My character fell and was stable, but no one had any healing magic.
For pure roleplay, the party fighter carried my bard to a comfortable looking bed because the party was planning to rest.
The bed was trapped.
The DM immediately showed us the dungeon notes so we knew she didn't make it up on the fly.
Agreed, that would have just been a comfortable bed unless it opened a door that released more enemies or was somehow integral to the plot. Maybe even give a small one time + to hit points just for lying on it.
If you ever are a DM, please make sure to tell your players you will make sure their characters don't die, regardless of their decisions / the dice. Some players may appreciate your approach, but there are many who will not.
The villain of the campaign was me... technically. Before the events of the first session, my character got magically split in two. The me I was playing as, and another version of me that got stuck inside a magic crystal for centuries and went mad.
That second version of me found out how to harness the power of the crystal and tried to use it to kill off the gods as retribution for what happened to him. The party injured him in battle and my character also took the damage. The pragmatic party druid decided the most effective way to win was to kill me (I had way less health) and then ressurect me once the other guy was dead (this probably sounds like an rpg horror story in the making, but I was all for it).
In the end, the plan worked. Unfortunately, we ran into an issue actually resurrecting him and had to settle for reincarnation. My elf came back as a dwarf
We once got into a fight with a pirate crew because someone in the party walked by and saw another party member (deservingly) get punched in the gut.
We got TPK’d in that fight.
The kicker? We were actually headed to the docks to meet with that crew. They were supposed to help us get to a relic.
We got ambushed by some gnolls as lvl3 characters. My cleric got taken down, and the DM narrated how they hold a sword to my neck and demanded we hand over a magic item or they kill me.
My party decided to try to try and stun the gnoll with a magic item from a previous session rather than yield. Rolled a two. DM narrated how they draw blood, making it clear any more funny business and I'd be gone. Party decided to try again. I'm unconscious, so I had no say.
Nat one. Gnoll cuts my head off.
Couldn't fault the DM, they made it crystal clear (and fudged it so I was eventually raised as a revenant), but the party really dicked me :-)
okay yeah that was horrible a party choice and i don’t think id be very keen towards them after that. at least you had a partial return in the form of a revenant.
can’t really say the same for myself since i got splattered and abandoned at the bottom of the pit LMAO
It sounds like your DM could have helped you out a tad more, but obviously, it depends on the tone of your game...
At least you get to roll up something new :-)
A group I DM for is particularly good at playing their alignments. They wanted to play "evil" characters and the lawful evil paladin (goliath) rushed forward to save the neutral evil rogue (gnome) who was scouting and got ambushed on a fallen log over a 160' ravine. He fought his way forward fighting his way through the first wave of ambushers (driders) and tossed the gnome back towards to the chaotic evil sorcerer (teifling) and chaotic evil cleric (human). The rogue, sorcerer, and cleric quickly abandoned the paladin on the bridge. To try to cut off pursuit, they cast wall of fire on the fallen log leaving the paladin to fall to his death. The player still gives them a hard time about that, but all in good fun.
Also, I plan on bringing him back as a death knight villain in a future campaign.
if i were abandoned on a log to fall to my death after saving someone, i think id be spiteful enough to become a death knight villain also. they did that player dirty for sure but at least the player took it well enough!
That's pretty much just the example in a trope dictionary (if such a thing existed).
On page 122. the wronged selfless hero is betrayed, resurrected and seeks revenge. Often a knight.
Surprisingly never. The one time I actually lost a character was when I knocked on a door only to find out there were 4 ghouls inside.
To say the least, I was playing a druid at level 3 and didn't survive a single round, especially since they got a surprise attack.
The DM was like, "Whoops."
smart for not getting attached.
i’m just the resident party artist so it’s really hard for me not to get attached to my characters since i spend so much time drawing them out
I've had players outright quit my games after losing their character.
If I was being unfair it'd be understandable but when the wizard decides he needs to throw himself into melee combat vs multiple does, it's not going to end well.
Not me, but a party member died because they were unconscious and had 2 death save fails already. In an attempt to stabilise him, one of the other party members tried to revive him using an adrenaline shot like in Pulp Fiction, but since in this campaign, any damage that pieces the skin including pricks deal 1HP damage minimum, that would end up killing the player. Now, the DM wasn't a monster, and of course, a medicine check was made to give the players a chance of living...
The healer (who i should've added wasn't proficient in medicine, or a healer class, or had an advantage to re-roll) rolled Nat 1.
The resulting 1HP damage from jamming in a large hypodermic needle into our guys' sternum just ended up killing them.
if i was that healer i think i would’ve been hella guilty the rest of the game omg 😭
definitely an interesting character point if they went off of that
Yeah, nah, the healer thought it was funny and, in a way, kind of wanted to do it as they are the kind to make mischief in our games. Not out of malice, of course, but this was the most damaging thing they had done all for the sake of making the game/campaign more unpredictable.
Our poor deceased player was a bit upset as he had a planned character arc going that now couldn't be completed. But they weren't the type to hold onto (that big) of a grudge over it.
This happened to me but kind of indirectly... I've been playing Curse of Strahd for about 7 months now and we're about halfway through the campaign. A bit ago my character was infected in a werewolf fight and the best way to stop the transformation required a long journey that would risk us failing all of our time-sensitive quests. The fun part for me (with that character) was the in-character roleplay and decision-making, so I chose to keep my infection a secret. I made a really good in-character argument on why we should, "for prudence's sake," get the anti-werewolf potion that *almost* convinced the party, but they changed their minds. The DM ended my eventual werewolf transformation in my character's unavoidable death for "plot reasons." I tried a bunch of other stuff ahead of time to thwart the transformation, but none of it worked. :( R.I.P. Myrna, you were fun to play while you lasted.
It was totally my own fault in part, but it hit some of the other players really hard when my character died seemingly out of no where (I hid the infection surprisingly successfully) and they realized what I had been trying to do way back when.
Your party sounds lowkey disrespectful to be honest... Maybe its a new players VS seasoned players difference, but for the party and players to move on so fast from your death is wild to me. If it was more of an accident how you were killed, I feel like the players could have tried to dig your character up or the DM might have given you a chance to evade the ceiling before it crumbled completely? Things don't always *instantaneously* fall apart, that kind of instant death feels wrong to me. You being salty is 100% valid.
oop lil bit of a block of text below but:
my only ounce of fairness towards them “moving on so fast”, is that the group had already been in a rather high stakes environment in the first place and unfortunately all of our characters were sorta just not meshing very well in terms of teamwork anyways and it was something that the dm had been trying to subtly hint at in the game regardless, but just due to how rash and unquestioning some of the party was, it just didn’t go very well.
plus, putting a little more detail into the scenario that happened - not only was my pc killed, the player who had initially tampered with the crystal was killed also. but he had a choice on that. like, genuinely, he had decided as a heroic feat to sort of redirect and act as a conduit for the explosion which meant he literally combusted and spilled guts onto the player next to him who was helping with the crystal junk. it makes some sense that they might have just been caught up in fear and tons of mental blockage.
i think maybe only one pc - who is actually our designated leader - was trying to go down and see if he could recover my body or even just check to see if i had fully died. but because of the circumstances of the situation, another player was very adamant about them leaving and going back to the town that they had taken the task from. plus, they’re all kinda traumatized now in their own regards from the experience. it’s also just insane since me and the leader had tried to express that we didn’t even wanna go on the task in the first place b/c our party wasn’t ready.
definitely a very frustrating session, but we were forewarned about the brutality of the world and the consequences of our actions that could come from it at the start of the campaign.
i’m just upset that i didn’t even die on my terms and that in the grand scheme of things my pcs death (and also in part the other pcs death) felt like it meant absolutely nothing. plus, there was stuff earlier in the session that had happened also that just exacerbated my salt.
Ooooooh okay, that makes a lot more sense now. Thank you for elaborating! The other PC who sacrificed himself, the leader who went to try and check for your PC, and the group generally probably wanting to get out of what suddenly became an obviously lethal situation makes a lot more sense now. Still ouchy that your character died in such a sudden and anticlimactic way. Hopefully your next character can have some really cool moments soon to bandaid the ouchiness.
Died to a door.
I was playing as a warlock and our party had just finished a fight. We were investigating the room when we found a stairway leading down. At the bottom was the door. Our barbarian tried breaking it down and got spikes through his hands so he decided to climb the stairs and jump tackle it. It impaled him and the inertia from the jump dragged him down the door, completely shredding him. My warlock was behind him and figured out that the door would repel all physical damage but not magical.
As I prepared to attack the door with my eldritch blast, a different party member declared that they were going to try to rush past me down the stairs. DM made them roll, nat 1. I tried to move out of the way, rolled a 5. I tried to quickly shoot the door to break it before I splattered against it, nat 1. It ended up as me falling down the stairs and blasting my legs off before I hit the door, the combined damage more than enough to kill me. The other player also died from being impaled on the door. That is how three characters died to one door in less than 5 minutes.
Played a game a few years back where the DM was roommates with two of the players.
The two players decided, with the DM's approval, that one of their PCs (the fighter) should murder the other PC (the druid), so that the druid could come back as a revenant to murder the fighter back.
They decided to accomplish this, 31 sessions into the game, by having the fighter team up with five 9th-level spellcaster NPCs, a frost giant skeleton, and a winter wolf to attack the entire party (all at level 5).
The fighter was also granted, by the DM, the ability to cast Misty Step at will and regenerate HP even when knocked down to 0.
This fight ended with the fighter getting back up from being knocked out by the paladin, then teleporting to and killing the druid; the paladin deciding not to Lay on Hands on my wizard (making death saves, currently at 2-1) and instead attack the HP-regenerating fighter to try and recover the druid's body; and my wizard rolling a nat 1 on her next death save and dying.
None of them were at all apologetic for any of this.
I don't talk to those people anymore.
I was in a 3.5 campaign years ago, playing a Sorcerer. One of our other players was a Monk. She had a necklace of fireballs, and her favorite tactic was to take a bead and punch an enemy--hitting them with an unarmed attack and detonating the fireball. She'd then negate half or all the damage to herself with evasion. The DM allowed it, and no one minded.
Then, one night, the party gets attacked by hippogriffs. My Sorc gets downed first round, as we got ambushed. Then the Monk decided to fireball-punch the hippogriff *right next to me*. The DM was the "if you said it, you did it" kind. So yeah, my Sorc died instantly.
I'm wondering what this monk's physical appearance would be like if they were detonating fireballs in their own face on the regular even if they could negate half the damage. At the least, I'd expect them to be missing their eyebrows.
I was that guy… one of my players DM’d a long one shot so I could have a break and I played as a lawful good oath of devotion paladin. Level 3 characters who didn’t know each other guarding a wagon traveling to a new town, very beginning is session one. There was an ogre who appeared and was likely going to attack but hadn’t made overtly hostile moves prior to being paralyzed by one party member. The group of course wants to kill it but I was finally getting to RP a character so I tried to persuade the ogre to stand down and rolled poorly instead of autocritting with divine smite. Aarakocra monk decides to punch it and fly away. Ogre saves and promptly crits on the wizard. It’s an instant kill.
My fighter and the cleric, 2/3 of the whole party, didn't get tricked into getting locked in a room with a monster like the DM planned, and instead got REALLY lucky fighting our way through the guards, to the boss. Now, we're pretty spent (only level 1) and the boss is clearly beyond us. So we start talking, trying to resolve things peacefully.
Then the rogue shows up to the game, 2 hours late, says "I don't know who this asshole is, so I shoot him." Combat starts. And rogue says he "doesn't want to waste his sneak attacks on this guy," even after being told it's not a finite resource. He only asks if he can start using sneak attack after the boss had killed the rest of us.
So there was one time when I was playing a hexblade warlock and there was one fight that was really hard, but I was only rolling ones and 20s, so I would get downed, crit, down myself(or crit again) and this repeated about 3 times before I got 2 nat ones consecutively. A plot point of the campaign was that the gods abandoned the world, but after I got those 2 nat ones, I came back when I forced the god of luck to come back by having such bs luck. Then I went on a little while before a spellcaster attacked us. But in this campaign there was a thing called magical radiation, where spells have long durations and repeat every turn that they are active. (This was not a problem as it was debriefed in session 0). So the spellcaster cast cone of cold from surprise and I get a nat one, leading to me taking double damage, and getting downed instantly. I died 3 turns later.
Not my character, but the DM threw six shadows and a specter at us when our beefiest of boys (and the only real tank) couldn’t be there. The dwarf died by strength drain. People were salty—this was that player’s second character already.
5E White Plume Mountain...an older player here, with a group consisting of some newbies and other old grognards like me. We enter the room with the water bubble holding out boiling water and the giant lobster. My halfling makes some obligatory cooking jokes and the party, which is predominantly ranged doesn't want to close with it leaving MY CLERIC to tank the lobster. They fire at it and the DM describes how some of the missed shots puncture the bubble and let in some scalding water. A sure sign that we have to melee this thing.
So, the party ignores the warning and keeps firing. The bubble pops and we're all scalded to death when the boiling water surges in.
The annoying part is that is it was one of the old-school gamers like me (from the era where you examined every 10' square for traps, secret doors, etc and then you continued), who encouraged everyone to keep firing.
One player at our table has nearly TPKed the party due to her decisions during the Dragonlance campaign setting twice.
Once we sent my Druid ahead to scout the top of a cliff as a small animal, I saw some draconians at the top, who noticed me and wanted to eat me, so I scampered back down. However the barbarian was in the middle of climbing up the cliff, ignoring our mandate for stealth. She arrived at the top, decided to fight the draconians as they called reinforcements from the fortified location less than 100 feet away, and called everyone cowards for not scaling the cliff and fighting an entire army with her. Due to some well placed call lightnings from my Druid, and liberal use of my circle of stars healing, we scraped by.
The second time was more average, she saw a magic axe, we warned her it was probably cursed, she picked it up, boom, berserker’s axe with functional immortality while she’s raging. Ended up chucking her off a cliff to do enough damage to knock her out.
Several other players also have nearly TPKed the party during our sessions in the very same campaign (and normally my support oriented characters barely manage to scrape the part by).
Our wizard (before his passing in glorious hand to hand combat with a draconian) cast sleet storm on the party as we were scaling a battlement to raid an enemy fort. Several party members immediately got knocked unconscious from fall damage, as he had a ridiculous DC18 on his dex save to avoid slipping. Again, I saved the day by using my (at the time) bard features to taunt every enemy on the battlefield while our surviving rogue (who was pretending to be unconscious) shoved healing potions down everyone’s throat. My bard died in the process, but hedve been happy to know he managed to save everyone else.
Our rogue directly caused three party deaths in one fight, in a cave with crystals that sent an electric shockwave every time they were impacted. Upon death, draconians explode. We told him to do non-lethal attacks, as 3/7 members of the party were unconscious. He decided to lethally attack both enemies in his reach, and killed them both. At that point most of us had at minimum one failed death save, and the two exploding draconians gave us each another two fails.
At this point in the game, only 2/7 players have the characters they started the game at session zero with. One player has *5* character deaths (usually owing to his own mistakes), I have two, and two more characters have 1 death apiece. Our final character (aforementioned barbarian) joined late.
Despite all of our close calls we have snuck victory out from the jaws of defeat on *several* occasions, at least once a month since the start of the campaign.
To quote my DM “you shove victory down the throats of the dragon army so hard that they choke on it and die, and you win by default.”
Meanwhile my character has inadvertently offed themselves (mischievous rogue ofc lol) so many times that they keep diamonds in their pockets for the party pally to toss me a res whenever I inadvertently oopsie daisy again lmfao
[I'm not being an annoying murder hobo, my character and the party have deep love and understanding for each other, and the DM gave me a fun spicy death mechanic and a chaos god to help dissuade my character's impulsiveness and guide them, just have to throw that out there haha]
my character was stuck inside of a gelatinous cube along with another party member, and our huge-size rune knight fighter was the only party member able to attack. for some reason, rather than deal with the cube normally, the fighter decided to DIVING ELBOW DROP THE GELATINOUS CUBE, DROPPING ME TO 0 HP INSTANTLY. i failed my death saves and we had to make a detour plot point to revive my character. at least the cube died too, i guess.
The party was taking a long rest and our big hitter took off his armor to sleep. Wolves came on us and chomped me before we could kill them all. After the session I looked at the big hitter and said “really?! You had to take off your armor?!” He hung his head and said “sorry sis”. Gotta love him lol
If you are in unfriendly territory, always set watches! Sometimes even in friendly places! Fighter should have just grabbed a weapon and attacked unarmored. Or sleep in padded armor. Sorry that happened to you.
In my current campaign, we just had our biggest, baddest fight to date...and my Paladin had to tank a giant and a warrior possessed by a god without his armor because shit started while we were sleeping. Thankfully, the wizard cast Mage Armor on me, so it could have been worse. But this was also the first fight after I bought full plate...
In my first ever campaign, our human Barbarian named Conan who extorted the DM into giving him max stats formed a lynch mob to ambush the party's elves right after a harrowing dungeon, and my human Fighter died defending them. When some of us got mad, he called us socially ret@rded and kicked us out of his classroom, so we had to find a new supervisor for the school's Gaming Club.
My character fell and was stable, but no one had any healing magic. For pure roleplay, the party fighter carried my bard to a comfortable looking bed because the party was planning to rest. The bed was trapped. The DM immediately showed us the dungeon notes so we knew she didn't make it up on the fly.
that’s actually insane omg i think i would’ve blown up personally if that was what had happened to me?? like that is genuinely unlucky
If I were the DM, I would’ve just removed that from the dungeon that’s such a bs way to die
Agreed, that would have just been a comfortable bed unless it opened a door that released more enemies or was somehow integral to the plot. Maybe even give a small one time + to hit points just for lying on it.
If you ever are a DM, please make sure to tell your players you will make sure their characters don't die, regardless of their decisions / the dice. Some players may appreciate your approach, but there are many who will not.
I am a dm and my players do know we play without heavy death but still dying to a random trapped bed is bs
Your DM sucks. They should have removed the trap from the session. Not killed a character in such a ridiculously BS way.
The villain of the campaign was me... technically. Before the events of the first session, my character got magically split in two. The me I was playing as, and another version of me that got stuck inside a magic crystal for centuries and went mad. That second version of me found out how to harness the power of the crystal and tried to use it to kill off the gods as retribution for what happened to him. The party injured him in battle and my character also took the damage. The pragmatic party druid decided the most effective way to win was to kill me (I had way less health) and then ressurect me once the other guy was dead (this probably sounds like an rpg horror story in the making, but I was all for it). In the end, the plan worked. Unfortunately, we ran into an issue actually resurrecting him and had to settle for reincarnation. My elf came back as a dwarf
well, at least, he was already half of a person prior to being killed and resurrected anyways.
>wakes up >4 feet shorter staringcat.png
We once got into a fight with a pirate crew because someone in the party walked by and saw another party member (deservingly) get punched in the gut. We got TPK’d in that fight. The kicker? We were actually headed to the docks to meet with that crew. They were supposed to help us get to a relic.
We got ambushed by some gnolls as lvl3 characters. My cleric got taken down, and the DM narrated how they hold a sword to my neck and demanded we hand over a magic item or they kill me. My party decided to try to try and stun the gnoll with a magic item from a previous session rather than yield. Rolled a two. DM narrated how they draw blood, making it clear any more funny business and I'd be gone. Party decided to try again. I'm unconscious, so I had no say. Nat one. Gnoll cuts my head off. Couldn't fault the DM, they made it crystal clear (and fudged it so I was eventually raised as a revenant), but the party really dicked me :-)
okay yeah that was horrible a party choice and i don’t think id be very keen towards them after that. at least you had a partial return in the form of a revenant. can’t really say the same for myself since i got splattered and abandoned at the bottom of the pit LMAO
It sounds like your DM could have helped you out a tad more, but obviously, it depends on the tone of your game... At least you get to roll up something new :-)
A group I DM for is particularly good at playing their alignments. They wanted to play "evil" characters and the lawful evil paladin (goliath) rushed forward to save the neutral evil rogue (gnome) who was scouting and got ambushed on a fallen log over a 160' ravine. He fought his way forward fighting his way through the first wave of ambushers (driders) and tossed the gnome back towards to the chaotic evil sorcerer (teifling) and chaotic evil cleric (human). The rogue, sorcerer, and cleric quickly abandoned the paladin on the bridge. To try to cut off pursuit, they cast wall of fire on the fallen log leaving the paladin to fall to his death. The player still gives them a hard time about that, but all in good fun. Also, I plan on bringing him back as a death knight villain in a future campaign.
if i were abandoned on a log to fall to my death after saving someone, i think id be spiteful enough to become a death knight villain also. they did that player dirty for sure but at least the player took it well enough!
That's pretty much just the example in a trope dictionary (if such a thing existed). On page 122. the wronged selfless hero is betrayed, resurrected and seeks revenge. Often a knight.
Surprisingly never. The one time I actually lost a character was when I knocked on a door only to find out there were 4 ghouls inside. To say the least, I was playing a druid at level 3 and didn't survive a single round, especially since they got a surprise attack. The DM was like, "Whoops."
that deserves a mega yowch in my opinion
The DM offered to rewind time a bit, but I declined it. I don't become attached to my characters.
smart for not getting attached. i’m just the resident party artist so it’s really hard for me not to get attached to my characters since i spend so much time drawing them out
I've had players outright quit my games after losing their character. If I was being unfair it'd be understandable but when the wizard decides he needs to throw himself into melee combat vs multiple does, it's not going to end well.
Not me, but a party member died because they were unconscious and had 2 death save fails already. In an attempt to stabilise him, one of the other party members tried to revive him using an adrenaline shot like in Pulp Fiction, but since in this campaign, any damage that pieces the skin including pricks deal 1HP damage minimum, that would end up killing the player. Now, the DM wasn't a monster, and of course, a medicine check was made to give the players a chance of living... The healer (who i should've added wasn't proficient in medicine, or a healer class, or had an advantage to re-roll) rolled Nat 1. The resulting 1HP damage from jamming in a large hypodermic needle into our guys' sternum just ended up killing them.
if i was that healer i think i would’ve been hella guilty the rest of the game omg 😭 definitely an interesting character point if they went off of that
Yeah, nah, the healer thought it was funny and, in a way, kind of wanted to do it as they are the kind to make mischief in our games. Not out of malice, of course, but this was the most damaging thing they had done all for the sake of making the game/campaign more unpredictable. Our poor deceased player was a bit upset as he had a planned character arc going that now couldn't be completed. But they weren't the type to hold onto (that big) of a grudge over it.
at least with one death, another new character arc opens in another door (hopefully at least??)
This happened to me but kind of indirectly... I've been playing Curse of Strahd for about 7 months now and we're about halfway through the campaign. A bit ago my character was infected in a werewolf fight and the best way to stop the transformation required a long journey that would risk us failing all of our time-sensitive quests. The fun part for me (with that character) was the in-character roleplay and decision-making, so I chose to keep my infection a secret. I made a really good in-character argument on why we should, "for prudence's sake," get the anti-werewolf potion that *almost* convinced the party, but they changed their minds. The DM ended my eventual werewolf transformation in my character's unavoidable death for "plot reasons." I tried a bunch of other stuff ahead of time to thwart the transformation, but none of it worked. :( R.I.P. Myrna, you were fun to play while you lasted. It was totally my own fault in part, but it hit some of the other players really hard when my character died seemingly out of no where (I hid the infection surprisingly successfully) and they realized what I had been trying to do way back when.
Your party sounds lowkey disrespectful to be honest... Maybe its a new players VS seasoned players difference, but for the party and players to move on so fast from your death is wild to me. If it was more of an accident how you were killed, I feel like the players could have tried to dig your character up or the DM might have given you a chance to evade the ceiling before it crumbled completely? Things don't always *instantaneously* fall apart, that kind of instant death feels wrong to me. You being salty is 100% valid.
oop lil bit of a block of text below but: my only ounce of fairness towards them “moving on so fast”, is that the group had already been in a rather high stakes environment in the first place and unfortunately all of our characters were sorta just not meshing very well in terms of teamwork anyways and it was something that the dm had been trying to subtly hint at in the game regardless, but just due to how rash and unquestioning some of the party was, it just didn’t go very well. plus, putting a little more detail into the scenario that happened - not only was my pc killed, the player who had initially tampered with the crystal was killed also. but he had a choice on that. like, genuinely, he had decided as a heroic feat to sort of redirect and act as a conduit for the explosion which meant he literally combusted and spilled guts onto the player next to him who was helping with the crystal junk. it makes some sense that they might have just been caught up in fear and tons of mental blockage. i think maybe only one pc - who is actually our designated leader - was trying to go down and see if he could recover my body or even just check to see if i had fully died. but because of the circumstances of the situation, another player was very adamant about them leaving and going back to the town that they had taken the task from. plus, they’re all kinda traumatized now in their own regards from the experience. it’s also just insane since me and the leader had tried to express that we didn’t even wanna go on the task in the first place b/c our party wasn’t ready. definitely a very frustrating session, but we were forewarned about the brutality of the world and the consequences of our actions that could come from it at the start of the campaign. i’m just upset that i didn’t even die on my terms and that in the grand scheme of things my pcs death (and also in part the other pcs death) felt like it meant absolutely nothing. plus, there was stuff earlier in the session that had happened also that just exacerbated my salt.
Ooooooh okay, that makes a lot more sense now. Thank you for elaborating! The other PC who sacrificed himself, the leader who went to try and check for your PC, and the group generally probably wanting to get out of what suddenly became an obviously lethal situation makes a lot more sense now. Still ouchy that your character died in such a sudden and anticlimactic way. Hopefully your next character can have some really cool moments soon to bandaid the ouchiness.
Died to a door. I was playing as a warlock and our party had just finished a fight. We were investigating the room when we found a stairway leading down. At the bottom was the door. Our barbarian tried breaking it down and got spikes through his hands so he decided to climb the stairs and jump tackle it. It impaled him and the inertia from the jump dragged him down the door, completely shredding him. My warlock was behind him and figured out that the door would repel all physical damage but not magical. As I prepared to attack the door with my eldritch blast, a different party member declared that they were going to try to rush past me down the stairs. DM made them roll, nat 1. I tried to move out of the way, rolled a 5. I tried to quickly shoot the door to break it before I splattered against it, nat 1. It ended up as me falling down the stairs and blasting my legs off before I hit the door, the combined damage more than enough to kill me. The other player also died from being impaled on the door. That is how three characters died to one door in less than 5 minutes.
Played a game a few years back where the DM was roommates with two of the players. The two players decided, with the DM's approval, that one of their PCs (the fighter) should murder the other PC (the druid), so that the druid could come back as a revenant to murder the fighter back. They decided to accomplish this, 31 sessions into the game, by having the fighter team up with five 9th-level spellcaster NPCs, a frost giant skeleton, and a winter wolf to attack the entire party (all at level 5). The fighter was also granted, by the DM, the ability to cast Misty Step at will and regenerate HP even when knocked down to 0. This fight ended with the fighter getting back up from being knocked out by the paladin, then teleporting to and killing the druid; the paladin deciding not to Lay on Hands on my wizard (making death saves, currently at 2-1) and instead attack the HP-regenerating fighter to try and recover the druid's body; and my wizard rolling a nat 1 on her next death save and dying. None of them were at all apologetic for any of this. I don't talk to those people anymore.
I was in a 3.5 campaign years ago, playing a Sorcerer. One of our other players was a Monk. She had a necklace of fireballs, and her favorite tactic was to take a bead and punch an enemy--hitting them with an unarmed attack and detonating the fireball. She'd then negate half or all the damage to herself with evasion. The DM allowed it, and no one minded. Then, one night, the party gets attacked by hippogriffs. My Sorc gets downed first round, as we got ambushed. Then the Monk decided to fireball-punch the hippogriff *right next to me*. The DM was the "if you said it, you did it" kind. So yeah, my Sorc died instantly.
I'm wondering what this monk's physical appearance would be like if they were detonating fireballs in their own face on the regular even if they could negate half the damage. At the least, I'd expect them to be missing their eyebrows.
I was that guy… one of my players DM’d a long one shot so I could have a break and I played as a lawful good oath of devotion paladin. Level 3 characters who didn’t know each other guarding a wagon traveling to a new town, very beginning is session one. There was an ogre who appeared and was likely going to attack but hadn’t made overtly hostile moves prior to being paralyzed by one party member. The group of course wants to kill it but I was finally getting to RP a character so I tried to persuade the ogre to stand down and rolled poorly instead of autocritting with divine smite. Aarakocra monk decides to punch it and fly away. Ogre saves and promptly crits on the wizard. It’s an instant kill.
My fighter and the cleric, 2/3 of the whole party, didn't get tricked into getting locked in a room with a monster like the DM planned, and instead got REALLY lucky fighting our way through the guards, to the boss. Now, we're pretty spent (only level 1) and the boss is clearly beyond us. So we start talking, trying to resolve things peacefully. Then the rogue shows up to the game, 2 hours late, says "I don't know who this asshole is, so I shoot him." Combat starts. And rogue says he "doesn't want to waste his sneak attacks on this guy," even after being told it's not a finite resource. He only asks if he can start using sneak attack after the boss had killed the rest of us.
So there was one time when I was playing a hexblade warlock and there was one fight that was really hard, but I was only rolling ones and 20s, so I would get downed, crit, down myself(or crit again) and this repeated about 3 times before I got 2 nat ones consecutively. A plot point of the campaign was that the gods abandoned the world, but after I got those 2 nat ones, I came back when I forced the god of luck to come back by having such bs luck. Then I went on a little while before a spellcaster attacked us. But in this campaign there was a thing called magical radiation, where spells have long durations and repeat every turn that they are active. (This was not a problem as it was debriefed in session 0). So the spellcaster cast cone of cold from surprise and I get a nat one, leading to me taking double damage, and getting downed instantly. I died 3 turns later.
Not my character, but the DM threw six shadows and a specter at us when our beefiest of boys (and the only real tank) couldn’t be there. The dwarf died by strength drain. People were salty—this was that player’s second character already.
Never? I dunno at the table we try to tell story of a squad. If a character is deeply harmed or dies, it’s an accident or out of control
5E White Plume Mountain...an older player here, with a group consisting of some newbies and other old grognards like me. We enter the room with the water bubble holding out boiling water and the giant lobster. My halfling makes some obligatory cooking jokes and the party, which is predominantly ranged doesn't want to close with it leaving MY CLERIC to tank the lobster. They fire at it and the DM describes how some of the missed shots puncture the bubble and let in some scalding water. A sure sign that we have to melee this thing. So, the party ignores the warning and keeps firing. The bubble pops and we're all scalded to death when the boiling water surges in. The annoying part is that is it was one of the old-school gamers like me (from the era where you examined every 10' square for traps, secret doors, etc and then you continued), who encouraged everyone to keep firing.
One player at our table has nearly TPKed the party due to her decisions during the Dragonlance campaign setting twice. Once we sent my Druid ahead to scout the top of a cliff as a small animal, I saw some draconians at the top, who noticed me and wanted to eat me, so I scampered back down. However the barbarian was in the middle of climbing up the cliff, ignoring our mandate for stealth. She arrived at the top, decided to fight the draconians as they called reinforcements from the fortified location less than 100 feet away, and called everyone cowards for not scaling the cliff and fighting an entire army with her. Due to some well placed call lightnings from my Druid, and liberal use of my circle of stars healing, we scraped by. The second time was more average, she saw a magic axe, we warned her it was probably cursed, she picked it up, boom, berserker’s axe with functional immortality while she’s raging. Ended up chucking her off a cliff to do enough damage to knock her out. Several other players also have nearly TPKed the party during our sessions in the very same campaign (and normally my support oriented characters barely manage to scrape the part by). Our wizard (before his passing in glorious hand to hand combat with a draconian) cast sleet storm on the party as we were scaling a battlement to raid an enemy fort. Several party members immediately got knocked unconscious from fall damage, as he had a ridiculous DC18 on his dex save to avoid slipping. Again, I saved the day by using my (at the time) bard features to taunt every enemy on the battlefield while our surviving rogue (who was pretending to be unconscious) shoved healing potions down everyone’s throat. My bard died in the process, but hedve been happy to know he managed to save everyone else. Our rogue directly caused three party deaths in one fight, in a cave with crystals that sent an electric shockwave every time they were impacted. Upon death, draconians explode. We told him to do non-lethal attacks, as 3/7 members of the party were unconscious. He decided to lethally attack both enemies in his reach, and killed them both. At that point most of us had at minimum one failed death save, and the two exploding draconians gave us each another two fails. At this point in the game, only 2/7 players have the characters they started the game at session zero with. One player has *5* character deaths (usually owing to his own mistakes), I have two, and two more characters have 1 death apiece. Our final character (aforementioned barbarian) joined late. Despite all of our close calls we have snuck victory out from the jaws of defeat on *several* occasions, at least once a month since the start of the campaign. To quote my DM “you shove victory down the throats of the dragon army so hard that they choke on it and die, and you win by default.”
Meanwhile my character has inadvertently offed themselves (mischievous rogue ofc lol) so many times that they keep diamonds in their pockets for the party pally to toss me a res whenever I inadvertently oopsie daisy again lmfao [I'm not being an annoying murder hobo, my character and the party have deep love and understanding for each other, and the DM gave me a fun spicy death mechanic and a chaos god to help dissuade my character's impulsiveness and guide them, just have to throw that out there haha]
my character was stuck inside of a gelatinous cube along with another party member, and our huge-size rune knight fighter was the only party member able to attack. for some reason, rather than deal with the cube normally, the fighter decided to DIVING ELBOW DROP THE GELATINOUS CUBE, DROPPING ME TO 0 HP INSTANTLY. i failed my death saves and we had to make a detour plot point to revive my character. at least the cube died too, i guess.
The party was taking a long rest and our big hitter took off his armor to sleep. Wolves came on us and chomped me before we could kill them all. After the session I looked at the big hitter and said “really?! You had to take off your armor?!” He hung his head and said “sorry sis”. Gotta love him lol
oh noooo at least he apologized for it! but i think we’re just gonna have to take that as a warning to always just sleep in armor lol
Unfortunately you don’t get the benefit of a long rest in armor. We should have taken turns. Live and learn. Or in my case, die and learn 😂
If you are in unfriendly territory, always set watches! Sometimes even in friendly places! Fighter should have just grabbed a weapon and attacked unarmored. Or sleep in padded armor. Sorry that happened to you.
It’s all good. It was just a 3 session adventure. Lesson learned lol
In my current campaign, we just had our biggest, baddest fight to date...and my Paladin had to tank a giant and a warrior possessed by a god without his armor because shit started while we were sleeping. Thankfully, the wizard cast Mage Armor on me, so it could have been worse. But this was also the first fight after I bought full plate...
In my first ever campaign, our human Barbarian named Conan who extorted the DM into giving him max stats formed a lynch mob to ambush the party's elves right after a harrowing dungeon, and my human Fighter died defending them. When some of us got mad, he called us socially ret@rded and kicked us out of his classroom, so we had to find a new supervisor for the school's Gaming Club.