orc den, soda and munchies flowing freely, hours passing in our favorite hobby, and we come to the climatic battle...

Ever have one of those fights where you make no real tactical mistakes (given what you know), but every single one of your decisions turns out to be exactly the wrong choice? This was like that. Total party kill. It's now about 2 AM, and the players are really bummed out. We crawl off to bed, a sorry excuse for gamers...

Until we get up again at 10 AM to start all over again

 

[nopantsyet]

I'm not dead yet...

Well, the character is not dead yet, but I think he's pretty d$#* cool, so here goes. I'm taking the summer off from DMing and one of my players is running a short OA adventure. Now, another one of my players gives me eternal h#$* about certain strict rule interpretations that I enforce when he feels it comprimises his character concept. So we decide to play a 5-week OA adventure and this guy is annoyed because he doesn't want to put all this time into a character concept for a short adventure. I insist that a good character concept neither has to be complex or tied to a long-term campaign. We disagree as usual. So in order to show that I win all DM-player debates, I come up with Kosei.

Kosei is a Ronin with low WIS. What this means is he has no inner strength, so when he was disgraced, rather than perform seppuku like all good Samurai do, he ran away. But he is penitent and truly wants to do right, so he is on a quest to find the inner strength to ritually disembowel himself and restore his lost honor.

And just to make things edgy, every time he fights honorably in battle, he roles a Will save which, if he ever succeeds, will mean he found the strength and he will promptly draw his wakizashi and spill forth his intestines.

Funny thing is, I've really started to empathize with the char and after every battle, I'm secretly hoping he makes that roll...

 

[RogueJK]

Re: I'm not dead yet...

And just to make things edgy, every time he fights honorably in battle, he roles a Will save which, if he ever succeeds, will mean he found the strength and he will promptly draw his wakizashi and spill forth his intestines.

That's an interesting character, but... (Forgive me if this is a bit nit-picky )

Keep in mind that seppuku involved more than just simply disembowling yourself. It required lots of meditation and preparation, and the act itself was highly ritualistic. You had certain clothes that you had to wear, a certain meal you wre required to eat, and a certain type of incision that you were required to inflict on yourself. Seppuku also involved two people: the samurai who is to commit the act, and a friend to dispatch him after he has slit his stomach. The samurai would disembowel himself with the knife, and then give a signal to his friend who would step forward and behead him. The longer the samurai waited between disembowling himself and signaling for his friend, the greater his honor (and the pain).

So if he just stops in the middle of battle, draws his wakazashi, and slits his stomach, he isn't committing seppuku... it's merely suicide. (And a long, messy, and extremely painful one at that...) The only time that seppuku was performed on the battlefield was to prevent yourself from being taken prisoner. In order to atone for his disgrace, he would need to perform the proper ceremony.

Also, sepukku was traditionaly perormed with a knife, such as a kozuka or boku, not the wakazashi.

 

[Pyske]

Re: Re: I'm not dead yet...

Rather cool character idea there, but I take it the WIS score is really low, or he'd have found his courage by now, yes?

Also, sepukku was traditionaly perormed with a knife, such as a kozuka or boku, not the wakazashi.

Eh? I'm no scholar, but I thought the tradition was to use the wakizashi blade, after removing the hilt and tsuba and wrapping the tang with ritual cloth? Thus the wakizashi as the "sword of honor?"

. . . . . . . -- Eric

 

[Femerus the Gnecro]

seppuku

I was always under the impression that it was a 'use the tanto knife' thing. The Wakizashi is just too damn long to use for the purpose... it'd be like trying to cut your dinner steak with a broadsword.

Also, don't forget that you need someone standing over you with a bare katana to cut off your head before you can disgrace yourself by groaning in pain.

If you're very lucky, they might even leave that flap of skin at the front of your neck intact so your head doesn't roll around all over the place.

Ahh... the joys of ritual disembowlment.

 

[Wicht]

Well, we find this powerful cleric, so we head back to the Caves of Chaos and once again the goblins show up, and the cleric hits us from behind with cause light wounds!!! So we die again.

Your dad sounds like quite a guy

Daebryn Bladestorm said:
I think my most memorable death was when the red dragon we were fighting decided to fall out of the sky after death and land on my half elf fighter-rogue.

That reminds me of Paranoia. I had all the clones trapped on an "amusement park" island (think Jurassic Park) trying to fight of dinosuars. The only way to reach the island was to be shot in a cannister through the air and hope the drop didn't kill you.

The clones were fighting and losing of course, against a huge Apatosaurus. One clone was killed but the others continued to fight. Finally the replacement clone was fired over and by a freak of luck the cannister hit the giant lizard in the head, killing it. The other clones cheered. And then the dinosaur collapsed forward. The look on the players faces as they realized it was going to fall on the clones was priceless.