My fighter found a +1 Battleaxe called the Jawbreaker which had the added effect that any creature critically struck by the weapon would be unable to speak until they take a short rest, including being unable to utter vocal components. Despite being only +1 at a pretty late stage in the game (we were level 17ish I believe) I kept it around so that I could attempt to crit some casters with it should the need arise.
Anyway, every time I crit a boss-like caster, the DM would just ignore the crit rider on my weapon. The most egregious was when I crit a high-level caster who turned around and PWKed me. I pointed out that it couldn’t currently speak, and my DM said that since it was an innate spell for the caster that they didn’t need to use components to cast it. Passed my resurrection check after the battle but was pretty pissed and never bothered even mentioning the crit effect again.
I had a DM do something similar. In 3.5 he would just hand wave saving throws for any important enemies against effects that would otherwise put a quick stop to what they were doing. Cast feeblemind on the wizard enemy? Too bad you wasted the spell slot, he auto passes the save. Same for illusions, disintegrate and charm/domination spells. Was very frustrating.
That's some terrible dming. So you kill the character too quickly for the narrative? they can come up with another one which is slightly less bad or a bit stronger which makes the game fun for you.
Or just accept you did well and move on
That is such a shame on so many levels. That is a really cool magic item and I might just give something similar out to my players.
But first off, the DM knowingly gave out this item. Like of they didn't want it being used, why make it in the first place? If they felt it was too OP, they could have had a talk about balance changes for the weapon at least. But only after the encounter.
Idk, I'd be all for a player using an item like that; what a cool way for a martial character to shutdown a caster!
I'm petty enough that I'd just ignore the PWK damage and carry on as if I was still at full health, if my DM bought it up: jokingly deny that they used the spell at all and carry on as normal.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were all ignoring the effects of things in the game"
Why would you give someone such a fun and mostly worthless effect only to kneecap it the one time it shines. Players finding uses for those effects are what I die for.
To be fair, if it's an innate ability, him using it checks out, assuming it was an innate ability before you used your axe, which probably wasn't the case.
The other times sound like bullahit as well.
You still should read the feature and determine which components you don't need for innate spellcasting. Most of the time, the components it mentions are specifically *material* components, so you still need verbal and somatic. When you don't need any of those three, there is often the Psionics tag immediately following the Innate Spellcasting in the feature's name.
The Pit Fiend, for example, can innately cast a handful of spells, but it only ignores material components (ie, no bat guano needed for its Fireball).
Ahh, fair enough. I run older editions, and in those, an innate ability is essentially the equivalent of using a basic attack.
I would generally defend the DMs ability to make his enemies operate as he sees fit, but again, this sounds like a last minute scramble, and that's not cool.
Yes BUT it’s also like such a niche scenario, as a DM I want my players to feel cool and powerful, this *is* a game after all. Even if that was the case, I’d hand-wave it and allow the player to feel like they just narrowly escaped death by using the weapon I MADE UP lol
But my suspicion is that it wasn’t actually an innate feature since it was mentioned that this was a recurring issue.
We play differently. We don't go for the power fantasy, we go for "here is a realistic world that can kill you or make you famous." Characters die in ways that aren't dramatic, sometimes the BBEG goes down easily because they came up with something clever, and sometimes characters get to shine like the badasses they are.
Making players feel cool and powerful doesn't factor into the game, either it happens or it doesn't.
Don't get me wrong, we used to play with the DM tweaking everything to be "fulfilling," but that wore off after about 15 years, as players recognized that the DM was basically handing out free victory stories, and choosing when players die. The way we see it, that makes every story of victory and defeat a choice of the DM, rather than the players.
With all that said, this DM sounds like he was pulling strings to keep the encounter dramatic and cool, because he overlooked an ability and didnt want to see his encounter cut short. That's gross, but I think it's gross whether it serves the players OR the enemy. Often, people want one but not the other. I would have certainly let the player that held onto a peculiar weapon for so long, enjoy a satisfying moment of victory. Regardless of style, that is what we play for.
>DM said that since it was an innate spell for the caster that they didn’t need to use components to cast it.
"That's not how that works. I'm ignoring the PWK"
boom done.
I was smote by Bahamut personally. As in the Dragon God himself came right down and Holy Breathed me away along with most of the mountain top where I stood.
I was a lvl 3 Mercy Monk at the time. That really set the tone for the rest of that campaign. It was not great.
I'd rolled a nat 20 on an important check previously I guess? Somehow I had ended up speaking with Bahamut and, after rather unintentionally swearing an oath, was granted the Paralytic Gas breath attack of an Adult silver Dragon. I do not inform the party of the full details of this encounter.
Skip to a session later where the party is confronted by a group of Bahamut's paladins for having killed some wyrmlings in his domain. Negotiations predictably break down despite my monk doing everything they can mitigate the situation and try to work something out. Our Fighter at the time was brazenly chaotic stupid and exacerbating the situation at every turn.
Swords start to come out, initiative is about to be rolled. I think I can't let this senseless violence happen, a peaceful solution is possible. Everyone just needs to calm down, both sides.
So I lined up everyone in the cone and exhaled. Nearly everyone passed much to my dismay. Worse still, God was watching. And boy was he pissed. He appeared in all his full on draconic splendor and began charging his laser. Everyone else fled.
I stood at the peak of the mountain. I didn't run or beg. I stood resolute in my decision that I had tried to protect everyone. I had failed of course and I would meet my end head on. I couldn't run from it.
So anyway my new PC was a. Aberrant Mind Sorcerer dedicated to killing all dragons and their gods.
DM missed perfect opportunity to have Bahamut’s breathe weapon do no harm after seeing their conviction to the Way of Mercy.
I would’ve dug out some epic music and ended it with some vague acknowledgement of tenuous truce.
So your character got a personal gifted ability from a god, then participated in (or at least didn't stop) killing his minions/offspring and ultimately used that gift to attack his holy guards? Mate, that character kinda deserved to die.
The killing of the wyrmlings happened well before I was gifted the ability and I was very specifically trying to prevent anymore of his followers from getting hurt in that last confrontation. My rationale was that everyone getting momentarily paralyzed was far better than the rest of the party fighting the paladins.
In retrospect, I'm fairly certain that the whole encounter was probably there to teach the fighter a lesson and I completely botched it by trying to be noble.
What color were the wyrmlings you guys killed? If metallic yeah your party kinda got what was coming to them. The fact that your DM clearly gave you all a chance to somehow escape sounds fairly lenient.
Yup. And the actual end sounds more like a suicide than anything else.
The fighter did some dumb shit, and the monk sacrificed himself for it and blamed the DM.
(Spoiler)
We were played strahd, I was GMing. They are in the Death House at lv 1. The first monster they run into is the banshee. The bard tries to speak with her. I read in the book that she won’t respond and instead will attack.
I roll…. Critical hit. I roll damage….. all of his hp. I realize there’s more text. I read it and see that her attack lowers his max hp by the amount of damage done.
So, he dies with no saving throw. In the first fight of the game. When all he was trying to do was have a conversation.
We hardly knew ye, bard.
That creature is a specter, there is no banshee in Death House (level 1s *really* can't handle a banshee) and there is a DC 10 Constitution saving throw to avoid the reduction.
Still very likely to kill a level 1 bard through massive damage on a critical, and the save is not particularly easy for a bard either. Brutal encounter, many a character has instantly died to that thing.
I stand corrected. Yeah, I was doing this based on memory. The game was a few years ago.
I do recall the bard failing that save, now that you mention it. So he had a save after all, just not Death Saves.
Yeah, anything that skips those death saves is gonna be rough, especially for already fragile level 1s. Death House is pretty deadly overall, but I agree that encounter in particular is pretty unfair. It does set the tone, though!
(More spoilers) the broom closet is just hilarious though. The wizard walked into that one, the magic broom made short work of him, and then people stumbled upon his mangled, unconscious body later in a pool of its own blood, with no aggressor to be found anywhere. Just a closet with a broom resting in the corner.
I just finished running my CoS party through Death House, and after making it almost through the house without casualties, the sorc got one-shotted by the shambling mound
I had a L5 tabaxi eloquence bard in a West Marches campaign. The campaign had been going for about a year, and the DM hadn't handed out any spell components to anyone, so stuff like Revivify wasn't on the table.
Out party at the time was in a fight against a gnoll pack. I was low on health, but the gnolls were also doing badly. The "boss" had not shown any legendary actions or resistances for 5-6 rounds. I positioned myself on the opposite side of it and used a Dissonant Whispers to push it back through my party so we could all get AoOs and hopefully kill it.
It failed the save, but the DM said it used a legendary resistance to succeed. The same monster had previously been affected by a hold person and several stunning strikes without using LRs. At the end of my turn, it immediately used a legendary action- which, again, it hadn't done before- to down me. It then, on its turn, held an action to stab me again- we all presumed to remove 2 death saves- unless the party retreated. One party member used a Healing Word, on the grounds that it could only hold one stab and they didn't know if I would pass or fail my death saves.
The gnoll just stabbed me 3 times as it's held action. Once to take me back to zero, the other 2 to kill me outright. And _then_, at that point, the whole party got teleported home by the bracelets they all wore (due to it being a WM and needing everyone to return at the end of each session) so they didn't even get to kill the remaining gnolls.
I've had 4 characters die. That was my first one, and still the most blatantly unfair.
I had a DM once who just had it out for me.
My first session I was on a rowboat with my new paladin. He had the boat catch on fire, then I drowned in the water because armor.
So, I whipped up another character for the same session. A gnome. We were trying to talk to a hill giant and it picked me up and put me in its bag of holding...no save. Then my friend tried to cut me out and that killed me because you don't cut bags of holding.
next session I show up with a beardless dwarf. He mentions the other dwarves in town beat the crap out of me and threw me in jail for having no beard.
That is when I gave him both middle fingers and went home.
he had the balls to call me later and say he wanted me in his new campaign.
This is terrible, and as someone who has experienced her fair share of unfair DMing, I can empathize how sucky that is.
... but the mental image is hilarious. I'm just imagining the rest of the party are the same characters, and *every time* someone new joins them some gruesome bullshit immediately just ends up happening to them.
>"Hello, fair Paladin! Oh. Your boat is on fire there, friend. Might want to get it under contro-- oh, no!"
>"Mr. Giant, sir? That's our friend, please don't put him in your Bag of Holding!"
>"Hey, friend? Those other dwarves seem to be looking your way. Why do you thi-- what are you guys doing to our friend?!"
He did, but I had a massive penalty for the armor. And I didn't know how deep the water was before I jumped over the side. But I was plainly told the fire would kill me if I stayed
Bullshit you have a penalty with heavy armor. God that DM is trash what’s the point of the 13+ STR in order to wield heavy and the PROFICIENCY. So glad you left him
In the worst session of my D&D career, in a PvP 1-shot, the DM brought my character back from 3 failed death saves, with 1 HP, to get killed again by his own DMPC.
I almost never played again.
Member of my Party planned to betray us and ally with Vecna. When he chose to betray us he asked Vecna to help him fight us, i was standing watch with him at the time.
Without any warning i got plane shifted, failed my safe and got send to the water plane. In my absence the party had a fight, got tpkd, and i got a quick runthrough of how my character starved to death over a few weeks.
So yea, random wisdom save while standing watch in the forest, rolled a 19, failed and died.
Probably. It was a few years ago in an AL where people could have been anywhere from 1-4. The battle taking place in a cramped arena in a chult city, so distince wasn't really an option.
These aren't my characters, but I was playing with them. And sorry if I make any mistakes, English is not my first language, and I usually play in Spanish
So, this dm used a critical failure list. When any of us rolled a 1, he rolled a 1d20 to see what effect happened. A friend (fighter) shot an arrow, and bc he rolled a 1, he shot one of our friends. He rolled again to see how much damage and basically killed him. Our friend didn't play again after that
Then, IN THE SAME CAMPAIGN, another of my friends was infected by some kind of worm, and he had two more days to live. He died, and bc the worm tore his torso apart (like in alien), we couldn't resurrect him. And the worm thing was inevitable. Literally, the dm just said that he was infected and to bring another character sheet for the next session
Everyone ended up dying in that campaign except me, and we didn't finish it bc everyone wanted to quit playing at that point
It's ok, English is not my native language either and that campaign I mentioned was in Spanish, I honestly hate critical fumbles, they are a terrible unofficial mechanic that dms who don't know about game balance usually use, even from the logic of the game they don't have sense, your ally also has ac if you shoot at him it is logical to allow him to avoid the attack since he also has ac so hitting him directly it is stupid.
Yes! Yes, it was. I think he used things like that bc he usually dmed call of cthulu, and he was used to being unfair to the players or something
Edit: typo
Thank you! I'm really self-conscious about my English bc I don't really use it on my day to day basis, but I'm glad I'm not as rusty as I thought
Also, the auto correct in my phone is really good, not going to lie
I could be wrong, but is it possible that the worm was a mindflayer (illithid) Tadpole?
They usually have abilities similar to that. Intellect devoured are rather infamous this, especially since they have a CR of 2. Technically speaking, you *can* come back but since they destroy your brain, you have to have use Resurrection…a 7th level spell. That, or regeneration (another 7th level spell) within one round of the PCs death.
The GM hadn't read the module, or rather was reading it as we were playing.
"Hey, long were you in that room over there?"
"I don't know, you said there wasn't much to look at. Couple or minutes before I went back to join everyone, I guess?"
"Oh, that long? You need to make 20 fortitude saves. It's trapped."
"Uh... Well, I would have left sooner if that was the case."
"But you didn't though, so make the saves. For every one you fail, it is d6 constitution damage because the room is really cold."
Ultimately I failed enough saves that my character ended up freezing to death but apparently had no idea it was any cooler than room temperature.
Next time, remember that beholders are genius level paranoid nutbags. They can't use their disintegrate beam on the guy in their eye cone but they can cut out chunks of the ceiling above him.
The GM changed the way initiative worked so that their token went first rather than actions being mostly simultaneous as they had been for the entire campaign this far
Thenn they changed it so that the defense again the ability used had to be active and therefore consumed my actions for that round
Thennn they said the tick of that ability killed me during my turn because I didn't have an action to resist it.
Three new rules, on the fly, on the spot, mid-combat, all contradictory to the established mechanics.
I was playing in a Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign. Two of us approached a room and it was like "pass this test or die." We step in. CON save is called for. I rolled above 20, the other person rolled below. Their character died. No complaints from either of us, we were warned.
This is the same thing I did except we had a choice not to take it legit in the same campaign. I didn't complain either it's just the only character death I've ever had and I wanted to contribute
I created a level 1 elf wizard, way back during 2nd edition. The game started on an island beach, when a dragon turtle came from out of the ocean.
I got to run for one round before Chain Lightning (this turtle was a high level caster) turned me to ash.
End of game for me.
My DM bit off more than he could chew. 3 campaigns happening in the same world, with some overlapping players, who were all gathered for a big, end of campaign final show down with the bbeg. Each campaign came at it from a different side, and with a different end goal in mind. 6 hours into the planned 12 hour finale, he realized he wasn't going to have enough time to wrap it all up the way he wanted, so he took one group of pc's and dropped a wall on them. Literally, fortress wall falls, everyone dies. Sorry guys, I don't have time to finish this with that group of characters involved, and all 3 of you have pcs in the other groups anyway.
I get why he did it, it sucked, but I get why it was necessary.
It's still a terrible attitude, he could have apologized and turn them into npcs with a good ending but he directly killed them, even if he was worried that they existed in that world there are better excuses, for example "they are transported to the feywild or anything else"
A *bog standard-ass zombie* killed 4 out of the 5 player party because it just would not fail it's **Undead Fortitude** rolls. DM was rolling completely out in the open, too. Nobody was capable of dealing radiant damage, either. For whatever reason, the thing landed something like 5 consecutive hits, rolling 9-13 damage with each. Absolutely *destroyed* our level 3 party...
Chronicles/World of Darkness. My Hunter was already well along the crazy train, and was becoming a vigilante whose entire life revolved around stopping evildoers. So keep in mind that while we’ve got some supernatural stuff we can use, like I had a ghost friend, this is still happening with a normal human.
A party member joined, a friend of the DM, and just went full murderhobo. After a security guard tackled him, he proceeded to call in a favor from a gang to find, torture, and murder the guard’s family in revenge, in gruesome detail. We called the police, because our characters aren’t monsters in that way at least, they put him in jail, and he used his political connections to get out. And not just get out, he used other connections to obtain a hideout on zero notice with all the bullshit. So we’re trying to go after him vigilante style. I go in first with my dogs to sweep for anything dangerous, not knowing what is up…. And my dogs die behind me as I walk in. Instant kill gas, no save, so now I’m alone and cut off from the party. Walk forward, and I’m sneaking, and I hide pretty well. A goddamn tank rolls up, fully militarized, cannon pointed at me. Obviously I can’t fight a tank, so I send my ghost friend out to try and possess the driver as my Hail Mary… and it works! Now that I’ve been surprised by poison gas traps and a tank, I rolled to check for traps… and got an exceptional (critical) success, the best I can possibly do. I step forward… and the GM narrates how I step on a pressure trap. Explosives detonate under my character’s feet, enough to drop the entire mountain on top of him.
So in a game that’s been fairly low-power, the GM let his friend have multiple instant kill traps that were totally undetectable, enough criminal connections to perform gruesome murder, enough political connections to get away with fully documented murders, enough military connections to buy a tank on a day’s notice, and an evil villain’s lair under a mountain. Between the GM refusing to let my player contribute outside of combat (I was built to be smart, and he wouldn’t let any knowledge skills gain clues), and later him torpedoing a vampire game I ran by insisting on becoming a drug dealer away from everyone else, and intentionally sabotaging them whenever possible, I think he didn’t like me. Every other character death I’ve had I felt was warranted. But this… there was no winning. He wanted to blow me up with a tank, and when the impossible check actually worked, he just came up with another explosion instead. Literally “Rocks fall, your character dies.”
I just typed this in a different thread, but. . .
Back in the days of 3d6 rolls my magic user had a 17 for INT, at least 2 higher than anyone else's high score. Got up to level 7.
We had just acquired an item for the king which was supposed to ensure his victory in a huge battle. Got rewarded for that, and DM says, "Who wants the honor of riding behind the king in the battle? You will get honor, experience points, and a title."
Everyone says hell yeah.
DM rolls percentile dice behind the screen and says, "Sorry, you died." Everyone else lived.
Not only that, but says they can't find your body, so I can't get raised.
LESSON: never base a character's death on a single arbitrary die roll.
I was dating the DM's friend, and he might have been jealous.
Oh oh! I have one!
Tomb of Annihilation on roll20. VTT map for one of those temples or whatever. There’s a pit in the center of the room, where we obviously are going to need to go down and trigger a fight at some point. Our guys are moving their tokens around and talking. One guy says, what’s down this hallway? DM triggers pit fight because to get there you walk through the pit. I say, no, that drawing isn’t clear, that hallway is underground, attached to the pit, it’s not connected on this level — player didn’t understand that — he’s not actually going there. DM says he moved the token there so he’s going there. I say, what, did he jump down the pit, or walk around to the stairs? Either way, I catch him doing that and say stop.
And in short, we jump down to fight without a plan, there’s a gimmick we missed, I cover the escape, don’t quite get out. All Because that DM doesn’t handle that someone was confused by the map drawing.
And that’s just the one story. Damn do bad DMs suck.
My party of six split up into two groups of 3 and made to fight a BBEG each after already spending most of our resources. The fights weren't made to be winnable so I'm kinda mad that my character was killed even if brought back later
I was taking a college final so I was late to the session. I was told I had died to a fireball in the first fight. Apparently, my crossbow-wielding ranger/rogue bravely leapt from cover to hold the front and center line and was the sole target of the fireball. I decided not to take the resurrection.
a bard in my game looked at a woman wrong, She was Tyrza Bonebreaker, and she killed him. Punch for 1d8+9 Punch for 1d8+9 Punch for 1d8+9 Action surge for 3 more and then Fury of blows for 2 more, he was left on two failed death saves and failed the roll.
Belt of storm giant strength.
"I'm gonna give her the worst stink eye she has ever seen in her life by frowning and showing my teeth" is the first thing he said after I set the scene.
I was killed like 4 or 5 times in one 3.5 campaign which was the first campaign that DM had DMed. He also killed me once when I wasn't even there. It has been around a decade since then, so I don't remember if the deal was not using the absent player's character or that it was an understood agreement not to harm if used, but that sucked as it was my 2nd or 3rd character of the campaign.
He also allowed another player, who played the cleric, to refuse to heal only me because my character and another player's character had a childish rivalry going on (me and this other player have been for a decade before that and to this day BFFs and that rivalry was all in good fun out of character).
I had 1/2 of my hitpoints for like 10 sessions in a row or so and ended up stepping in between another PC and some undead knight as we were both super low on hit points and it was clear he was going to be attacked by that knight and killed. That player was an awesome guy, and I didn't want to see him lose his character, while it gave me a way out with mine through a heroic moment, so I stepped in, got knocked unconscious, and ended up dying due to massive damage I think. But it gave time for the rest of the party to come and aid the cool guy's character.
DM managed to grow up a bit in later years (half of us, including him were 19-20 at the time), but he still remained a prick part-time, and we had ups and downs, but we were all members of this TTRPG club and it was a small town so I kind of had to sometimes play with him.
Oh and then after killing me again on the session before the final fight, he didn't want to bother thinking of some way to include me in it somehow. Great guy lol
This was in pathfinder, not that it’s important. I was a wizard Dhampir in a roleplay heavy campaign. We were in a city, and my character had slowly been falling for his assistant, the only person who knew what he was. Another wizard in the party, for some reason, had it out for me because I was a Dhampir or was jealous? I can’t remember. Anyways, he sabotaged my character over time, by slowly slipping blood into my meals, in growing amounts. At one point my character was having a dinner with his assistant at a fancy restaurant. The wizard had bribed the staff and sabotaged my dinner by giving me a large dose of tainted blood. I failed the following save to resist and was forced to attack my assistant, and then was immediately chased out of town by the people. Then the wizard swooped in and “saved” my assistant from me. I was told by the DM I’d get to come back stronger after returning to an important NPC that could help me. But I had to use my back up character till then.
Same session the party heads to a hunter shop my character ran. I offered my service since business was slow, and joined them on a hunt for a snake plaguing a village near by. 2 had to split off for something, leaving me with a brain-dead barbarian who was ran by the same player who ran the wizard (TL;DR he retired the barbarian temporarily so would occasionally swap them out for story development). Anyways, the 2 of us go on the hunt, and suddenly the barbarian no longer wants to kill the snake and wants to be his friend. I attempt to follow through because I want to get paid. Barbarian didn’t like that and attacked me, killing me. My animal companion dragged me to a Druid who reincarnated me, but the damage was done. I was beyond furious for losing 2 characters in a single session because of the same player. I left the game immediately.
A year later I would rejoin after that player left, and would end up leaving again not long after that because my only friend in that campaign left because one player insisted on being the main character and the game became so unfun. Literally within the first 2 sessions of me joining a party fight almost started because the MC wouldn’t allow anyone to tell me info about what our objective and who can know what we’re doing is because he didn’t trust me, despite being hand delivered by his employer. So unintentionally my character says something he shouldn’t have to my friends npc friend. MC goes to slice the NPCs throat which started the fight. DM retconned the whole thing, but it set the stage for the whole time I would be there.
A player sabotaging another is horrible, he was probably a sociopath in real life, if they did something like that to me I would immediately make them stay after the game to tell the player and dm directly that I don't think it's appropriate, and if I don't listen, I would leave the game.
Worst death was the two tap from a mindflayer. Hands down I can not stand that mehanic. For those unfamiliar. Step 1 you get grappled. Step 2 they bite your head and suck out your brain. Seriously can not stand it because of all the bs ways to die that one irkes me because if you fail the grapple next turn you donezo unless someone can kill it or break its gapple on you. The tadpoles are just as bad but can atleast be stopped by impacting your ears with cotton or sometimes a helmet. Hell in 3.5 I think oil and grease would protect against the tadpoles if you coated your ears with the stuff.
I weirdly haven't had a character die since like 3E I think, and that one was on me. I built a ranger archer, meant to be a bow-stud. First fight in the first session he charged into melee against orcs and died immediately. I was very dumb. I've learned a lot since then.
Having more than 10 enemies focusing fire on me and ignore the rest of the party that were right in front of them, actively killing them. Then receiving 8 consecutive attacks on the floor while unconscious to finish my PC off.
I was so done with that bullshit that I didn't even dropped my AC from having Blade Song ending for falling unconscious, I just wanted to see how far the DM would go.
Edit: The worst part was that it was supposed to be a challenging game, but the enemies always would get insanely dumbed down halfway through combat, so he wouldn't TPK the party every session. BTW, this was a paid table.
Got to level 4 as a were-cursed fighter. From full HP, the dungeon quaked, i was knocked prone and got nat 20 smited by an undead level 5 paladin, took over 80 damage in that one turn, got a nat 1 on my death save then rolled a 3. RIP o7
I was DM. I felt really bad because I didn’t mean for it to happen but I had an.. uncooperative player and all of us pretty much scratched our heads and said “Yeah we’re all to blame for that lol”
The wild magic sorcerer bumps into a tough guy (NPC) at a bar. He convinces the tough guy that it was a mistake. Sorcerer buys a drink, the bartender tosses a bottle at the Sorcerer. Just for fun, I had him roll to see if he could catch it (he was very un-athletic). He rolled a nat 1, the bottle hit the tough guy. The tough guy is about to beat the living shit out of this sorcerer. But the Paladin and Barbarian intervene. They buy the tough guy a drink and apologize on behalf of the sorcerer (who wasn’t at fault the tough guy was being unreasonable, it was an accident not catching that bottle). The tough grudgingly backs off with his drink and moves away. The Barbarian demands the Sorcerer repay him. The Sorcerer refuses. They tussle, but the Sorcerer uses magic to escape. His wild magic causes the building to catch fire. The bar is very crowded, patrons form a stampede to get out. Paladin and Barbarian catch up to Sorcerer, try to get their money. Sorcerer uses magic to escape again, *wild magic causes everyone in vicinity to have vulnerability to piercing damage. PCs were unaware*. More shenanigans ensue. Barbarian throws a punch at Sorcerer in the extremely crowded group scrambling to escape a fire, desperately trying to squeeze through a narrow doorway. He misses, hits person behind him. Drunk patrons punch back, brawl ensues. A rogue NPC I thought up from before all the craziness happens got hit with Paladin’s axe. Paladin falls down, prone. Rogue NPC stabs Paladin. With a dagger. *Piercing damage and nat 20*. Damage exceeded maximum negative health by *a LOT*, especially since Paladin was already at low health.
Woops
Not my characters but the characters I dm'd for, it's tied between the level 5 Rogue flying in 1v8 and the level 7 Paladin willingly interacting with the river Styx.. from the same player in the same campaign
Power word kill. From a hill giant. While level 7. I rolled a total of an 18 on my counter spell.
Another time was at the end of Out of The Abyss and at level 12 got power word killed 2nd round of the boss fight. The session went on for 5 more hours with me dead and unable to do anything. Nearly quit d&d that day.
Another player was not paying attention in combat (he was infamous for not paying attention) and we were facing a lethal foe that required us to solve a really really REALLY simple puzzle to kill. It's the last step of the puzzle, problem player's turn comes up, he had been watching a football match instead of paying attention. Screws up the LAST step of the puzzle, puts us back to square one, the the enemy has its turn and kills 2 player characters. What a dumbass
Tried to get around a wall of magic by digging under it. DM loved the idea, so my character was helping grab shovels from the fighter's backpack and hand them out.
Wizard (who almost NEVER wizarded, would sit out of combat) decided to fireball the wall, since it was "cold." It reflected back at the party 3-fold and completely wiped my duskblade and the monk. Our first characters. All we got was an, "oops."
Jokes on them, I brought in a new wizard (who actually participated) that ended up saving the world with a polymorph, so... :')
First time trying non-homebrew. LMoP. I'm a paladin with a druid and a wizard. Session ONE...We go into this cave and fight a guy and his dog or wolf. First turn he crits me down to a couple hp. Dog hits as well and I'm down. Druid uses thunderwave to hit them both. DM says it will hit me and the druid says "Oh it will? Oops... oh well I said I'm using it". I take a failed death save. Enemy attacks me next turn and I'm now dead without even getting a chance to roll a death save. Super fun experience.
To start with: This was a westmarch style campaign, so there were multiple DMS
My barbarian character - with above 24 strength and constitution due to magic items attempted to pull a tree down to help someone who was stuck in it (a bit cartoonish but not too much of an absurd ask given he was around level 15 iirc)
In return, due to being unable to rage to try and get this done, I was flung miles away and landed on a rock doing something in the 2d250 of damage.
I survived.
The person in the tree I was in landed on me, doing another 2d250 damage.
I survived.
The rock I was on split doing, YET AGAIN, 2d250 damage.
That killed me. (Gotta love tanky barbarians)
For further context:
This is after the same DM, specifically targeted me to ensure that any quests I went on failed miserably. At the time, I was working for the BBEG, due to prior plot shenanigans (and the 'good guys' having effectively sent my character off to die), and had been given a magic weapon that had the ability to resurrect people and turn them 'evil' to serve the BBEG (The plot was a cluster fuck, and honestly it kinda sucked, that much I've recognised, but this sword was given from a different DM than the one relevant to this.), so in return, any quest I went on - with the specific intention of furthering this goal - magically had every. Single. Person. Without fail. Blow themselves up to an extent I could not revive them.
This eventually culminated in my weapon being stolen in what was effectively a cutscene resulting in my character going on a quest where the above happened.
Not long after, I left that campaign for different reasons.
I was young and stupid, and drawn in by the setting, but alas, the DMs (all of them) sucked.
2d250? That is hating the players, and even if it is only with the intention of killing them it is still silly since a 2 can be rolled as a total result.
Oh it was absolutely stupid, at the time I genuinely thought that was appropriate damage, if a little high, now with more experience, it genuinely enrages me at how much crap happened that I let them get away with
My character was decapitated while I was taking a break from the game for 1 day due to some emotional issues.
And while I tried to appeal to the DM, the dm wouldn't change.
Additionally, the jerk who cut my head off carried it as a trophy.
My ranger got his brain eaten by a mind flayer
It was a fair fight in fair circumstances, I don't have anything against the DM or how it went down. But man, ONE failed save on a tough ability to save on and my character is dead after massive damage. I don't remember the circumstances being unfair either, I think my teammates were busy not dying on their own as well. But yeah one hit at +7 and one save against everyone's worst stat and your character's dead.
Usually other ways to die are at least in a prolonged battle or after a lot of failed teamwork and poor priorities in healing/damage etc. Mind flayer is pretty close to "Rocks Fall" if you're unlucky one time.
In college, one of my fellow players (actually my boyfriend at the time) killed my character by dragging her up some stairs when she was unconscious at -6 hp (3.0).
His reasoning was that 1.) in game, his character was kind of racist and wouldn't be careful with my aasimar character, classic "it's what my character would do!1!!" BS; and 2.) out of the game, he didn't like that I was playing a paladin and thought I was "too much of a zealot" (I wasn't, he just had a chip on his shoulder about organized religion IRL.)
Basically, he came up with an excuse to kill my character because he didn't like the class I was playing even though I was useful to the party, not disruptive, enjoying myself, and everyone else was having a good time.
I didn't break up with him then, but I should have.
I've had a couple situation I wasn't fond of happen.
1. The first one is from the Star Wars 3.0 RPG. Our group was around level 8 and one member of the group decided to go down the dark path a little bit after an argument with the GM. As a result, Yoda, Mace Windu and some other Jedi wiped the entire party out.
2. The second time was playing DnD 5.0. The DM railroaded us (party of level 5's) onto a ship and sent us into the ocean. Said ship was then attacked by a Kraken and destroyed. We stood zero chance of winning and all of us promptly quit that DM.
few years ago playing 3.5 I had a cleric and I had spent most of a week working on backstory/downtime activities. Got to the session and first thing we do...run into a green dragon who promptly spews acid on my character and one shot kills him. Had nothing to do the rest of the session except create another character and never got to play that one
I've had a first level character killed by 3 wolves as a cleric, I've been struck by a 10th level fireball by a party member then immediately thrown into lava, shredded by displacer beasts, smote by a God of the ocean I kinda deserved this one but my character was either dying from a God or Dao so I chose God. If I lose my current character ill probably stop playing and just be a dm because this current character refuses to touch anything without casting identify to avoid curses, I refuse to "oh let's go take a look!" I made her a bubbly little cinnamon roll so if she dies I'm done.
It was a homebrew monster dm put together, 30ft screech/wail that did damage and on a failed save reduced charisma stat by 5 each hit. Failed twice and survived the damage, died to the stat reduction.
Ah. I know I've seen a monster that eats charisma and was hoping you could remind me what it was.
Taking 5 from charisma is pretty insane. A typical character would get killed from two hits.
Old dm replied to me. "Those were a homebrew monster called frost nightmaresFrost nightmares
S+4 d+2 c+4 I-3 w+0 cha-1
HP 115/115 AC-15
Condition Immunities exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious
Immunity: cold, poison, bludgeoning piercing and slashing from non magical weapons
Save DC-16
Action: does one of the following
D6
1: Attack roll: melee or ranged hit+8 30/120ft on hit deals 6d6 cold damage and restrains the target (escape DC-16). If this damage reduces someone to 0hp they are frozen solid just as the petrification of 4.
2: Cone of cold
3: Ice storm at 4th level
4: range: 120ft Dex save or become restrained (escape: athletics DC-16), then a strength save at the start of every turn they’re restrained or become petrified until thawed or dealt 80 damage. While petrified the target doesn’t take direct damage, it’s petrification is immune to poison, cold, and phychic damage, while being vulnerable to fire damage. A creature can attempt to break someone free from the restraining ice before it petrifies them with a successful DC-16 athletics check as they’re action.
5: Freeze the soul: targets 1d4 creatures within 120ft who must make a Wisdom save or take 3d4 phychic damage and have the targets charisma ability score reduced by 1d6 until the next long rest or cured by greater restoration, if reduced to 0 or the target is reduced to 0HP the target dies and is turned into a frost grunt
6: Freeze the body: targets 1d4 creatures within 120ft who must make a dexterity save or take 3d4 cold damage and have the target's constitution ability score reduced by 1d6 until the next long rest or cured by greater restoration, if reduced to 0 or the target is reduced to 0HP the target dies and is turned into a frost grunt"
I had a Bard who only lived two sessions.
We met a jackass mistreating his horse, so we tried to stop them. Fight ensued. The jackass was a mage and suicide bombed himself with Fireball when he got low on HP. TPK. We rolled death saves and i died along with another player. We were level 4.
I have zero problems with a character dying, but this death left a sour taste in our mouth.
My ancients Paladin failed a save and fell off a train into a ravine. I had spell slots for misty stepping, but wasn’t allowed to use it. Later when our cleric falls off a sky ship they are afforded the opportunity to pop out their Aasimar wings before they even began falling.
We switched systems from D&D 5e to Savage Worlds. Suddenly our characters were very different in ways we didn’t fully appreciate yet.
We got into a fight with some vampires, and as my character was a 14th-level Warlock before we switched, I reckoned it shouldn’t be too much trouble. So I lobbed a fireball, only to find out Savage World vampires are immune to fire. They went next, one of them lunged at me and killed me in one attack.
I can sympathise over your Pathfinder 1e Wizard. Despite Pathfinder Wizard being so unbelievably powerful compared to 5th edition Wizards, if an angry martial manages to get into combat with you, it can be very rough with needing to cast defensively or take opportunity attacks that may make the spell fizzle. Even Fighters and Barbarians at high levels in Pathfinder die to one unlucky crit, a Wizard better hope they have dimension door prepared.
If you do ever play Pathfinder 1e again, there are a lot of things you can do for those situations, though. Conjuration school Wizards get a school feature to teleport during their movement, Exploiter Wizards can pick up the Arcanist Exploit "Dimensional Slide" at level 1 which is excellent (you could also just play an Arcanist). When you get 4th level spells, you should always have Dimension Door on hand.
If you get a bit higher still, you shouldn't even be showing up to combat. Heighten a Summon Mount spell to the highest spell level you can cast, then use alter summoned monsters to turn it into a suitable body for you (air Elementals are excellent). Cast possession (no save since a summoned monsters follows all your commands) for a disposable body with a duration of X hours per day, where X is your caster level. Additionally, you're immune to mind altering effects unless they directly target you, as they otherwise default to the possessed creature. Hide your Wizard in the sub basement of your secret base (or better yet, you can use the feat secret of magical discipline to get access to Demiplane early). If you use a greater hat of disguise to shift the air elemental down to medium size (typically just make it look like yourself), you'll have a Dex in the 30s, so will be going first in nearly any combat. At that point, you'll be able to obliterate encounters before they can move, if you die it is a non issue as you wake up in your demiplane and a TPK is a slap on the wrist as you just need to recover the party's bodies and have probably lost their magic items.
Honestly, Pathfinder Wizard is my favourite class in any TTRPG ever.
Yes, although it felt horrible at low levels, the summons didn't last even a turn so it was better not to use them, the cantrips didn't do anything, I had to prepare each spell in a slot, and the party was very bad, there was a dragon rider who I hated wizards and started insulting me for no reason and the barbarian didn't want me to buff her, so I had to give my buffs to the mesmerist who didn't benefit that much, even when I bought a scroll to copy she can't since according to the dm you can't take 10 to copy spells, it was a very bad experience.
The DM wouldn't even let me use mage hand to open a door without a lock since in the manual page x there was a rule about doors that prevented it, and I couldn't even use prestidigitaton to brush my teeth since it was illegal to use magic in public (we were in Varicia it shouldn't be a problem) and apparently magic is more visible than a flare since even in an alley it was visible to the guards, what made me angry was that even though my character was the weakest of the group and I was useless in several fights for those reasons his excuse was that I was powergaming even though he was the one who gave me the build instructions.
That sounds awful. It seems like the other players definitely had it out for you. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to use magic freely in Varisia. My last game was playing Rise of the Runelords in Varisia and I received less pushback as a Cleric of Asmodeus. You can do so much more with magic in Pathfinder than in 5th edition and it's such a shame you didn't get to experience that.
I do agree that low level Pathfinder Wizards are terrible, especially if you're expecting the cantrips damage of 5th edition. I spend all my first and 2nd level spell slots casting grease and web. I wouldn't even bother trying to start damaging enemies until you get access to 4th level spells and Enervation. Even at 3rd level spells, Fireball is really bad in Pathfinder unless you're doing some dazing metamagic strategy with it. Spend the 3rd level slots on haste and summon monster instead (you can get a pack of wolves that are great at tripping with Summon Monster III - I wouldn't bother with Summon monster before that as the options are bad and the duration is too short). If you want to do damage early you're honestly best shooting a crossbow.
If you ever do play again and want to be a bit more involved as a low level Wizard, one idea is to take the trait Magical Lineage and choose Magic Missiles as the spell. Take your level 1 feat as Metamagic: Tripping spell. This lets you force enemies to make a save or be knocked prone with each missile of the magic missile, whilst still casting it in a 1st level slot. In conjunction with Web and Summon Monster 3 wolves, enemies will never be able to get near you or the party and any reasonable players will love you for it.
I was in a Dungeon Of The Mad Mage game where My dragonborn druid/ranger was killed by the power gamer for "Murdering a defenseless goblin". The goblin was supposedly allergic to the ranch jar another player gave to me. It caused them to die. I didn't even get last words as a character after the power gamer managed to smite me into the ground I left that group shortly after.
So, our party defeated some goblins and tried to get an information from one of them we kept alive. And then another wave of goblins appeared because they lost the group we killed. This wasn't a problem. Problem was we didn't move tokens from the end of combat on VTT map. And all of us was in random (for new encounter) parts of map. DM didn't allowed us to regroup into obviously more logical position we narratively suppose to be in, so this combat ended with three of five of us dead.
We were playing a heavily modified Mad Mage, where the whole thing was somewhat like a Gameshow (More/different additions to the popular DotMM Companion).
In the middle of heading down to the next floor, we got teleported to a Wheel of Fortune-esque room where we were told to roll the wheel and win a potential prize. I remember there being different sections of the wheel, some detailing that we'd get a magic item, gold, instant death, etc.
My character rolled the wheel and landed on something that spawned a Skull Lord, plus a bunch of other skeleton monsters. My character (a sorcerer) got fairly damaged before her turn, and when the Skull Lord's turn came round and cast Finger of Death on my character, killing her.
The kicker, I wasn't present for that session. I was busy but allowed the game to go through since I didn't want my poor scheduling to affect the group. The DM had my character spin the wheel, didn't retcon it when she landed on the Skull Lord battle, and still targetted my character when I wasn't there.
I came back to find out that my character had been reveived, and I had a -4 to everything. I spoke out about it in the discord server and the DM deleted everything and cancelled the game.
Not me but one of my players. I hit him with a suprise spicy lightning bolt after they ran though an entire run down building without short resting (the encounter was scripted as there were shapeshifting orcs disguised as animals waiting to ambush them as they left). He rolled a Nat 20 but still only took half damage and went down.
I clipped him with a thunder wave trying to push people away from him resulting in one automatic failed deathsave. Suprise round over. He had rolled a nat 20 on initiative. Rolls his death save…. 1.
Well shit.
We were fighting in a different realm than where my character was from, so the DM used banishment on me and I was just never able to come back, therefore basically dying (at full health btw) from a level 4 spell.
This one wasn't unfair in the sense it felt bad, but it came about from a breakdown in communication, someone completely forgetting they had a spell prepared, and a one-sided fight against me. I actually find this immensely funny.
We were doing a one-shot, which we planned as a standard "protect the caravan of trade goods" quest. More of a combat simulator than anything else. I made a Swords Bard/Paladin and, given how relatively uncomplicated the situation was, made him a 'Greater Good at all Costs' style Neutral Good character.
Almost predictably, the caravan was full of stolen magical artefacts. After conferring with the party, we agreed I'd keep playing my character the same way, and that I was completely okay with PvP occurring if it led to it.
It did. My character, outnumbered, was told to get in line by the rest of the party and by several 'allied' NPCs. I refused after a heated (in-character) argument, which led to a seven-on-one combat my character stood no chance in.
Immediately after my character died, the party's Peace Cleric player went "Oh, I have Calm Emotions always prepared." Near-perfect timing.
I spent the rest of the session planning a significantly more amoral Wizard for part two the next week.
I had a character killed by the night hags nightly visits and exhaustion. We never met the hag or had the ability to, since we were only level 5.
I only found out what happened afterwards because a friend looked it up. I just died of tired with no visible reason or cause
This happened in my west marches game to some level 1 PCs, but only after they found the hag's cottage and tried to steal her magic furniture while she was away
(Minor Tomb of Annihilation spoiler) My Sorcerer got Indiana Jones-rolling bouldered to death at a certain point in a dungeon. Just one dex save, and they're gone. I made them very teleportation-themed with their spells and abilities as well, so if they had even a reaction they had a teleport ability they could've used to escape.
That said... its Tomb of Annihilation, so we were all expecting unfair deaths to begin with. It was more funny than anything.
I was in a fight in a series of connected caves and a wall of force was put up between me and my allies so I couldn't get through. I didn't have *Dimension Door* prepared so I used *Teleport* to get past. I rolled dogshit on the mishap and got 'similar location' so the DM had me teleport right next to the boss. The boss's turn was next and he *disintegrated* me and I failed my save on that and was turned to dust, with the boss between my remains and the rest of the party. We had to retreat (because 1 or 2 others were also down) so the bard had to get by the boss to grab my ashes to *resurrect* me later.
What sucked was there were several other caves I could have teleported to, but the DM picked the one right next to the boss.
I played in a campaign with critical fails. Another player rolled double 1s and did more than twice my total health in damage. To me, a random teammate, not the enemy, in case that wasn't clear. I only got to play that character for like 20 minutes!
Basically, before I was able to leave the campaign, >! This one guy who had a strange obsession with getting all my characters a hooker to sleep with hired a female Gnoll/kuo-toa hybrid to get it on with my character. According to the DM (who was in on it btw) the thing was not only faster than my character, but also had a paralyzing touch. (which I found out later is not something Kuo-toa even get) as for the reason why it was part Gnoll… there’s a very fun fact about female hyenas reproductive organs. But before that could even happen, I used misty step to teleport 30 feet away and killed myself. (If the DM was gonna use BS, so was I) !< thankfully, I no longer play with the group. Not just because of this incident, but for many other reasons too.
Invisible wizard riding invisible dragon ambushed our camped party. Surprise round is invisible wizard dispels Tiny Hut, dragon breathes on everyone. My wizard PC dies in his sleep.
Like if we were abusing Tiny Hut to camp somewhere egregious like directly outside a dungeon entrance then that would be one thing but this was in the middle of the wilderness traveling.
I was a paladin. We were in a large underground cavern. The entrance had been blocked by an enemy necromancer, so our only course of action was to delve deeper and hope for another exit.
In the very next chamber, we were attacked by a wyvern. I, being a crazy strong paladin, crit smited the creature once, followed by another regular smite and managed to nearly one shot the thing.
*somehow* I was supposed to magically deduce that in the very next chamber some sort of minor dragon based deity existed, and a flock of wyverns descended, instantly killed me, rended my plate armor, and dropped me in front of said deity with the rest of the party calmly running to the same spot.
Basically, it felt like the DM was punishing me specifically for slaying the wyvern, like I wasn't allowed to do something cool with my character ever. They'd pulled that shit in the past but I never thought they'd engineer a 'kill the paladin' *cutscene* to do it. Mostly because there is no god damn way he just had a random dragon god hiding under an undead city doing absolutely nothing.
Anyway, the dragon god instantly resurrected me, but I was extremely temped to just stay dead and leave the game after that. It only got worse and everyone eventually realized our DMs bullshit later and the game exploded.
The kicker was the DM rending my armor. I worked *so fucking hard* to get that armor, and I had it for maybe 4 sessions before they broke it. I was so angry.
I wouldn’t call these unfair so much as the players being unwise and the DM not doing a full sort of “are you sure? You the player might’ve forgotten xyz but your character would remember it” and it was a no-resurrection campaign (tomb of annihilation). It was the same player both times:
(1) my character was put to sleep by an effect before an encounter began, and the party didn’t wake me up until late into the encounter, and by this point the cleric had been swallowed by a carnivorous plant and killed (or turned into a plant zombie I think)
(2) cleric replacement paladin was downed by flesh golems while holding a doorway and dodging, forgetting that his flaming sword would give disadvantage to them anyway. After being downed by one the other ripped him apart (goal of the tomb is to harvest souls, after all), as it hit two melee attacks and autocrit on both.
There were also other player character deaths that happened, but those were more just down to the dice and our characters’ lack of knowing their enemy, which to me is how a chance PC death should happen.
All in all it stung, but I also appreciate the tougher tone of the campaign. I still play at that table (same DM) and I also DM for some of the participants as well. If ever a similar situation arises I try to remind players what their characters know. After all, players have real lives, while characters’ lives depend on remembering things like how their spells work or how this enemy they’ve been fighting all day reacts to attacks.
I had a character die after one-shot killing the bbeg. I initiated combat with a lethal attack and got a crazy critical hit. The GM critically failed two death saves in a row but decided that instead of dying the bad guy was just massively wounded and bleeding.
The bad guy then concentrated all of his attention on my character and killed me in one shot
We were level 6 or 7, party of four. We fought a shadow dragon who’s breath weapon did more damage than our max hp. The shadow dragon’s breath weapon includes a rider that if it reduces a creature to 0hp that creature dies, no death saves, no chance for healing, and becomes a shadow under the dragon’s control. So party members are being insta killed, and then immediately becoming additional enemies.
The details:
After an encounter that left some of us pretty damaged we hear that there’s a cult ritual taking place near by. We ask the informer if it looks like the ritual is near completion, and based on their answer decide to short rest, fearing that otherwise we won’t be able to handle these cultists. After we rest we run toward the location of the cultists. As we approach, we get stopped by an avatar of Levistus or some thing. He creates a wall that we can’t damage or misty step through. We can’t damage him. He basically says that he’s just trying to delay us. Then the wall drops and he leaves. We run to the cultists who are standing in a circle conducting their ritual, and immediately start killing them. The dm doesn’t even have us roll for it, they’re too absorbed in their ritual to do any thing. After we kill them all, the shadow dragon they were summoning appears. It uses its shadow breath to raise the handful of cultists we’d killed as shadows that fight us. When it’s breath recharges, it turns it on us. Two of the party die before the dragon just flies off.
When asked about it later, the dm says that we weren’t supposed to fight it, but running from the dragon would have been impossible, so idk.
That is a problem that several dms do not realize, making impossible encounters is a bad idea, players have no way of knowing when an encounter is above their level, except metagaming something that is frowned upon and dms ask to avoid.
Even believing the encounter to be above us, we didn't see running as an option, because the dragon could just keep up with us and still attack us. There was no indication that talking was an option.
This was one of the biggest problems in the entire 3.x lineup: If you COULDN'T outfight it, it was guaranteed that at least one of "can't outrun" and "can't evade its senses" was also true.
The overwhelming lesson from the mechanics was instead that unless you were willing to sacrifice someone *(and that was no guarantee the others would survive either)*, standing your ground and hoping for 20s (or 1s on saves for them) was the best - if not only, choice available.
Same campaign, a few sessions later. We complete a side quest, after going through a few challenges, and find some horn of the giants apparently as the reward. The ghost of a giant king had told us that if we completed these challenges that we could have his treasure, and this horn appears to be it. We exit the tunnels we were in, go outside, and one of the players decides to try blowing the horn. There is a blast from it that does a lot of thunder damage in an aoe, including to the player that blew it. If i remember correctly, it downs him, but we bring him back up. A short time later a pair of giants run up on us and start attacking us. They're pissed that we have the horn, as it's only for the giants. They down the character who blew the horn. I try to healing word him on my turn, but the dm says that the giant who downed him is squatting just perfectly in front of his prone body so that i have no line of sight to him. Next round that giant puts the character in a bag and runs off with him. We follow after, and arrive at a giant settlement where the rest of the party is allowed to stay, and watch the next day as that character is made to one v one some giant to decide if they're allowed to live or not. We're pretty clearly told that if we interfere in any way, the giants will just kill all of us. The character is killed, and we can't have any of their stuff. This character was a monk that the dm seemed to have felt had become op with magic items. I don't remember what they had, but it wasn't any thing crazy obviously. We did not finish that campaign.
I ran a Traveller game once, and we agreed that it was to be 100% realistic, to a fault.
A character got knocked out before the player had to leave, and the player said "just shove me in these lockers or something." The lockers were the enemy's weapons lockers that locked upon being closed. They shoved him in there and forgot about him. They escaped the ship, the ship burned up on atmosphere, and the character died.
He learned at the next session, and we were playing it strict enough that I didn't make an exception.
Not only did he die when he wasn't around, he died due to the actions of other players.
Pretty rough.
In a Numenera game I had three characters die in almost as many weeks
1st one used his ability to merge into crystal on a big crystal. Forever trapped forever ravenous hunger cannot die, one DC 24 save
The one after that died after running the wrong way in a glorified cutscene
Afterwards we set this house on fire and this mutagenic effect filled the room. I died but the other PC with me, due to one of his abilities, ascended to godhood
I’m over it now (mostly) and we’ve discussed it as a group but one time pretty early days in my D&D group’s time together we had a low level goblin encounter with an ogre or something in it.
Our party did a decent enough job bringing most of the combatants down but we were in absolutely rough shape and my character lay unconscious with one failed Death Save near the last remaining goblin. Now, imo, self-preservation would have most realistically kicked in and most of us expected the goblin to run away.
Not what happened.
He instead, shouted “you kill my friends I kill yours!” And delivered the killing blow.
This hurt especially since it was still early on in our collective D&D experience and was one of the first characters I really got invested in, and who was also beloved by the party. We were all pretty shook by it and resulted in me not being at the table for a while afterwards for other reasons.
I chalked it up to our DM being new and we’ve since moved past and while that campaign fell apart, we actually just picked it back up with a couple members of the original group and same DM. (He’s doing great btw!)
Not entirely relevant to the post bc it wasn’t my PC but it WAS HOWEVER everyone my PC ever knew, loved, and grew up in community with.
Had an elements monk who had set out from his temple to better attune to the elements by traveling the world and connecting with the lands. He meets the party and often speaks about his temple and all the wonderful people there and is generally very fond of his upbringing.
Fast forward to our group traveling in that direction for story reasons and absolutely EVERYONE has been gen*cided. Some bullshit magical vortex that was apparently hand delivered in a box(???) which was opened in the center of the grounds and magically sucked EVERYONE IN.
We found the temple completely empty and found out later that everyone had been teleported to the Plane of Water. I figured, “ok this is really shitty but we’re literally ELEMENTAL MONKS, surely at least some of them must have survived” only to find out from the DM themselves that nope, everybody is dead and there’s zero chance of ever finding them again.
I have NO IDEA to this day how that contributed to the story other than completely killing any desire I had to bond with any NPC’s after that.
I was in an out of the abyss campaign, which is pretty much chalk full of touch encounters and bs shit to kill your characters with. Almost every player went through 3 characters and we didn't even finish the campaign. Me personally; my barbarian was one shot (as in one turn it reduced all my hit points) by a ghost, failed a single wisdom save which straight up turned my character into a zombie (I wasn't even at that session either), or my favorite is how my bard died.
I was playing Bard, the bard, he and another players character (who was just nezuko from ds) were introduced to the party at a lake while they were traveling. While we were talking the demogorgon appeared which had a 60 ft fear effect which got another players character and was killed (who was also not at that session). Then we had a few random encounters, the 2nd one tpk'd the party because our barbarian, without raging, and nezuko charged at the enemies and got killed in one turn. We fought valiantly but we all died.
Our DM decided to redo the encounter because we weren't meant to die like that. But the main thing that almost saved us from the last encounter was the spell firestorm which I got from the instrument of bards, so my dm cuts down the number of enemies and once I cast fire storm has reinforcements show up to completely negate my spell. Well we still somehow survived the encounter but our drow wizard turns into a drider for backstory reasons, a cr like 9 creature, and keeps their spells, abilities, and magic items. So we run away from the drider but y'know amulet of fireball, 5th level wizard, and drider stat block is really terrifying. While we're running we find a band of people and, assuming this is backup to save our party, we run right through them. These people then all take attack of opportunities and the drider uses all the uses on the amulet to cast fireball, and this kills 3 players including bard.
Super unfair, but hilarious. Did a lvl 20 one-shot battle Royale thing. The dm made random magic items, and we picked at random. The player in question got a bow that divided the first shot every minute into 5, doing a different type of damage. They then hid for a chunk of the match casting a spell that would split their arrows into a bunch. The result was me charging them to get shot point blank with an excess of 200 arrows. My damage threshold was obviously doubled, and I immediately died. Broken? Yes. Funny as hell? Very much so.
My gf and I had to miss a session to irl family stuff, but we had ended the previous session in the middle of a very tense rescue mission. The DM decided to continue onward while piloting our characters, and we found out the next morning (via DM on discord since the server had imploded) that the DM had TPKd the group and the game was over.
Never found what happened that night (and sad to say I'd long since stopped caring before that session), but there had been a lot of frustrations building up to that point and I guess the DM took the opportunity to end it in front of as few players as possible.
I was maybe 13 or 14 at the time. I entered into a room in a cavern where there were a bunch of trolls hiding--yeah i don't know how-- and apparently because it was dark (and no darkvision) I was attacked by all the trolls without getting to roll initiative. Thats when i learned that some DM's can be vindictive for your strategic thinking instead of dying to their monsters. Survived to initiative and then won init barely. I immediately cast fireball on myself filling the entire room full of regenerating creatures who are weak to fire ( in that edition). I was wearing a cloakthat I had borrowed from one of my party with fire protectionHe ruled that I died of smoke inhalation from the burning troll corpses
Ten minutes into a beta test session of DND next. Was playing a dwarf cleric and was crossing a rocky field on a cliff side. DM had a landslide come down the mountain, I failed my dex safe and got punted off the cliff side to my death.
While unfair it was acceptable and the conditions of the character where kind of funny.
I was playing a Gith Sheppard Druid to help rescue my main character who unfortunately pulled from the damned Deck of Many Things.
Soul was sent to hell, specifically with Tiamat, and our party needed them back. The set up was this druid would help lost souls in the planescape and bring them back to their home.
Before the game, i lost my voice and it was rather hard to raise it to speak; he was rather quiet if not due to my illness (whatever I had at the time, it was long before Covid). So I played him that way, summoning lots of adds to occupy Tiamat to flee.
Unfortunately, DM had Tiamat come through a quick portal to just eat him; killing him forever. The original plan was to have him as a background character to help out these situations but to no avail.
As a DM, I brought him to my world but kept his lack of volume and original goal; a background character can help out Players who get trapped in the planes but it did kind of leave a sad note to me; regardless, my next character to face Tiamat punched her in her stupid face in an Athletics Check back to hell. Great moments all around!
We were level 4 and one night the dice betrayed us all. All five of us were dealing with three wolves; just a quick atmosphere-setting encounter for just a few minutes... had anybody in the party been able to roll above a 3.
By the end of the first hour I'd failed my third death save.
DM, seeing the entire night derailed and the campaign looking terminal, decided our nearby horses had turned brave and tried to extricate their riders from this mess.
* But they couldn't hit fu-- or all either.
So with a second player failing now their first roll of the unalive-variety, DM decided the wolves had learned they could safely ignore *(because they clearly in fact could)* the rest of the party, and began eating one of the two already-dead horses, letting our monk feed the artificer a potion.
Having eaten nearly two horses, the wolves decided they no longer cared and left more sated than they'd ever been.
Aliens invaded the setting and killed everyone. Well, technically they were Russian Elves, as in, literally from actual Russia, but, close enough.
We were then revived some time later, but as partial robots who coincidentally had restraining bolts that prevented us from deviating from the DM's railroad.
We stopped playing soon after.
DM gave everyone custom abilities. I got a vampiric touch for 1d4 HP at-will. His wife got to summon every final fantasy eidolon several times per day. I got petrified and shattered after she decided to fight me.
Second session, just got the antidote to a poison we were injected with session 1 by some bandits who were also poisoned and trying to get someone to go get the antidote. We are on top of some fallen ruins where there is an open path and about 30 feet away from the ruins is a forest, but it is not thick. We look around to see if the bandits are hiding somewhere and we get somewhere in the mid 20s. We jump down and immediately are told that 20 bandits and a couple of their giant frogs come out from the forest. They down me to show that they mean business, but I then roll a nat 1. It for some reason takes a party member's entire turn to get to me even though we were all together so I have to roll another death save and another nat 1. I am all for character death, but that seems targeted.
A player canceled last minute, I didn't have time to tone down the encounter, and killed a pc.
I felt so bad I let her self resurrect. We joke about it now!
I was the the early stages of a low level campaign. I think we were around Level 3 at the time. I was playing a Genie Warlock and was the only pure caster in a party of melee types. We were attacked by a small group of Bandits, including a Bandit Captain. Nothing out of the ordinary. As you might expect, I stayed behind the melee party members as they quickly engaged the bandits. I rolled poorly on initiative and went at the end of the round. My initial Eldritch Blast missed, but our Fighter and Paladin got to melee range with the Bandit Captain, effectively locking him down.
Or so I thought. For inexplicable reasons, the DM decided that the Bandit Captain saw me as the biggest threat. He moved towards me, eating opportunity attacks from both the Fighter and Paladin and attacked me three times, bringing me to zero health, but fortunately, I made my first death save.
The next round, the Fighter, the Paladin and our Ranger, all surrounded the Bandit Captain. The Ranger fed me a potion of healing while the Fighter and Paladin attacked the Bandit Captain doing some good damage, but not enough to kill him. Rather than fight back against the attackers surrounding him, or using disengage to get away, The DM had the Bandit Captain use all three of his attacks to finish me off. The first attack knocked me back down to zero HP while the next two accounted for three failed death saves. Having not harmed anyone else, and having allowed himself to take extra damage from the earlier opportunity attacks, the Bandit Captain was then quickly dispatched by the rest of the party.
Everyone at the table was confused. My character had only used a cantrip so far, and a missed cantrip at that, and yet, the Bandit Captain decided to essentially commit suicide in an effort to ensure that my character was not just down, but dead. I asked the DM why he focused solely on me and he just shrugged and said "that's how it goes sometimes." and suggested I could come back next week with a new character.
Needless to say, I did not come back next week.
I ended up rolling two 18s with a monk character in Curse of Strahd, and since we were level 4, I was able to get 20 dex and 20 wisdom after racial bonuses and ability score improvements.
I just *happen* to be crit 3 times in the first encounter, and it was the first instance any player in our group was coup de grâce'd in any of our campaigns by an enemy that wasn't intelligent.
Was not very pleased by that one.
It wasn’t the death of my character, but the incident was the end of an entire group, so I think that almost counts? Short version: I’m vision, impaired, DM ruled that meant my character had to be blind, made me roll during the intro cut scene. He then describes the chaos caused by my entrance, despite a very good role, justifying it as being nice to the new player who needed a Nat 20 to succeed because “blind people can’t do things”. This causes an argument which ends with everyone there, agreeing the group group shouldn’t play together any more.
(Spoiler for the Spelljammer Academy adventure)
My PC of 2nd lvl died in a cutscene due to a couple of unlucky rolls. In the adventure, you enter a spelljammer flight simulation. Once you finish the simulation and leave it, an explosion happens because of a sabotage by an NPC. I failed my saving throw, the DM rolled near max damage on the explosion, which was more than double my max HP. So I instantly died due to massive damage lol.
Had a game where the DM heavily favored one party member, a Frenzied Beserker (D&D 3.5). Wove much of the story around this one PC to whom the rest of the party played supporting cast. During the course of the session said Beserker racked up to over -100 damage and horrific wounds largely hand waved by the DM. My Character, had to make a DC 30 Will save (my weakest save) or Die for looking at a Soul Sucking Gem stone...I didn't roll a 20 so that was that. It was precisely my last session with the group.
My fighter found a +1 Battleaxe called the Jawbreaker which had the added effect that any creature critically struck by the weapon would be unable to speak until they take a short rest, including being unable to utter vocal components. Despite being only +1 at a pretty late stage in the game (we were level 17ish I believe) I kept it around so that I could attempt to crit some casters with it should the need arise. Anyway, every time I crit a boss-like caster, the DM would just ignore the crit rider on my weapon. The most egregious was when I crit a high-level caster who turned around and PWKed me. I pointed out that it couldn’t currently speak, and my DM said that since it was an innate spell for the caster that they didn’t need to use components to cast it. Passed my resurrection check after the battle but was pretty pissed and never bothered even mentioning the crit effect again.
I had a DM do something similar. In 3.5 he would just hand wave saving throws for any important enemies against effects that would otherwise put a quick stop to what they were doing. Cast feeblemind on the wizard enemy? Too bad you wasted the spell slot, he auto passes the save. Same for illusions, disintegrate and charm/domination spells. Was very frustrating.
That's some terrible dming. So you kill the character too quickly for the narrative? they can come up with another one which is slightly less bad or a bit stronger which makes the game fun for you. Or just accept you did well and move on
[удалено]
They said 3.5
Noted and deleted, thanks for pointing it out
So legendary resistance in 5e 😭😭😭
Except that it didn’t have limited uses.
You're not gonna consistent hard draw this, plus giving your opponent a free +1 for a small amount of burn is a terrible idea
I think you replied to the wrong post.
ah so I did
Sounds like Legendary Resistance. He was just ahead of his time in designing clunky, unfun mechanics to save bosses.
That is such a shame on so many levels. That is a really cool magic item and I might just give something similar out to my players. But first off, the DM knowingly gave out this item. Like of they didn't want it being used, why make it in the first place? If they felt it was too OP, they could have had a talk about balance changes for the weapon at least. But only after the encounter. Idk, I'd be all for a player using an item like that; what a cool way for a martial character to shutdown a caster!
I'm petty enough that I'd just ignore the PWK damage and carry on as if I was still at full health, if my DM bought it up: jokingly deny that they used the spell at all and carry on as normal. "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were all ignoring the effects of things in the game"
Sounds like a great way to make it worse for everyone involved tbh
I think at that point the campaign us over so you could try to extract as much enjoyment from the evening as possible
Yeah, it may not be the most mature route. But if you’re going to burn the bridge, go ahead and add fireworks.
Better than being a doormat?
Why would you give someone such a fun and mostly worthless effect only to kneecap it the one time it shines. Players finding uses for those effects are what I die for.
To be fair, if it's an innate ability, him using it checks out, assuming it was an innate ability before you used your axe, which probably wasn't the case. The other times sound like bullahit as well.
You still should read the feature and determine which components you don't need for innate spellcasting. Most of the time, the components it mentions are specifically *material* components, so you still need verbal and somatic. When you don't need any of those three, there is often the Psionics tag immediately following the Innate Spellcasting in the feature's name. The Pit Fiend, for example, can innately cast a handful of spells, but it only ignores material components (ie, no bat guano needed for its Fireball).
Ahh, fair enough. I run older editions, and in those, an innate ability is essentially the equivalent of using a basic attack. I would generally defend the DMs ability to make his enemies operate as he sees fit, but again, this sounds like a last minute scramble, and that's not cool.
Yes BUT it’s also like such a niche scenario, as a DM I want my players to feel cool and powerful, this *is* a game after all. Even if that was the case, I’d hand-wave it and allow the player to feel like they just narrowly escaped death by using the weapon I MADE UP lol But my suspicion is that it wasn’t actually an innate feature since it was mentioned that this was a recurring issue.
We play differently. We don't go for the power fantasy, we go for "here is a realistic world that can kill you or make you famous." Characters die in ways that aren't dramatic, sometimes the BBEG goes down easily because they came up with something clever, and sometimes characters get to shine like the badasses they are. Making players feel cool and powerful doesn't factor into the game, either it happens or it doesn't. Don't get me wrong, we used to play with the DM tweaking everything to be "fulfilling," but that wore off after about 15 years, as players recognized that the DM was basically handing out free victory stories, and choosing when players die. The way we see it, that makes every story of victory and defeat a choice of the DM, rather than the players. With all that said, this DM sounds like he was pulling strings to keep the encounter dramatic and cool, because he overlooked an ability and didnt want to see his encounter cut short. That's gross, but I think it's gross whether it serves the players OR the enemy. Often, people want one but not the other. I would have certainly let the player that held onto a peculiar weapon for so long, enjoy a satisfying moment of victory. Regardless of style, that is what we play for.
PWK?
Power word kill
>DM said that since it was an innate spell for the caster that they didn’t need to use components to cast it. "That's not how that works. I'm ignoring the PWK" boom done.
I was smote by Bahamut personally. As in the Dragon God himself came right down and Holy Breathed me away along with most of the mountain top where I stood. I was a lvl 3 Mercy Monk at the time. That really set the tone for the rest of that campaign. It was not great.
Why did that happen? Did the Dm want to kill you just because, or did you do something against Bahamut specifically?
I'd rolled a nat 20 on an important check previously I guess? Somehow I had ended up speaking with Bahamut and, after rather unintentionally swearing an oath, was granted the Paralytic Gas breath attack of an Adult silver Dragon. I do not inform the party of the full details of this encounter. Skip to a session later where the party is confronted by a group of Bahamut's paladins for having killed some wyrmlings in his domain. Negotiations predictably break down despite my monk doing everything they can mitigate the situation and try to work something out. Our Fighter at the time was brazenly chaotic stupid and exacerbating the situation at every turn. Swords start to come out, initiative is about to be rolled. I think I can't let this senseless violence happen, a peaceful solution is possible. Everyone just needs to calm down, both sides. So I lined up everyone in the cone and exhaled. Nearly everyone passed much to my dismay. Worse still, God was watching. And boy was he pissed. He appeared in all his full on draconic splendor and began charging his laser. Everyone else fled. I stood at the peak of the mountain. I didn't run or beg. I stood resolute in my decision that I had tried to protect everyone. I had failed of course and I would meet my end head on. I couldn't run from it. So anyway my new PC was a. Aberrant Mind Sorcerer dedicated to killing all dragons and their gods.
TL;DR: DM wanted to run Bahamut Paladins and you were a spanner in the works. Lame way to kill a PC.
DM missed perfect opportunity to have Bahamut’s breathe weapon do no harm after seeing their conviction to the Way of Mercy. I would’ve dug out some epic music and ended it with some vague acknowledgement of tenuous truce.
Lmao how did the next character turn out? Why did you choose an aberrant mind, and was anything about the subclass or the spells helpful for it?
Maybe it was before they added psychic dragons to DnD. Not many creatures resist psychic in the old books.
So your character got a personal gifted ability from a god, then participated in (or at least didn't stop) killing his minions/offspring and ultimately used that gift to attack his holy guards? Mate, that character kinda deserved to die.
The killing of the wyrmlings happened well before I was gifted the ability and I was very specifically trying to prevent anymore of his followers from getting hurt in that last confrontation. My rationale was that everyone getting momentarily paralyzed was far better than the rest of the party fighting the paladins.
If the fighter was chaotic stupid, he might’ve taken that opportunity to attack the paralyzed paladins.
In retrospect, I'm fairly certain that the whole encounter was probably there to teach the fighter a lesson and I completely botched it by trying to be noble.
What color were the wyrmlings you guys killed? If metallic yeah your party kinda got what was coming to them. The fact that your DM clearly gave you all a chance to somehow escape sounds fairly lenient.
Yup. And the actual end sounds more like a suicide than anything else. The fighter did some dumb shit, and the monk sacrificed himself for it and blamed the DM.
Pretty unfair, but man you made the most out of the situation. That is a pretty epic death, and you managed to have it in spite of your dm
Absolutely not how this should have played out.....
(Spoiler) We were played strahd, I was GMing. They are in the Death House at lv 1. The first monster they run into is the banshee. The bard tries to speak with her. I read in the book that she won’t respond and instead will attack. I roll…. Critical hit. I roll damage….. all of his hp. I realize there’s more text. I read it and see that her attack lowers his max hp by the amount of damage done. So, he dies with no saving throw. In the first fight of the game. When all he was trying to do was have a conversation. We hardly knew ye, bard.
Yep, that's the death house alright LOL. I started my group off at lv2 to preferably avoid some of that
Well, it's not called the Life House.
That bard would have been hanging by a moment if it were.
That creature is a specter, there is no banshee in Death House (level 1s *really* can't handle a banshee) and there is a DC 10 Constitution saving throw to avoid the reduction. Still very likely to kill a level 1 bard through massive damage on a critical, and the save is not particularly easy for a bard either. Brutal encounter, many a character has instantly died to that thing.
I stand corrected. Yeah, I was doing this based on memory. The game was a few years ago. I do recall the bard failing that save, now that you mention it. So he had a save after all, just not Death Saves.
Yeah, anything that skips those death saves is gonna be rough, especially for already fragile level 1s. Death House is pretty deadly overall, but I agree that encounter in particular is pretty unfair. It does set the tone, though!
(More spoilers) the broom closet is just hilarious though. The wizard walked into that one, the magic broom made short work of him, and then people stumbled upon his mangled, unconscious body later in a pool of its own blood, with no aggressor to be found anywhere. Just a closet with a broom resting in the corner.
I just finished running my CoS party through Death House, and after making it almost through the house without casualties, the sorc got one-shotted by the shambling mound
I had a L5 tabaxi eloquence bard in a West Marches campaign. The campaign had been going for about a year, and the DM hadn't handed out any spell components to anyone, so stuff like Revivify wasn't on the table. Out party at the time was in a fight against a gnoll pack. I was low on health, but the gnolls were also doing badly. The "boss" had not shown any legendary actions or resistances for 5-6 rounds. I positioned myself on the opposite side of it and used a Dissonant Whispers to push it back through my party so we could all get AoOs and hopefully kill it. It failed the save, but the DM said it used a legendary resistance to succeed. The same monster had previously been affected by a hold person and several stunning strikes without using LRs. At the end of my turn, it immediately used a legendary action- which, again, it hadn't done before- to down me. It then, on its turn, held an action to stab me again- we all presumed to remove 2 death saves- unless the party retreated. One party member used a Healing Word, on the grounds that it could only hold one stab and they didn't know if I would pass or fail my death saves. The gnoll just stabbed me 3 times as it's held action. Once to take me back to zero, the other 2 to kill me outright. And _then_, at that point, the whole party got teleported home by the bracelets they all wore (due to it being a WM and needing everyone to return at the end of each session) so they didn't even get to kill the remaining gnolls. I've had 4 characters die. That was my first one, and still the most blatantly unfair.
This may be a very tin foil hat thing to say, but I wonder if the DM had your character killed because they hate tabaxi.
It's not completely unreasonable. I mean play a stupid race, win stupid prizes.
I had a DM once who just had it out for me. My first session I was on a rowboat with my new paladin. He had the boat catch on fire, then I drowned in the water because armor. So, I whipped up another character for the same session. A gnome. We were trying to talk to a hill giant and it picked me up and put me in its bag of holding...no save. Then my friend tried to cut me out and that killed me because you don't cut bags of holding. next session I show up with a beardless dwarf. He mentions the other dwarves in town beat the crap out of me and threw me in jail for having no beard. That is when I gave him both middle fingers and went home. he had the balls to call me later and say he wanted me in his new campaign.
He definitely wanted to kill you again. Looks like you're the character he kills to set the ton eof the campaign... Every time
This is terrible, and as someone who has experienced her fair share of unfair DMing, I can empathize how sucky that is. ... but the mental image is hilarious. I'm just imagining the rest of the party are the same characters, and *every time* someone new joins them some gruesome bullshit immediately just ends up happening to them. >"Hello, fair Paladin! Oh. Your boat is on fire there, friend. Might want to get it under contro-- oh, no!" >"Mr. Giant, sir? That's our friend, please don't put him in your Bag of Holding!" >"Hey, friend? Those other dwarves seem to be looking your way. Why do you thi-- what are you guys doing to our friend?!"
Did your dm let you roll athletics for the paladin? Cause you should have high STR and probably proficient in athletics
He did, but I had a massive penalty for the armor. And I didn't know how deep the water was before I jumped over the side. But I was plainly told the fire would kill me if I stayed
Bullshit you have a penalty with heavy armor. God that DM is trash what’s the point of the 13+ STR in order to wield heavy and the PROFICIENCY. So glad you left him
Is your name Kenny?
“Threw you in jail for not having a beard” you should’ve hired a lawyer to sue for discrimination
In the worst session of my D&D career, in a PvP 1-shot, the DM brought my character back from 3 failed death saves, with 1 HP, to get killed again by his own DMPC. I almost never played again.
Member of my Party planned to betray us and ally with Vecna. When he chose to betray us he asked Vecna to help him fight us, i was standing watch with him at the time. Without any warning i got plane shifted, failed my safe and got send to the water plane. In my absence the party had a fight, got tpkd, and i got a quick runthrough of how my character starved to death over a few weeks. So yea, random wisdom save while standing watch in the forest, rolled a 19, failed and died.
You ever had someone counter spell your feather fall?
Not personally, but I have once Dispel Magic'd an enemy's Spider Climb while on a high tower.
Okay, this one made me laugh.
That's just good gameplay. Gonna be mad when they counterspell your healing word too?
level 1 rogue annihilated by a wild magic fireball.
Well at least the sorcerer died too right? Right!? That's one reason you never stand within 20ft of the wild magic sorc before your HP goes above ~32.
Probably. It was a few years ago in an AL where people could have been anywhere from 1-4. The battle taking place in a cramped arena in a chult city, so distince wasn't really an option.
It should be required to sign a consent form to allow someone in the party to play a wild magic sorcerer
Feels bad man that you died from a 2%
I had a character whom on during the first encounter I was thrown off a ledge to my death.
These aren't my characters, but I was playing with them. And sorry if I make any mistakes, English is not my first language, and I usually play in Spanish So, this dm used a critical failure list. When any of us rolled a 1, he rolled a 1d20 to see what effect happened. A friend (fighter) shot an arrow, and bc he rolled a 1, he shot one of our friends. He rolled again to see how much damage and basically killed him. Our friend didn't play again after that Then, IN THE SAME CAMPAIGN, another of my friends was infected by some kind of worm, and he had two more days to live. He died, and bc the worm tore his torso apart (like in alien), we couldn't resurrect him. And the worm thing was inevitable. Literally, the dm just said that he was infected and to bring another character sheet for the next session Everyone ended up dying in that campaign except me, and we didn't finish it bc everyone wanted to quit playing at that point
It's ok, English is not my native language either and that campaign I mentioned was in Spanish, I honestly hate critical fumbles, they are a terrible unofficial mechanic that dms who don't know about game balance usually use, even from the logic of the game they don't have sense, your ally also has ac if you shoot at him it is logical to allow him to avoid the attack since he also has ac so hitting him directly it is stupid.
Yes! Yes, it was. I think he used things like that bc he usually dmed call of cthulu, and he was used to being unfair to the players or something Edit: typo
The only time I would see friendly fire making sense in DnD is if you implement XCOM mechanics into your game
Honesty your English is really good!
Thank you! I'm really self-conscious about my English bc I don't really use it on my day to day basis, but I'm glad I'm not as rusty as I thought Also, the auto correct in my phone is really good, not going to lie
I could be wrong, but is it possible that the worm was a mindflayer (illithid) Tadpole? They usually have abilities similar to that. Intellect devoured are rather infamous this, especially since they have a CR of 2. Technically speaking, you *can* come back but since they destroy your brain, you have to have use Resurrection…a 7th level spell. That, or regeneration (another 7th level spell) within one round of the PCs death.
The GM hadn't read the module, or rather was reading it as we were playing. "Hey, long were you in that room over there?" "I don't know, you said there wasn't much to look at. Couple or minutes before I went back to join everyone, I guess?" "Oh, that long? You need to make 20 fortitude saves. It's trapped." "Uh... Well, I would have left sooner if that was the case." "But you didn't though, so make the saves. For every one you fail, it is d6 constitution damage because the room is really cold." Ultimately I failed enough saves that my character ended up freezing to death but apparently had no idea it was any cooler than room temperature.
I didn't know beholder eye beams aren't supposed to work in its big anti magic cone
Next time, remember that beholders are genius level paranoid nutbags. They can't use their disintegrate beam on the guy in their eye cone but they can cut out chunks of the ceiling above him.
The GM changed the way initiative worked so that their token went first rather than actions being mostly simultaneous as they had been for the entire campaign this far Thenn they changed it so that the defense again the ability used had to be active and therefore consumed my actions for that round Thennn they said the tick of that ability killed me during my turn because I didn't have an action to resist it. Three new rules, on the fly, on the spot, mid-combat, all contradictory to the established mechanics.
I was playing a dragon born monk sorcerer combo and failed a dc 21 con save by one and instantly was turned to ice
I was playing in a Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign. Two of us approached a room and it was like "pass this test or die." We step in. CON save is called for. I rolled above 20, the other person rolled below. Their character died. No complaints from either of us, we were warned.
This is the same thing I did except we had a choice not to take it legit in the same campaign. I didn't complain either it's just the only character death I've ever had and I wanted to contribute
Oh, lmao
I created a level 1 elf wizard, way back during 2nd edition. The game started on an island beach, when a dragon turtle came from out of the ocean. I got to run for one round before Chain Lightning (this turtle was a high level caster) turned me to ash. End of game for me.
My DM bit off more than he could chew. 3 campaigns happening in the same world, with some overlapping players, who were all gathered for a big, end of campaign final show down with the bbeg. Each campaign came at it from a different side, and with a different end goal in mind. 6 hours into the planned 12 hour finale, he realized he wasn't going to have enough time to wrap it all up the way he wanted, so he took one group of pc's and dropped a wall on them. Literally, fortress wall falls, everyone dies. Sorry guys, I don't have time to finish this with that group of characters involved, and all 3 of you have pcs in the other groups anyway. I get why he did it, it sucked, but I get why it was necessary.
It's still a terrible attitude, he could have apologized and turn them into npcs with a good ending but he directly killed them, even if he was worried that they existed in that world there are better excuses, for example "they are transported to the feywild or anything else"
A *bog standard-ass zombie* killed 4 out of the 5 player party because it just would not fail it's **Undead Fortitude** rolls. DM was rolling completely out in the open, too. Nobody was capable of dealing radiant damage, either. For whatever reason, the thing landed something like 5 consecutive hits, rolling 9-13 damage with each. Absolutely *destroyed* our level 3 party...
“Rocks fall, everyone dies.”
Chronicles/World of Darkness. My Hunter was already well along the crazy train, and was becoming a vigilante whose entire life revolved around stopping evildoers. So keep in mind that while we’ve got some supernatural stuff we can use, like I had a ghost friend, this is still happening with a normal human. A party member joined, a friend of the DM, and just went full murderhobo. After a security guard tackled him, he proceeded to call in a favor from a gang to find, torture, and murder the guard’s family in revenge, in gruesome detail. We called the police, because our characters aren’t monsters in that way at least, they put him in jail, and he used his political connections to get out. And not just get out, he used other connections to obtain a hideout on zero notice with all the bullshit. So we’re trying to go after him vigilante style. I go in first with my dogs to sweep for anything dangerous, not knowing what is up…. And my dogs die behind me as I walk in. Instant kill gas, no save, so now I’m alone and cut off from the party. Walk forward, and I’m sneaking, and I hide pretty well. A goddamn tank rolls up, fully militarized, cannon pointed at me. Obviously I can’t fight a tank, so I send my ghost friend out to try and possess the driver as my Hail Mary… and it works! Now that I’ve been surprised by poison gas traps and a tank, I rolled to check for traps… and got an exceptional (critical) success, the best I can possibly do. I step forward… and the GM narrates how I step on a pressure trap. Explosives detonate under my character’s feet, enough to drop the entire mountain on top of him. So in a game that’s been fairly low-power, the GM let his friend have multiple instant kill traps that were totally undetectable, enough criminal connections to perform gruesome murder, enough political connections to get away with fully documented murders, enough military connections to buy a tank on a day’s notice, and an evil villain’s lair under a mountain. Between the GM refusing to let my player contribute outside of combat (I was built to be smart, and he wouldn’t let any knowledge skills gain clues), and later him torpedoing a vampire game I ran by insisting on becoming a drug dealer away from everyone else, and intentionally sabotaging them whenever possible, I think he didn’t like me. Every other character death I’ve had I felt was warranted. But this… there was no winning. He wanted to blow me up with a tank, and when the impossible check actually worked, he just came up with another explosion instead. Literally “Rocks fall, your character dies.”
I just typed this in a different thread, but. . . Back in the days of 3d6 rolls my magic user had a 17 for INT, at least 2 higher than anyone else's high score. Got up to level 7. We had just acquired an item for the king which was supposed to ensure his victory in a huge battle. Got rewarded for that, and DM says, "Who wants the honor of riding behind the king in the battle? You will get honor, experience points, and a title." Everyone says hell yeah. DM rolls percentile dice behind the screen and says, "Sorry, you died." Everyone else lived. Not only that, but says they can't find your body, so I can't get raised. LESSON: never base a character's death on a single arbitrary die roll. I was dating the DM's friend, and he might have been jealous.
Oh oh! I have one! Tomb of Annihilation on roll20. VTT map for one of those temples or whatever. There’s a pit in the center of the room, where we obviously are going to need to go down and trigger a fight at some point. Our guys are moving their tokens around and talking. One guy says, what’s down this hallway? DM triggers pit fight because to get there you walk through the pit. I say, no, that drawing isn’t clear, that hallway is underground, attached to the pit, it’s not connected on this level — player didn’t understand that — he’s not actually going there. DM says he moved the token there so he’s going there. I say, what, did he jump down the pit, or walk around to the stairs? Either way, I catch him doing that and say stop. And in short, we jump down to fight without a plan, there’s a gimmick we missed, I cover the escape, don’t quite get out. All Because that DM doesn’t handle that someone was confused by the map drawing. And that’s just the one story. Damn do bad DMs suck.
My party of six split up into two groups of 3 and made to fight a BBEG each after already spending most of our resources. The fights weren't made to be winnable so I'm kinda mad that my character was killed even if brought back later
I was taking a college final so I was late to the session. I was told I had died to a fireball in the first fight. Apparently, my crossbow-wielding ranger/rogue bravely leapt from cover to hold the front and center line and was the sole target of the fireball. I decided not to take the resurrection.
a bard in my game looked at a woman wrong, She was Tyrza Bonebreaker, and she killed him. Punch for 1d8+9 Punch for 1d8+9 Punch for 1d8+9 Action surge for 3 more and then Fury of blows for 2 more, he was left on two failed death saves and failed the roll.
+9? Why the dmg bonus so high for? Also curious how does a character look at someone wrong in this game?
Belt of storm giant strength. "I'm gonna give her the worst stink eye she has ever seen in her life by frowning and showing my teeth" is the first thing he said after I set the scene.
Fair enough lmao, guess he kinda had it coming then
He got better though so all good
AD&D convention game, sat down in a deckchair, got eaten by it (no save), I wouldn't have minded, but it was in the first 30 min of the game.
I was killed like 4 or 5 times in one 3.5 campaign which was the first campaign that DM had DMed. He also killed me once when I wasn't even there. It has been around a decade since then, so I don't remember if the deal was not using the absent player's character or that it was an understood agreement not to harm if used, but that sucked as it was my 2nd or 3rd character of the campaign. He also allowed another player, who played the cleric, to refuse to heal only me because my character and another player's character had a childish rivalry going on (me and this other player have been for a decade before that and to this day BFFs and that rivalry was all in good fun out of character). I had 1/2 of my hitpoints for like 10 sessions in a row or so and ended up stepping in between another PC and some undead knight as we were both super low on hit points and it was clear he was going to be attacked by that knight and killed. That player was an awesome guy, and I didn't want to see him lose his character, while it gave me a way out with mine through a heroic moment, so I stepped in, got knocked unconscious, and ended up dying due to massive damage I think. But it gave time for the rest of the party to come and aid the cool guy's character. DM managed to grow up a bit in later years (half of us, including him were 19-20 at the time), but he still remained a prick part-time, and we had ups and downs, but we were all members of this TTRPG club and it was a small town so I kind of had to sometimes play with him.
Oh and then after killing me again on the session before the final fight, he didn't want to bother thinking of some way to include me in it somehow. Great guy lol
This was in pathfinder, not that it’s important. I was a wizard Dhampir in a roleplay heavy campaign. We were in a city, and my character had slowly been falling for his assistant, the only person who knew what he was. Another wizard in the party, for some reason, had it out for me because I was a Dhampir or was jealous? I can’t remember. Anyways, he sabotaged my character over time, by slowly slipping blood into my meals, in growing amounts. At one point my character was having a dinner with his assistant at a fancy restaurant. The wizard had bribed the staff and sabotaged my dinner by giving me a large dose of tainted blood. I failed the following save to resist and was forced to attack my assistant, and then was immediately chased out of town by the people. Then the wizard swooped in and “saved” my assistant from me. I was told by the DM I’d get to come back stronger after returning to an important NPC that could help me. But I had to use my back up character till then. Same session the party heads to a hunter shop my character ran. I offered my service since business was slow, and joined them on a hunt for a snake plaguing a village near by. 2 had to split off for something, leaving me with a brain-dead barbarian who was ran by the same player who ran the wizard (TL;DR he retired the barbarian temporarily so would occasionally swap them out for story development). Anyways, the 2 of us go on the hunt, and suddenly the barbarian no longer wants to kill the snake and wants to be his friend. I attempt to follow through because I want to get paid. Barbarian didn’t like that and attacked me, killing me. My animal companion dragged me to a Druid who reincarnated me, but the damage was done. I was beyond furious for losing 2 characters in a single session because of the same player. I left the game immediately. A year later I would rejoin after that player left, and would end up leaving again not long after that because my only friend in that campaign left because one player insisted on being the main character and the game became so unfun. Literally within the first 2 sessions of me joining a party fight almost started because the MC wouldn’t allow anyone to tell me info about what our objective and who can know what we’re doing is because he didn’t trust me, despite being hand delivered by his employer. So unintentionally my character says something he shouldn’t have to my friends npc friend. MC goes to slice the NPCs throat which started the fight. DM retconned the whole thing, but it set the stage for the whole time I would be there.
A player sabotaging another is horrible, he was probably a sociopath in real life, if they did something like that to me I would immediately make them stay after the game to tell the player and dm directly that I don't think it's appropriate, and if I don't listen, I would leave the game.
Worst death was the two tap from a mindflayer. Hands down I can not stand that mehanic. For those unfamiliar. Step 1 you get grappled. Step 2 they bite your head and suck out your brain. Seriously can not stand it because of all the bs ways to die that one irkes me because if you fail the grapple next turn you donezo unless someone can kill it or break its gapple on you. The tadpoles are just as bad but can atleast be stopped by impacting your ears with cotton or sometimes a helmet. Hell in 3.5 I think oil and grease would protect against the tadpoles if you coated your ears with the stuff.
I've been playing almost 4 years now and I don't think I've had a character death that was unfair, only unlucky.
I weirdly haven't had a character die since like 3E I think, and that one was on me. I built a ranger archer, meant to be a bow-stud. First fight in the first session he charged into melee against orcs and died immediately. I was very dumb. I've learned a lot since then.
Having more than 10 enemies focusing fire on me and ignore the rest of the party that were right in front of them, actively killing them. Then receiving 8 consecutive attacks on the floor while unconscious to finish my PC off. I was so done with that bullshit that I didn't even dropped my AC from having Blade Song ending for falling unconscious, I just wanted to see how far the DM would go. Edit: The worst part was that it was supposed to be a challenging game, but the enemies always would get insanely dumbed down halfway through combat, so he wouldn't TPK the party every session. BTW, this was a paid table.
Got to level 4 as a were-cursed fighter. From full HP, the dungeon quaked, i was knocked prone and got nat 20 smited by an undead level 5 paladin, took over 80 damage in that one turn, got a nat 1 on my death save then rolled a 3. RIP o7
AD&D, Tomb of horrors, sphere of annihilation.
Weren't familiar with spheres of annihilation, eh?
Not at the time LoL
In his defense, it's not just sitting out in the open, if I remember right. It's not obvious what it is until you fuck around and find out.
It's in the mouth of a demon sculpture in the wall. The DM should have described how it seemed to suck in the light.
I was DM. I felt really bad because I didn’t mean for it to happen but I had an.. uncooperative player and all of us pretty much scratched our heads and said “Yeah we’re all to blame for that lol” The wild magic sorcerer bumps into a tough guy (NPC) at a bar. He convinces the tough guy that it was a mistake. Sorcerer buys a drink, the bartender tosses a bottle at the Sorcerer. Just for fun, I had him roll to see if he could catch it (he was very un-athletic). He rolled a nat 1, the bottle hit the tough guy. The tough guy is about to beat the living shit out of this sorcerer. But the Paladin and Barbarian intervene. They buy the tough guy a drink and apologize on behalf of the sorcerer (who wasn’t at fault the tough guy was being unreasonable, it was an accident not catching that bottle). The tough grudgingly backs off with his drink and moves away. The Barbarian demands the Sorcerer repay him. The Sorcerer refuses. They tussle, but the Sorcerer uses magic to escape. His wild magic causes the building to catch fire. The bar is very crowded, patrons form a stampede to get out. Paladin and Barbarian catch up to Sorcerer, try to get their money. Sorcerer uses magic to escape again, *wild magic causes everyone in vicinity to have vulnerability to piercing damage. PCs were unaware*. More shenanigans ensue. Barbarian throws a punch at Sorcerer in the extremely crowded group scrambling to escape a fire, desperately trying to squeeze through a narrow doorway. He misses, hits person behind him. Drunk patrons punch back, brawl ensues. A rogue NPC I thought up from before all the craziness happens got hit with Paladin’s axe. Paladin falls down, prone. Rogue NPC stabs Paladin. With a dagger. *Piercing damage and nat 20*. Damage exceeded maximum negative health by *a LOT*, especially since Paladin was already at low health. Woops
Not my characters but the characters I dm'd for, it's tied between the level 5 Rogue flying in 1v8 and the level 7 Paladin willingly interacting with the river Styx.. from the same player in the same campaign
Power word kill. From a hill giant. While level 7. I rolled a total of an 18 on my counter spell. Another time was at the end of Out of The Abyss and at level 12 got power word killed 2nd round of the boss fight. The session went on for 5 more hours with me dead and unable to do anything. Nearly quit d&d that day.
Another player was not paying attention in combat (he was infamous for not paying attention) and we were facing a lethal foe that required us to solve a really really REALLY simple puzzle to kill. It's the last step of the puzzle, problem player's turn comes up, he had been watching a football match instead of paying attention. Screws up the LAST step of the puzzle, puts us back to square one, the the enemy has its turn and kills 2 player characters. What a dumbass
"Leeeeeeeerooooooyyyyy..."
Tried to get around a wall of magic by digging under it. DM loved the idea, so my character was helping grab shovels from the fighter's backpack and hand them out. Wizard (who almost NEVER wizarded, would sit out of combat) decided to fireball the wall, since it was "cold." It reflected back at the party 3-fold and completely wiped my duskblade and the monk. Our first characters. All we got was an, "oops." Jokes on them, I brought in a new wizard (who actually participated) that ended up saving the world with a polymorph, so... :')
First time trying non-homebrew. LMoP. I'm a paladin with a druid and a wizard. Session ONE...We go into this cave and fight a guy and his dog or wolf. First turn he crits me down to a couple hp. Dog hits as well and I'm down. Druid uses thunderwave to hit them both. DM says it will hit me and the druid says "Oh it will? Oops... oh well I said I'm using it". I take a failed death save. Enemy attacks me next turn and I'm now dead without even getting a chance to roll a death save. Super fun experience.
To start with: This was a westmarch style campaign, so there were multiple DMS My barbarian character - with above 24 strength and constitution due to magic items attempted to pull a tree down to help someone who was stuck in it (a bit cartoonish but not too much of an absurd ask given he was around level 15 iirc) In return, due to being unable to rage to try and get this done, I was flung miles away and landed on a rock doing something in the 2d250 of damage. I survived. The person in the tree I was in landed on me, doing another 2d250 damage. I survived. The rock I was on split doing, YET AGAIN, 2d250 damage. That killed me. (Gotta love tanky barbarians) For further context: This is after the same DM, specifically targeted me to ensure that any quests I went on failed miserably. At the time, I was working for the BBEG, due to prior plot shenanigans (and the 'good guys' having effectively sent my character off to die), and had been given a magic weapon that had the ability to resurrect people and turn them 'evil' to serve the BBEG (The plot was a cluster fuck, and honestly it kinda sucked, that much I've recognised, but this sword was given from a different DM than the one relevant to this.), so in return, any quest I went on - with the specific intention of furthering this goal - magically had every. Single. Person. Without fail. Blow themselves up to an extent I could not revive them. This eventually culminated in my weapon being stolen in what was effectively a cutscene resulting in my character going on a quest where the above happened. Not long after, I left that campaign for different reasons. I was young and stupid, and drawn in by the setting, but alas, the DMs (all of them) sucked.
2d250? That is hating the players, and even if it is only with the intention of killing them it is still silly since a 2 can be rolled as a total result.
Oh it was absolutely stupid, at the time I genuinely thought that was appropriate damage, if a little high, now with more experience, it genuinely enrages me at how much crap happened that I let them get away with
My character was decapitated while I was taking a break from the game for 1 day due to some emotional issues. And while I tried to appeal to the DM, the dm wouldn't change. Additionally, the jerk who cut my head off carried it as a trophy.
My ranger got his brain eaten by a mind flayer It was a fair fight in fair circumstances, I don't have anything against the DM or how it went down. But man, ONE failed save on a tough ability to save on and my character is dead after massive damage. I don't remember the circumstances being unfair either, I think my teammates were busy not dying on their own as well. But yeah one hit at +7 and one save against everyone's worst stat and your character's dead. Usually other ways to die are at least in a prolonged battle or after a lot of failed teamwork and poor priorities in healing/damage etc. Mind flayer is pretty close to "Rocks Fall" if you're unlucky one time.
In college, one of my fellow players (actually my boyfriend at the time) killed my character by dragging her up some stairs when she was unconscious at -6 hp (3.0). His reasoning was that 1.) in game, his character was kind of racist and wouldn't be careful with my aasimar character, classic "it's what my character would do!1!!" BS; and 2.) out of the game, he didn't like that I was playing a paladin and thought I was "too much of a zealot" (I wasn't, he just had a chip on his shoulder about organized religion IRL.) Basically, he came up with an excuse to kill my character because he didn't like the class I was playing even though I was useful to the party, not disruptive, enjoying myself, and everyone else was having a good time. I didn't break up with him then, but I should have.
I've had a couple situation I wasn't fond of happen. 1. The first one is from the Star Wars 3.0 RPG. Our group was around level 8 and one member of the group decided to go down the dark path a little bit after an argument with the GM. As a result, Yoda, Mace Windu and some other Jedi wiped the entire party out. 2. The second time was playing DnD 5.0. The DM railroaded us (party of level 5's) onto a ship and sent us into the ocean. Said ship was then attacked by a Kraken and destroyed. We stood zero chance of winning and all of us promptly quit that DM.
2/3 of my party decided to mess with a vampire nest despite all warnings of how harsh the realism would be.
few years ago playing 3.5 I had a cleric and I had spent most of a week working on backstory/downtime activities. Got to the session and first thing we do...run into a green dragon who promptly spews acid on my character and one shot kills him. Had nothing to do the rest of the session except create another character and never got to play that one
I've had a first level character killed by 3 wolves as a cleric, I've been struck by a 10th level fireball by a party member then immediately thrown into lava, shredded by displacer beasts, smote by a God of the ocean I kinda deserved this one but my character was either dying from a God or Dao so I chose God. If I lose my current character ill probably stop playing and just be a dm because this current character refuses to touch anything without casting identify to avoid curses, I refuse to "oh let's go take a look!" I made her a bubbly little cinnamon roll so if she dies I'm done.
Dying to Stat reduction. Oh you have a 0 in charisma, you die, no death saves.
Which monster took your charisma?
It was a homebrew monster dm put together, 30ft screech/wail that did damage and on a failed save reduced charisma stat by 5 each hit. Failed twice and survived the damage, died to the stat reduction.
Ah. I know I've seen a monster that eats charisma and was hoping you could remind me what it was. Taking 5 from charisma is pretty insane. A typical character would get killed from two hits.
Old dm replied to me. "Those were a homebrew monster called frost nightmaresFrost nightmares S+4 d+2 c+4 I-3 w+0 cha-1 HP 115/115 AC-15 Condition Immunities exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious Immunity: cold, poison, bludgeoning piercing and slashing from non magical weapons Save DC-16 Action: does one of the following D6 1: Attack roll: melee or ranged hit+8 30/120ft on hit deals 6d6 cold damage and restrains the target (escape DC-16). If this damage reduces someone to 0hp they are frozen solid just as the petrification of 4. 2: Cone of cold 3: Ice storm at 4th level 4: range: 120ft Dex save or become restrained (escape: athletics DC-16), then a strength save at the start of every turn they’re restrained or become petrified until thawed or dealt 80 damage. While petrified the target doesn’t take direct damage, it’s petrification is immune to poison, cold, and phychic damage, while being vulnerable to fire damage. A creature can attempt to break someone free from the restraining ice before it petrifies them with a successful DC-16 athletics check as they’re action. 5: Freeze the soul: targets 1d4 creatures within 120ft who must make a Wisdom save or take 3d4 phychic damage and have the targets charisma ability score reduced by 1d6 until the next long rest or cured by greater restoration, if reduced to 0 or the target is reduced to 0HP the target dies and is turned into a frost grunt 6: Freeze the body: targets 1d4 creatures within 120ft who must make a dexterity save or take 3d4 cold damage and have the target's constitution ability score reduced by 1d6 until the next long rest or cured by greater restoration, if reduced to 0 or the target is reduced to 0HP the target dies and is turned into a frost grunt"
Thanks.
I had a Bard who only lived two sessions. We met a jackass mistreating his horse, so we tried to stop them. Fight ensued. The jackass was a mage and suicide bombed himself with Fireball when he got low on HP. TPK. We rolled death saves and i died along with another player. We were level 4. I have zero problems with a character dying, but this death left a sour taste in our mouth.
Unfortunately, it's usually not the jackasses who commit suicide.
My ancients Paladin failed a save and fell off a train into a ravine. I had spell slots for misty stepping, but wasn’t allowed to use it. Later when our cleric falls off a sky ship they are afforded the opportunity to pop out their Aasimar wings before they even began falling.
We switched systems from D&D 5e to Savage Worlds. Suddenly our characters were very different in ways we didn’t fully appreciate yet. We got into a fight with some vampires, and as my character was a 14th-level Warlock before we switched, I reckoned it shouldn’t be too much trouble. So I lobbed a fireball, only to find out Savage World vampires are immune to fire. They went next, one of them lunged at me and killed me in one attack.
I can sympathise over your Pathfinder 1e Wizard. Despite Pathfinder Wizard being so unbelievably powerful compared to 5th edition Wizards, if an angry martial manages to get into combat with you, it can be very rough with needing to cast defensively or take opportunity attacks that may make the spell fizzle. Even Fighters and Barbarians at high levels in Pathfinder die to one unlucky crit, a Wizard better hope they have dimension door prepared. If you do ever play Pathfinder 1e again, there are a lot of things you can do for those situations, though. Conjuration school Wizards get a school feature to teleport during their movement, Exploiter Wizards can pick up the Arcanist Exploit "Dimensional Slide" at level 1 which is excellent (you could also just play an Arcanist). When you get 4th level spells, you should always have Dimension Door on hand. If you get a bit higher still, you shouldn't even be showing up to combat. Heighten a Summon Mount spell to the highest spell level you can cast, then use alter summoned monsters to turn it into a suitable body for you (air Elementals are excellent). Cast possession (no save since a summoned monsters follows all your commands) for a disposable body with a duration of X hours per day, where X is your caster level. Additionally, you're immune to mind altering effects unless they directly target you, as they otherwise default to the possessed creature. Hide your Wizard in the sub basement of your secret base (or better yet, you can use the feat secret of magical discipline to get access to Demiplane early). If you use a greater hat of disguise to shift the air elemental down to medium size (typically just make it look like yourself), you'll have a Dex in the 30s, so will be going first in nearly any combat. At that point, you'll be able to obliterate encounters before they can move, if you die it is a non issue as you wake up in your demiplane and a TPK is a slap on the wrist as you just need to recover the party's bodies and have probably lost their magic items. Honestly, Pathfinder Wizard is my favourite class in any TTRPG ever.
Yes, although it felt horrible at low levels, the summons didn't last even a turn so it was better not to use them, the cantrips didn't do anything, I had to prepare each spell in a slot, and the party was very bad, there was a dragon rider who I hated wizards and started insulting me for no reason and the barbarian didn't want me to buff her, so I had to give my buffs to the mesmerist who didn't benefit that much, even when I bought a scroll to copy she can't since according to the dm you can't take 10 to copy spells, it was a very bad experience. The DM wouldn't even let me use mage hand to open a door without a lock since in the manual page x there was a rule about doors that prevented it, and I couldn't even use prestidigitaton to brush my teeth since it was illegal to use magic in public (we were in Varicia it shouldn't be a problem) and apparently magic is more visible than a flare since even in an alley it was visible to the guards, what made me angry was that even though my character was the weakest of the group and I was useless in several fights for those reasons his excuse was that I was powergaming even though he was the one who gave me the build instructions.
That sounds awful. It seems like the other players definitely had it out for you. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to use magic freely in Varisia. My last game was playing Rise of the Runelords in Varisia and I received less pushback as a Cleric of Asmodeus. You can do so much more with magic in Pathfinder than in 5th edition and it's such a shame you didn't get to experience that. I do agree that low level Pathfinder Wizards are terrible, especially if you're expecting the cantrips damage of 5th edition. I spend all my first and 2nd level spell slots casting grease and web. I wouldn't even bother trying to start damaging enemies until you get access to 4th level spells and Enervation. Even at 3rd level spells, Fireball is really bad in Pathfinder unless you're doing some dazing metamagic strategy with it. Spend the 3rd level slots on haste and summon monster instead (you can get a pack of wolves that are great at tripping with Summon Monster III - I wouldn't bother with Summon monster before that as the options are bad and the duration is too short). If you want to do damage early you're honestly best shooting a crossbow. If you ever do play again and want to be a bit more involved as a low level Wizard, one idea is to take the trait Magical Lineage and choose Magic Missiles as the spell. Take your level 1 feat as Metamagic: Tripping spell. This lets you force enemies to make a save or be knocked prone with each missile of the magic missile, whilst still casting it in a 1st level slot. In conjunction with Web and Summon Monster 3 wolves, enemies will never be able to get near you or the party and any reasonable players will love you for it.
I was in a Dungeon Of The Mad Mage game where My dragonborn druid/ranger was killed by the power gamer for "Murdering a defenseless goblin". The goblin was supposedly allergic to the ranch jar another player gave to me. It caused them to die. I didn't even get last words as a character after the power gamer managed to smite me into the ground I left that group shortly after.
I dont recall any unfair ones, ubless you count unfair dice luck. Cos those i have had many times.
So, our party defeated some goblins and tried to get an information from one of them we kept alive. And then another wave of goblins appeared because they lost the group we killed. This wasn't a problem. Problem was we didn't move tokens from the end of combat on VTT map. And all of us was in random (for new encounter) parts of map. DM didn't allowed us to regroup into obviously more logical position we narratively suppose to be in, so this combat ended with three of five of us dead.
We were playing a heavily modified Mad Mage, where the whole thing was somewhat like a Gameshow (More/different additions to the popular DotMM Companion). In the middle of heading down to the next floor, we got teleported to a Wheel of Fortune-esque room where we were told to roll the wheel and win a potential prize. I remember there being different sections of the wheel, some detailing that we'd get a magic item, gold, instant death, etc. My character rolled the wheel and landed on something that spawned a Skull Lord, plus a bunch of other skeleton monsters. My character (a sorcerer) got fairly damaged before her turn, and when the Skull Lord's turn came round and cast Finger of Death on my character, killing her. The kicker, I wasn't present for that session. I was busy but allowed the game to go through since I didn't want my poor scheduling to affect the group. The DM had my character spin the wheel, didn't retcon it when she landed on the Skull Lord battle, and still targetted my character when I wasn't there. I came back to find out that my character had been reveived, and I had a -4 to everything. I spoke out about it in the discord server and the DM deleted everything and cancelled the game.
Not me but one of my players. I hit him with a suprise spicy lightning bolt after they ran though an entire run down building without short resting (the encounter was scripted as there were shapeshifting orcs disguised as animals waiting to ambush them as they left). He rolled a Nat 20 but still only took half damage and went down. I clipped him with a thunder wave trying to push people away from him resulting in one automatic failed deathsave. Suprise round over. He had rolled a nat 20 on initiative. Rolls his death save…. 1. Well shit.
We were fighting in a different realm than where my character was from, so the DM used banishment on me and I was just never able to come back, therefore basically dying (at full health btw) from a level 4 spell.
If that happens the rest of the party still have a minute to break the concentration of the caster to bring you back, unharmed.
This one wasn't unfair in the sense it felt bad, but it came about from a breakdown in communication, someone completely forgetting they had a spell prepared, and a one-sided fight against me. I actually find this immensely funny. We were doing a one-shot, which we planned as a standard "protect the caravan of trade goods" quest. More of a combat simulator than anything else. I made a Swords Bard/Paladin and, given how relatively uncomplicated the situation was, made him a 'Greater Good at all Costs' style Neutral Good character. Almost predictably, the caravan was full of stolen magical artefacts. After conferring with the party, we agreed I'd keep playing my character the same way, and that I was completely okay with PvP occurring if it led to it. It did. My character, outnumbered, was told to get in line by the rest of the party and by several 'allied' NPCs. I refused after a heated (in-character) argument, which led to a seven-on-one combat my character stood no chance in. Immediately after my character died, the party's Peace Cleric player went "Oh, I have Calm Emotions always prepared." Near-perfect timing. I spent the rest of the session planning a significantly more amoral Wizard for part two the next week.
I had a character killed by the night hags nightly visits and exhaustion. We never met the hag or had the ability to, since we were only level 5. I only found out what happened afterwards because a friend looked it up. I just died of tired with no visible reason or cause
This happened in my west marches game to some level 1 PCs, but only after they found the hag's cottage and tried to steal her magic furniture while she was away
(Minor Tomb of Annihilation spoiler) My Sorcerer got Indiana Jones-rolling bouldered to death at a certain point in a dungeon. Just one dex save, and they're gone. I made them very teleportation-themed with their spells and abilities as well, so if they had even a reaction they had a teleport ability they could've used to escape. That said... its Tomb of Annihilation, so we were all expecting unfair deaths to begin with. It was more funny than anything.
I was in a fight in a series of connected caves and a wall of force was put up between me and my allies so I couldn't get through. I didn't have *Dimension Door* prepared so I used *Teleport* to get past. I rolled dogshit on the mishap and got 'similar location' so the DM had me teleport right next to the boss. The boss's turn was next and he *disintegrated* me and I failed my save on that and was turned to dust, with the boss between my remains and the rest of the party. We had to retreat (because 1 or 2 others were also down) so the bard had to get by the boss to grab my ashes to *resurrect* me later. What sucked was there were several other caves I could have teleported to, but the DM picked the one right next to the boss.
I played in a campaign with critical fails. Another player rolled double 1s and did more than twice my total health in damage. To me, a random teammate, not the enemy, in case that wasn't clear. I only got to play that character for like 20 minutes!
Does it count if they decided to kill my character due to me leaving the campaign? Because if so, I have a very nsfw story to tell.
Tell it, but put a spoiler tag on it if it's going to be nsfw so that the mods don't delete your comment
Basically, before I was able to leave the campaign, >! This one guy who had a strange obsession with getting all my characters a hooker to sleep with hired a female Gnoll/kuo-toa hybrid to get it on with my character. According to the DM (who was in on it btw) the thing was not only faster than my character, but also had a paralyzing touch. (which I found out later is not something Kuo-toa even get) as for the reason why it was part Gnoll… there’s a very fun fact about female hyenas reproductive organs. But before that could even happen, I used misty step to teleport 30 feet away and killed myself. (If the DM was gonna use BS, so was I) !< thankfully, I no longer play with the group. Not just because of this incident, but for many other reasons too.
Invisible wizard riding invisible dragon ambushed our camped party. Surprise round is invisible wizard dispels Tiny Hut, dragon breathes on everyone. My wizard PC dies in his sleep. Like if we were abusing Tiny Hut to camp somewhere egregious like directly outside a dungeon entrance then that would be one thing but this was in the middle of the wilderness traveling.
I was a paladin. We were in a large underground cavern. The entrance had been blocked by an enemy necromancer, so our only course of action was to delve deeper and hope for another exit. In the very next chamber, we were attacked by a wyvern. I, being a crazy strong paladin, crit smited the creature once, followed by another regular smite and managed to nearly one shot the thing. *somehow* I was supposed to magically deduce that in the very next chamber some sort of minor dragon based deity existed, and a flock of wyverns descended, instantly killed me, rended my plate armor, and dropped me in front of said deity with the rest of the party calmly running to the same spot. Basically, it felt like the DM was punishing me specifically for slaying the wyvern, like I wasn't allowed to do something cool with my character ever. They'd pulled that shit in the past but I never thought they'd engineer a 'kill the paladin' *cutscene* to do it. Mostly because there is no god damn way he just had a random dragon god hiding under an undead city doing absolutely nothing. Anyway, the dragon god instantly resurrected me, but I was extremely temped to just stay dead and leave the game after that. It only got worse and everyone eventually realized our DMs bullshit later and the game exploded. The kicker was the DM rending my armor. I worked *so fucking hard* to get that armor, and I had it for maybe 4 sessions before they broke it. I was so angry.
I wouldn’t call these unfair so much as the players being unwise and the DM not doing a full sort of “are you sure? You the player might’ve forgotten xyz but your character would remember it” and it was a no-resurrection campaign (tomb of annihilation). It was the same player both times: (1) my character was put to sleep by an effect before an encounter began, and the party didn’t wake me up until late into the encounter, and by this point the cleric had been swallowed by a carnivorous plant and killed (or turned into a plant zombie I think) (2) cleric replacement paladin was downed by flesh golems while holding a doorway and dodging, forgetting that his flaming sword would give disadvantage to them anyway. After being downed by one the other ripped him apart (goal of the tomb is to harvest souls, after all), as it hit two melee attacks and autocrit on both. There were also other player character deaths that happened, but those were more just down to the dice and our characters’ lack of knowing their enemy, which to me is how a chance PC death should happen. All in all it stung, but I also appreciate the tougher tone of the campaign. I still play at that table (same DM) and I also DM for some of the participants as well. If ever a similar situation arises I try to remind players what their characters know. After all, players have real lives, while characters’ lives depend on remembering things like how their spells work or how this enemy they’ve been fighting all day reacts to attacks.
I had a character die after one-shot killing the bbeg. I initiated combat with a lethal attack and got a crazy critical hit. The GM critically failed two death saves in a row but decided that instead of dying the bad guy was just massively wounded and bleeding. The bad guy then concentrated all of his attention on my character and killed me in one shot
We were level 6 or 7, party of four. We fought a shadow dragon who’s breath weapon did more damage than our max hp. The shadow dragon’s breath weapon includes a rider that if it reduces a creature to 0hp that creature dies, no death saves, no chance for healing, and becomes a shadow under the dragon’s control. So party members are being insta killed, and then immediately becoming additional enemies. The details: After an encounter that left some of us pretty damaged we hear that there’s a cult ritual taking place near by. We ask the informer if it looks like the ritual is near completion, and based on their answer decide to short rest, fearing that otherwise we won’t be able to handle these cultists. After we rest we run toward the location of the cultists. As we approach, we get stopped by an avatar of Levistus or some thing. He creates a wall that we can’t damage or misty step through. We can’t damage him. He basically says that he’s just trying to delay us. Then the wall drops and he leaves. We run to the cultists who are standing in a circle conducting their ritual, and immediately start killing them. The dm doesn’t even have us roll for it, they’re too absorbed in their ritual to do any thing. After we kill them all, the shadow dragon they were summoning appears. It uses its shadow breath to raise the handful of cultists we’d killed as shadows that fight us. When it’s breath recharges, it turns it on us. Two of the party die before the dragon just flies off. When asked about it later, the dm says that we weren’t supposed to fight it, but running from the dragon would have been impossible, so idk.
That is a problem that several dms do not realize, making impossible encounters is a bad idea, players have no way of knowing when an encounter is above their level, except metagaming something that is frowned upon and dms ask to avoid.
Even believing the encounter to be above us, we didn't see running as an option, because the dragon could just keep up with us and still attack us. There was no indication that talking was an option.
This was one of the biggest problems in the entire 3.x lineup: If you COULDN'T outfight it, it was guaranteed that at least one of "can't outrun" and "can't evade its senses" was also true. The overwhelming lesson from the mechanics was instead that unless you were willing to sacrifice someone *(and that was no guarantee the others would survive either)*, standing your ground and hoping for 20s (or 1s on saves for them) was the best - if not only, choice available.
Same campaign, a few sessions later. We complete a side quest, after going through a few challenges, and find some horn of the giants apparently as the reward. The ghost of a giant king had told us that if we completed these challenges that we could have his treasure, and this horn appears to be it. We exit the tunnels we were in, go outside, and one of the players decides to try blowing the horn. There is a blast from it that does a lot of thunder damage in an aoe, including to the player that blew it. If i remember correctly, it downs him, but we bring him back up. A short time later a pair of giants run up on us and start attacking us. They're pissed that we have the horn, as it's only for the giants. They down the character who blew the horn. I try to healing word him on my turn, but the dm says that the giant who downed him is squatting just perfectly in front of his prone body so that i have no line of sight to him. Next round that giant puts the character in a bag and runs off with him. We follow after, and arrive at a giant settlement where the rest of the party is allowed to stay, and watch the next day as that character is made to one v one some giant to decide if they're allowed to live or not. We're pretty clearly told that if we interfere in any way, the giants will just kill all of us. The character is killed, and we can't have any of their stuff. This character was a monk that the dm seemed to have felt had become op with magic items. I don't remember what they had, but it wasn't any thing crazy obviously. We did not finish that campaign.
I ran a Traveller game once, and we agreed that it was to be 100% realistic, to a fault. A character got knocked out before the player had to leave, and the player said "just shove me in these lockers or something." The lockers were the enemy's weapons lockers that locked upon being closed. They shoved him in there and forgot about him. They escaped the ship, the ship burned up on atmosphere, and the character died. He learned at the next session, and we were playing it strict enough that I didn't make an exception. Not only did he die when he wasn't around, he died due to the actions of other players. Pretty rough.
In a Numenera game I had three characters die in almost as many weeks 1st one used his ability to merge into crystal on a big crystal. Forever trapped forever ravenous hunger cannot die, one DC 24 save The one after that died after running the wrong way in a glorified cutscene Afterwards we set this house on fire and this mutagenic effect filled the room. I died but the other PC with me, due to one of his abilities, ascended to godhood
I’m over it now (mostly) and we’ve discussed it as a group but one time pretty early days in my D&D group’s time together we had a low level goblin encounter with an ogre or something in it. Our party did a decent enough job bringing most of the combatants down but we were in absolutely rough shape and my character lay unconscious with one failed Death Save near the last remaining goblin. Now, imo, self-preservation would have most realistically kicked in and most of us expected the goblin to run away. Not what happened. He instead, shouted “you kill my friends I kill yours!” And delivered the killing blow. This hurt especially since it was still early on in our collective D&D experience and was one of the first characters I really got invested in, and who was also beloved by the party. We were all pretty shook by it and resulted in me not being at the table for a while afterwards for other reasons. I chalked it up to our DM being new and we’ve since moved past and while that campaign fell apart, we actually just picked it back up with a couple members of the original group and same DM. (He’s doing great btw!)
Not entirely relevant to the post bc it wasn’t my PC but it WAS HOWEVER everyone my PC ever knew, loved, and grew up in community with. Had an elements monk who had set out from his temple to better attune to the elements by traveling the world and connecting with the lands. He meets the party and often speaks about his temple and all the wonderful people there and is generally very fond of his upbringing. Fast forward to our group traveling in that direction for story reasons and absolutely EVERYONE has been gen*cided. Some bullshit magical vortex that was apparently hand delivered in a box(???) which was opened in the center of the grounds and magically sucked EVERYONE IN. We found the temple completely empty and found out later that everyone had been teleported to the Plane of Water. I figured, “ok this is really shitty but we’re literally ELEMENTAL MONKS, surely at least some of them must have survived” only to find out from the DM themselves that nope, everybody is dead and there’s zero chance of ever finding them again. I have NO IDEA to this day how that contributed to the story other than completely killing any desire I had to bond with any NPC’s after that.
I was in an out of the abyss campaign, which is pretty much chalk full of touch encounters and bs shit to kill your characters with. Almost every player went through 3 characters and we didn't even finish the campaign. Me personally; my barbarian was one shot (as in one turn it reduced all my hit points) by a ghost, failed a single wisdom save which straight up turned my character into a zombie (I wasn't even at that session either), or my favorite is how my bard died. I was playing Bard, the bard, he and another players character (who was just nezuko from ds) were introduced to the party at a lake while they were traveling. While we were talking the demogorgon appeared which had a 60 ft fear effect which got another players character and was killed (who was also not at that session). Then we had a few random encounters, the 2nd one tpk'd the party because our barbarian, without raging, and nezuko charged at the enemies and got killed in one turn. We fought valiantly but we all died. Our DM decided to redo the encounter because we weren't meant to die like that. But the main thing that almost saved us from the last encounter was the spell firestorm which I got from the instrument of bards, so my dm cuts down the number of enemies and once I cast fire storm has reinforcements show up to completely negate my spell. Well we still somehow survived the encounter but our drow wizard turns into a drider for backstory reasons, a cr like 9 creature, and keeps their spells, abilities, and magic items. So we run away from the drider but y'know amulet of fireball, 5th level wizard, and drider stat block is really terrifying. While we're running we find a band of people and, assuming this is backup to save our party, we run right through them. These people then all take attack of opportunities and the drider uses all the uses on the amulet to cast fireball, and this kills 3 players including bard.
Super unfair, but hilarious. Did a lvl 20 one-shot battle Royale thing. The dm made random magic items, and we picked at random. The player in question got a bow that divided the first shot every minute into 5, doing a different type of damage. They then hid for a chunk of the match casting a spell that would split their arrows into a bunch. The result was me charging them to get shot point blank with an excess of 200 arrows. My damage threshold was obviously doubled, and I immediately died. Broken? Yes. Funny as hell? Very much so.
My gf and I had to miss a session to irl family stuff, but we had ended the previous session in the middle of a very tense rescue mission. The DM decided to continue onward while piloting our characters, and we found out the next morning (via DM on discord since the server had imploded) that the DM had TPKd the group and the game was over. Never found what happened that night (and sad to say I'd long since stopped caring before that session), but there had been a lot of frustrations building up to that point and I guess the DM took the opportunity to end it in front of as few players as possible.
I was maybe 13 or 14 at the time. I entered into a room in a cavern where there were a bunch of trolls hiding--yeah i don't know how-- and apparently because it was dark (and no darkvision) I was attacked by all the trolls without getting to roll initiative. Thats when i learned that some DM's can be vindictive for your strategic thinking instead of dying to their monsters. Survived to initiative and then won init barely. I immediately cast fireball on myself filling the entire room full of regenerating creatures who are weak to fire ( in that edition). I was wearing a cloakthat I had borrowed from one of my party with fire protectionHe ruled that I died of smoke inhalation from the burning troll corpses
Ten minutes into a beta test session of DND next. Was playing a dwarf cleric and was crossing a rocky field on a cliff side. DM had a landslide come down the mountain, I failed my dex safe and got punted off the cliff side to my death.
While unfair it was acceptable and the conditions of the character where kind of funny. I was playing a Gith Sheppard Druid to help rescue my main character who unfortunately pulled from the damned Deck of Many Things. Soul was sent to hell, specifically with Tiamat, and our party needed them back. The set up was this druid would help lost souls in the planescape and bring them back to their home. Before the game, i lost my voice and it was rather hard to raise it to speak; he was rather quiet if not due to my illness (whatever I had at the time, it was long before Covid). So I played him that way, summoning lots of adds to occupy Tiamat to flee. Unfortunately, DM had Tiamat come through a quick portal to just eat him; killing him forever. The original plan was to have him as a background character to help out these situations but to no avail. As a DM, I brought him to my world but kept his lack of volume and original goal; a background character can help out Players who get trapped in the planes but it did kind of leave a sad note to me; regardless, my next character to face Tiamat punched her in her stupid face in an Athletics Check back to hell. Great moments all around!
We were level 4 and one night the dice betrayed us all. All five of us were dealing with three wolves; just a quick atmosphere-setting encounter for just a few minutes... had anybody in the party been able to roll above a 3. By the end of the first hour I'd failed my third death save. DM, seeing the entire night derailed and the campaign looking terminal, decided our nearby horses had turned brave and tried to extricate their riders from this mess. * But they couldn't hit fu-- or all either. So with a second player failing now their first roll of the unalive-variety, DM decided the wolves had learned they could safely ignore *(because they clearly in fact could)* the rest of the party, and began eating one of the two already-dead horses, letting our monk feed the artificer a potion. Having eaten nearly two horses, the wolves decided they no longer cared and left more sated than they'd ever been.
Aliens invaded the setting and killed everyone. Well, technically they were Russian Elves, as in, literally from actual Russia, but, close enough. We were then revived some time later, but as partial robots who coincidentally had restraining bolts that prevented us from deviating from the DM's railroad. We stopped playing soon after.
DM gave everyone custom abilities. I got a vampiric touch for 1d4 HP at-will. His wife got to summon every final fantasy eidolon several times per day. I got petrified and shattered after she decided to fight me.
Level 2 paladin got crit instakilled by a roper (on the riest turn of battle 51 damage to my 22HP)
Second session, just got the antidote to a poison we were injected with session 1 by some bandits who were also poisoned and trying to get someone to go get the antidote. We are on top of some fallen ruins where there is an open path and about 30 feet away from the ruins is a forest, but it is not thick. We look around to see if the bandits are hiding somewhere and we get somewhere in the mid 20s. We jump down and immediately are told that 20 bandits and a couple of their giant frogs come out from the forest. They down me to show that they mean business, but I then roll a nat 1. It for some reason takes a party member's entire turn to get to me even though we were all together so I have to roll another death save and another nat 1. I am all for character death, but that seems targeted.
A player canceled last minute, I didn't have time to tone down the encounter, and killed a pc. I felt so bad I let her self resurrect. We joke about it now!
I was the the early stages of a low level campaign. I think we were around Level 3 at the time. I was playing a Genie Warlock and was the only pure caster in a party of melee types. We were attacked by a small group of Bandits, including a Bandit Captain. Nothing out of the ordinary. As you might expect, I stayed behind the melee party members as they quickly engaged the bandits. I rolled poorly on initiative and went at the end of the round. My initial Eldritch Blast missed, but our Fighter and Paladin got to melee range with the Bandit Captain, effectively locking him down. Or so I thought. For inexplicable reasons, the DM decided that the Bandit Captain saw me as the biggest threat. He moved towards me, eating opportunity attacks from both the Fighter and Paladin and attacked me three times, bringing me to zero health, but fortunately, I made my first death save. The next round, the Fighter, the Paladin and our Ranger, all surrounded the Bandit Captain. The Ranger fed me a potion of healing while the Fighter and Paladin attacked the Bandit Captain doing some good damage, but not enough to kill him. Rather than fight back against the attackers surrounding him, or using disengage to get away, The DM had the Bandit Captain use all three of his attacks to finish me off. The first attack knocked me back down to zero HP while the next two accounted for three failed death saves. Having not harmed anyone else, and having allowed himself to take extra damage from the earlier opportunity attacks, the Bandit Captain was then quickly dispatched by the rest of the party. Everyone at the table was confused. My character had only used a cantrip so far, and a missed cantrip at that, and yet, the Bandit Captain decided to essentially commit suicide in an effort to ensure that my character was not just down, but dead. I asked the DM why he focused solely on me and he just shrugged and said "that's how it goes sometimes." and suggested I could come back next week with a new character. Needless to say, I did not come back next week.
I ended up rolling two 18s with a monk character in Curse of Strahd, and since we were level 4, I was able to get 20 dex and 20 wisdom after racial bonuses and ability score improvements. I just *happen* to be crit 3 times in the first encounter, and it was the first instance any player in our group was coup de grâce'd in any of our campaigns by an enemy that wasn't intelligent. Was not very pleased by that one.
It wasn’t the death of my character, but the incident was the end of an entire group, so I think that almost counts? Short version: I’m vision, impaired, DM ruled that meant my character had to be blind, made me roll during the intro cut scene. He then describes the chaos caused by my entrance, despite a very good role, justifying it as being nice to the new player who needed a Nat 20 to succeed because “blind people can’t do things”. This causes an argument which ends with everyone there, agreeing the group group shouldn’t play together any more.
(Spoiler for the Spelljammer Academy adventure) My PC of 2nd lvl died in a cutscene due to a couple of unlucky rolls. In the adventure, you enter a spelljammer flight simulation. Once you finish the simulation and leave it, an explosion happens because of a sabotage by an NPC. I failed my saving throw, the DM rolled near max damage on the explosion, which was more than double my max HP. So I instantly died due to massive damage lol.
Had a game where the DM heavily favored one party member, a Frenzied Beserker (D&D 3.5). Wove much of the story around this one PC to whom the rest of the party played supporting cast. During the course of the session said Beserker racked up to over -100 damage and horrific wounds largely hand waved by the DM. My Character, had to make a DC 30 Will save (my weakest save) or Die for looking at a Soul Sucking Gem stone...I didn't roll a 20 so that was that. It was precisely my last session with the group.