Quick deaths in D&D

[MerricB]

For some reason, I've been thinking about a former player of mine. Let's call him Greg, because that was his name, and let me tell you about how exceptional this player was at killing off his characters...

There was a time I was running a RPGA adventure, one of the first I ran, part of the Green Regent campaign IIRC. In one of the first encounters, the group came up against a frost giant. Without waiting for back-up, Greg's barbarian ran in to challenge the giant alone. One attack routine later, Greg's barbarian's corpse was disappearing over the mountainside with the rest of the group wondering what was happening...

There was another time I was running a RPGA adventure, this time an early Mark of Heroes adventure. The group had to interview a grumpy shifter who had been having a really bad day. Greg wanders in and tries to seduce her with one of the worst pick-up lines in history. She attacked, critted, and threw his spleen out of the door as the rest of the party watched bemused. This was the first encounter of this adventure, and it wasn't even a combat encounter!

Greg could actually play incredibly well, but his heart (and spleen) wasn't always in it. He'd prefer to be doing something else, and so, in a very short time, he normally was.

Someone else DMed Greg one time through the old Greyhawk Ruins campaign. I have the distinction of being the only player whose character never died in that campaign; I was even able to talk my way out of a Colossal Red Dragon eating me. Greg wasn't so lucky. Or maybe, by his standards, he was. Highest death count of the group, although it was another Greg (who still plays with me) who won the award for most arbitrary death: he died one session and created a new paladin to replace the old character. Next session, he forgot to bring the paladin so, in the way of this campaign, the paladin was considered to be dead and Greg made up yet another character.

Of course, my very first D&D character didn't survive much more than about an hour. (Having shocking grasp as your only offensive spell does not lead to a long life as an AD&D magic-user!)

There are times when keeping your character alive is important, when history and roleplaying are the focus of the campaign and your enjoyment of the game. And there are times, if you're Greg, when none of that matters.

Cheers!

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yXAEzp6W-U]That's why I'm always the first to die.[/ame]

 

[greyscale1]

To be honest, I almost always run RP and character heavy campaigns (combat all the time too, but still heavy RP) so I seldom will put characters in 50/50 die situations.

I actually would really like to run a brutal face melting dungeon crawl campaign with character deaths the reward for less than optimal teamwork. I have a relatively large (10 or so) playerbase to choose from, yet I think only maybe 1 or 2 of them would be into a campaign where every action was vital vital vital. Still - I wanna : P

 

[gribble]

My record was a particularly brutal encounter in the Savage Tide AP featuring basilisks...
Most of the party fell in the first encounter, and we created new characters. Mine was a dwarven fighter. We returned to the basilisk lair, and I charged. As I charged in I had a choice of averting my eyes or not. I chose not to (to not get the miss chance) and rolled a natural 1 (the only thing that would have failed the fort save from memory). Turned to stone without even rolling a die, and the character sheet was still half filled in. That one got stunned silence and then a round of laughter from the table. It was a record that I'm pretty sure still stands... (I've since moved city, and don't regularly game with that group anymore).

 

[MortalPlague]

I had a character turned to stone in his first session... We were chasing a little girl who'd wandered into a dangerous mine shaft. We passed several people who had been turned to stone, so we knew there was something afoot. We then came across an old basilisk, and my character saw the girl jump down the far side of the room. Trying to get to her, he charged across the room, ignoring the basilisk, and jumped down after her. Turns out she was a young medusa. The basilisk had cateracts, and couldn't turn people to stone anymore. A one on the die, though, and my poor character was petrified.

 

[Ander00]

A few quick ones:

• A replacement character in an Eberron game, a half-orc barbarian. His first and last encounter was a Sahuagin ambush, in which he was swallowed by a dire shark.
• The first level elven wizard with a less than stellar constitution score who went ahead into a room with goblin archers didn't live through her first encounter either.
• Same player as the second one. The party, on their first quest, is camping in a forest. They are attacked by worgs and one of them fails to wake up in the first round. The player liked it that way ("I want to sleep through this anyway"), so nobody made a special effort to rouse her, even though a worg was getting really close. Second round she had a worg jaw where her throat used to be.

cheers

 

[That One Guy]

I rarely have PC deaths. I tend to not have overpoweringly amazing villains (or if those do exist, the PCs know well enough to avoid them) who know EVERYTHING or anything like that. Always seemed cheap. My traps have a way of being solved (Why else would they be there unless someone wanted to get back in?). I try and be impartial. Usually I have the first few sessions of a game be 'easy' so PCs get into the story and have some victories...

I once had a PC who died twice in the first session of the game. I think he died at least one more time soon after that. Spot on RP, his character was a guy who thought that everything was a challenge. If he could beat it, then it should be tougher. If it killed him, he wasn't good enough, yet.

....yup.

 

[dystmesis]

My quickest death was in a Savage Tides game. I was playing an elf barbarian. I joined the group late and really had no idea what was going on, but we went to some cave in a boat and the party got split up somehow. We encountered some zombies, I charged them, they grappled me, and I died.

In another game, I played a dwarf cleric in RHoD. When we went into the lich's place and I walked down the wrong hallway. A group of bonedrinkers? sprung out of nowhere. One grappled me and I died.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

I played in a (single session) campaign with a DM who clearly wasn't very good.

First encounter - ghouls. My character - paralyzed & eaten. Rolled up new character. Second encounter - cockatrice. My character - turned to stone. Happily our regular DM came up with a new idea for a campaign and we got back on with things as normal.

In another campaign, I had a half-orc barbarian die in a game, get resurrected, and promptly die again in the following session. At that stage, I agreed to change him for something else...

 

[Draksila]

In a friend's homebrew AD&D 2E game, I played a githzerai planar stuck in a prime material world. He was originally from Sigil, hadn't been in the world long, and thought very little of anyone who wasn't born in the planes (kind of a big city vs farm folk mentality). We were breaking into a tomb and found a corridor blocked off by what was identified as a disintegrate trap (this was a mid-level group). One of the humans, on impulse, dashed across the trap to the other side without a bit of harm. Believing that if some lowly clueless berk from Downtown Backwater could go somewhere then he certainly could, my gith was the next to follow. Thus ended his first and only encounter with that team.

As a note, he was replaced by a half-silver dragon that lasted several sessions before being killed in a feral charge against the campaign villain. I was going through a weird phase wherein I didn't want to play normal races or less-than-reckless heroes. Thankfully it passed.