D&D 5E RIP Murder Hobos

[blueherald]

Not sure if this counts as the player was leaving the group and was seeking a death.

It counts in my book. Ages ago, I was running a game and the bard player decided tabletop RPGs weren't for him (which was too bad because he was theater/literature/music major and man did he _role-play_!)

I asked him if I could kill him - dramatically of course - and he agreed. The engineered scene we had planned went out the window because the rest of the party did it for us. They encountered a doppelganger and after one thing led to another, the opportunity to pull the "Two Identical Looking Figures Roll Around On the Ground Fighting Claiming The Other Is The Fake" cliche presented itself - with me and the player screaming Shakespearean threats at one another.

The ranger went with "Knock It Off, Or I'll Shoot You Both" - and killed the bard.
I let them feel guilty for a while when the player didn't show up next session, before telling them it was somewhat arranged. It drove home with that group that death was real, and they might not always win, which is priceless.

 

[JonnyP71]

I converted X2, X4 and X5 from the Expert series of adventures for my players - they started X2 at level 6..... Where one of them died due to a Magic Jar being destroyed while the possessed body was too far away.

They managed X4 fine, but then 2 of them (levels 9, 11) were wiped in the finale against The Master, who I converted to be a slightly weakened Lich casting Priest spells (as an Avatar, with his corpse in a crystal coffin in the room where they were fighting him). Sadly for them, all they had to do was 50hp of damage to his corpse - and despite me dropping plenty of hints - 'Your Shatter spell destroys the front of the crystal coffin, damaging the corpse inside' and 'Caught within the area of effect of your spell you see pieces of the corpse come away' - they kept plugging away at the Avatar and his Guards. Oh and the enslaved Storm Giant who came to do the Master's bidding... Destroy the body, the Avatar would have disappeared, the spell would have been broken over the Giant, and the Cult Guards would have been in disarray and easy to deal with.

The others made their death saves, got captured, broke out unnoticed - but instead of sneaking away to safety, got stuck into more fighting - with another of them getting swamped by enemies and being cut down...

And then there was one - he was lucky he had an Ebony Fly...

 

[Unwise]

A high level Paladin was investigating a frat-house of the wizard's university that was dabbling in pseudo-necromancy as part of their oh-so-spooky initiation rites. He waits until the spookiest part, then jumps out and screams at them, having bathed himself in holy-fire. They poop themselves, but he ate 12 magic missiles a turn as they panicked and threw everything they had at the "monster". Kind of sucks to die to a bunch of first and second level mages.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Many years ago, I was helping a friend run a FASA Star Trek campaign. One player was moving away so he agreed to let the DM kill his character.

The PC in question was the helmsman and of the catfolk race (from the cartoon, I think). During a dramatic combat encounter he suddenly coughed loudly a few times, then keeled over. He was dead, the DM announced, "from a hairball."

 

[transtemporal]

For this campaign we started with the old Dragonspear playtest. 4 deaths, and it was only by stupendous luck that we missed the seemingly intentional TPK at the end.

Half-orc paladin (lvl2) who held off the charging black dragon so the rest of us could escape.
My dwarf tank (lvl4) who went down to double-crits from wraiths x3.
And then finally my human bbn and a friends human monk (lvl5) died to the same stoopid auto-kill trap.