Send in the Clones
If you’ve ever heard of the pile of dead bards, then you already know what’s up. It’s not easy saying goodbye to a beloved PC, but with enough printer ink and a suitably lenient GM, you don’t have to! Just bring in the long lost twin brother / mirror universe version / identically built dude named Fïghtër and you’re good to go! It strains credulity, but hey, as long as the player’s happy, right?
Well, not exactly. You guys know my opinion on PC death. You know that I like for my players to have some kind of say in their PCs’ ultimate fate. However, I also think it behooves a player to move on. PCs have a shelf life, and if the dramatically appropriate climax rolls around, clinging to a PC can ruin the moment. There’s something unsavory about the revolving door of death. It’s the thing that players object to when they say that “easy resurrection cheapens the game.” When I see the sentiment in forums, it’s usually followed up with, “Taking death out of the equation removes all the tension!” For some players that may be true, but for me it’s more about squandering a good tragedy than losing a sense of threat.
Take my last dead player. He was a ranger, and he’d just challenged the Priest King of the Bestial Host to single combat. Now this Priest King was a badass troll with cleric levels, and the fight was friggin’ epic. The besieged townsfolk looked on from the walls. The other players, huddled in their orc disguises, muttered prayers from ringside. And when the Priest King finally lost his last hit point, got booted into the conveniently placed bonfire, and began to smolder fitfully, everyone thought the day was won. The triumphant ranger began making his victory speech. He commanded the Bestial Host to lay down their arms, leave human lands forever, donate to the local puppy orphanage, etc. etc. good guy stuff. Unfortunately, the Priest King had fire resistant armor, and he was slowly regenerating the whole time. Suffice it to say that the ranger didn’t survive surprise-attack-round-2.
The other party members managed to finish off the fire resistant troll. They scattered the horde, saved the day, and even managed to recover the ranger’s body. However, it’s tough to beat dying in single combat against the big bad. The ranger’s warrior spirit refused the party’s resurrection attempts, and I think the campaign was better for that decision. The hero was brave, the villain was treacherous, and the death was memorable. Coming back after that would have been anticlimactic. That’s not an easy call to make, but in my book it makes the player every bit as heroic as the PC.
Question of the day then. Have you ever seen a truly excellent death in a game? Conversely, have you witnessed an ill-conceived resurrection when the PC really ought to have stayed dead? Let’s hear your tales of mostly dead PCs in the comments!
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I have not seen a single good death in my relatively few years of gaming. It’s a shame, really.
On the contrary, I’ve seen the silliest deaths in my games. You know, deaths that make you think “this is really not what I want to be remembered for”. Including a retired PC being canonically swallowed by a Horn of Fog’s fog.
As a player who prefers good roleplay and storytelling, a good death is something I long for. Scenes like a selfish rogue making an unlikely sacrifice to save a friend, a barbarian falling after his rage ends, having just killed the BBEG, that’s the good stuff, man.
You can’t always have that though. Not every battle is epic and deserving of being your final stand, otherwise it wouldn’t be special. Sometimes the dice gods decide you gotta die to poop-flinging goblins, or oversized bats.
Dude… Never exit the story via fog. That mess doesn’t end well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itXQFNRk_wM&t=4m11s
A PC death is a plot development, a player death is a tragedy. 😛
Anyway, story below. Some Death House spoilers involved.
My group nearly TPKed on Death House the first time around, with 4 out of 6 dying. On the first attempt, a Warforged in the group attempted to befriend an Animated Armor, with mixed results. On the second attempt, they found the Warforged’s corpse inside the Animated Armor, who was protective of it. The new group’s Paladin, a skeletal Dwarf from a previous campaign, also attempts to befriend the Armor, half for the armor and half to recover the corpse. He was successful, both in getting the armor to remove the corpse, and in wearing the armor himself. I considered it to be a bit like fantasy Power Armor, granting him the defense of plate mail and the speed of the animated armor (30 vs 25).
Fast forward a bit, and they’ve made their way to Lorgoth the Decayer. Lorgoth is too strong for a level 1 party, particularly one that is melee oriented, and extra-particularly for one that is missing half their members that session. They beat a hasty retreat, with our Power Armor Paladin electing to delay the thing for 1 turn to cover the party’s escape. He grappled it valiantly, roaring in defiance. However, Lorgoth proved much too dangerous for him alone, and he was quickly engulfed, dropping to 0 HP. Fortunately, the Rogue had fled by this point.
Not wanting to TPK the party, I had the Animated Armor take over. Bursting out of Lorgoth with the dying Paladin inside, he sprinted toward the exit. On the way, he encountered the group’s Rogue, bleeding out after a failed save against a trap. The Animated Armor threw him over his shoulder and continued out. Miraculously passing all but one save himself and valiantly tanking the missed one, the armor and the party managed to escape.
However, outside the house, but before anyone could do anything about it, the Paladin’s death saves could hold out no longer. He made the final fail, and his last gasp escaped the armor’s visor. His sacrifice, both directly and indirectly, had saved them all.
The Paladin player elected not to take any of my resurrection options and instead brought in another character, a decision that was assuredly for the best.
Instead, a bit of the Paladin’s soul lingered within his old bones, imbuing the Animated Armor with a portion of his being. Along with the original animus and a bit of the Warforged’s spirit, the animated armor gained a dim sentience. Their intelligence raised to 6, and ancient protective runes flared to life. The whole group agreed on the name for the Armor, “Legion,” for they are many.
Legion the Eldritch Knight now serves as a temporary PC for sessions when the party size drops below 4, then fades back into the background when they return. As a DMPC, I try to keep them from hogging the spotlight. 🙂
Good DMing right there. If the deus ex armor rescue happens just because you don’t want to TPK the party, then you wind up second guessing yourself. “Am I DMing on easy mode?” etc. etc. Because that warforged made the attempt to befriend the armor, and because it was set up with a protective personality, the subsequent escape felt earned. I award you full marks and a coupon for one free coup de grace attempt, redeemable at your nearest unconscious PC.
Dame Julia Servia Valens was a tough old Nosferatu, as strong as an ox and a wanton hedonist even by the standards of other vampires. You’d know her when you see her: Muscular body, skin that crawls like her muscles were made of worms, and that mask. That beautiful, horrible mask that she never took off. Some say she lost her face and it never grew back. Others say it -is- her real face, frozen in a pale, dead rictus by a mutation of her bloodline.
As a Dame of the Invictus and a guardian of her city, she was able to rally her personal guard and the members of her misbegotten clan to set fire to most of a neighboring city just to drive out and kill a rival that had been a thorn in her faction’s side for the past few years. It was a great day for the Invictus, and there was much wealth to be claimed in the looting.
But you don’t put half of a city to the sword without losing a sizable chunk of your humanity.
A city could fall by her command, after all. Why shouldn’t the Invictus embrace such force and power? Why is their leader, the Prince, opening up PEACE talks with their rivals in the church? Why should the Lancea et Sanctum work beside the Invictus, and not under them? Clearly, the leader is getting soft. Weak. He had to be dealt with.
So the Dame, she gets a handful of her most loyal undead soldiers together, and she goes to the church. The Prince and the church’s acting leader, the Bishop, are sealing the deal. So what does she do? Valens draws her twin greataxes, and just like that, the Prince is a pile of ashes.
The Bishop is next, but he has a chance to call in his bodyguards before he gets dusted. Valens has at it with the champion of the church, bringing her weapons and her horrible Nightmare to bear. But in the end, he gains the upper hand, and the Dame is put down. With her dwindling sanity and growing ambition, it was better for the city.
But where does that leave our fair city? Its two leading factions are beheaded, any dream of peace cut to ribbons. Ruinous powers once held in check begin to stir. The surviving Invictus movers and shakers do their best to repair their relations, and the Sanctum accelerate their plans to awaken their ancient Archbishop from his long, torpid slumber~
Maaaaaaan I had a lot of fun as Valens. She want out in a damn good fight, and for better or (mostly) worse, she left her mark on the game in a way that would alter the landscape for centuries to come. I had a tendency to lose characters in our longer WoD games (Valens was my second of…. four, I think?) but that death felt more like I… you know. EARNED it. It was highly satisfying.
This is the interesting piece for me: “She left her mark on the game.” I think that’s what players really want when a character dies. It’s not just that something like tripping and falling onto a sharpened tent stake is a lame death. It’s also a squandered opportunity to leave an impact on the game world. We want to feel like our characters matter to the story, and going out in an epic fight that shakes up the political status quo is a pretty cool way to do that.
My first 5E character, a sorta standard Chaotic Neutral/Stupid Tiefling Criminal Necromancer, died at the end of our High School campaign in a standard ‘Rocks fall, everyone dies’ cause it was the end of the campaign. I, however, don’t want to let Vortigaunt go. Surprisingly, he seems to has more potential coming back from the dead than he did when he was alive. I keep thinking of a variety of ways to bring him back possible class changes as well, and stuff that would account for , if I brought him back into a new campaign, level and magic item loss. He could have a lot more story potential, trying to earn money and resources to bring back the rest of the dead party, or fighting and questing in their honor, to make them proud. Or he sells their souls to a devil to bring himself back, the list goes on. But I’m beginning to wonder if this is a bad thing? I’ve made new and different characters since then, but I keep thinking back to him. Should I let him go? If I bring him back, would it be better as a revision, a new character but with some similar traits/resemblances?
No two ways about it: “Rocks fall, everyone dies ’cause it was the end of the campaign” is going to give you player blue balls. It’s never going to be the same because that group is never going to be the same (assuming that you don’t all come back to your home town for a reunion campaign). You could always wedge the PC into one of your own games as an NPC, but that feels a bit like shooting electricity through a lifeless corpse.
The first game I ever ran was in college. It was a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game, and we were one session away from the big finale. There was going to be an earthquake in San Francisco, the vampires were going to run wild in the city, and the BBEG was going to use the distraction to do BBEG things. That’s never going to happen though. We graduated, went our separate ways, and that game isn’t coming back. I think I prefer it as a happy memory rather than trying to salvage the concept in a different campaign.
I say you should take a note from Jake:
https://awaitingthemuse.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/darktower-quote.jpg
It sucks losing out on the chance for a cool story, but I think there’s value in having “the one that got away” forever in your back pocket.
Good luck out there, and happy gaming.
“There’s something unsavory about the revolving door of death. It’s the thing that players object to when they say that “easy resurrection cheapens the game.” When I see the sentiment in forums, it’s usually followed up with, “Taking death out of the equation removes all the tension!” For some players that may be true, but for me it’s more about squandering a good tragedy than losing a sense of threat.”
One variant rule I’d like to try out in a high heroism game sometime is the “death flag.” Basically, when a character fails three death saves, instead of dying they are knocked unconscious until they are healed or after a long rest (exception: death from massive damage). However, players can at any time choose to “raise the death flag.” When they do this they immediately gain 3 Inspiration Points (and I’ve homebrewed IPs to be much stronger in my games*) but the normal death rules now apply to their character until they finish a long rest, at which point they also lose any unused IPs. This way players can still have that epic moment when they want to put it all on the line to have their moment of glory, either triumphant or heroic final stand, while also stopping a few bad rolls from causing stupid PC deaths like in a random encounter with a rabid flumph. (This rule also works better in games with much more restrictive resurrection).
*Ways Inspiration can be used in my games: a) advantage on a d20 roll, but if the second roll is 1-10 you get a +10 bonus to it, b) cast a single spell from you class list of a level you can cast (up to 5th level) as a 5th level spell and without expending a slot, or c) gain the benefit of an Action Surge.
You might dig Hero Points from Pathfinder. Some neat options in there:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/hero-points/
This is very similar to the “Dead Box” Mechanics of Tenra Banshao Zero. It’s a sort of anime focused system designed around running small stories rather than large scale campaigns like Pathfinder.
In TBZ, characters get more dangerous as they get wounded, because anime. Normally, a character cannot be killed in a scene even if they are reduced to zero vitality. They will fall off a ledge and mysteriously be washed off scene, or be left and presumed dead; but they will survive. “Checking the Dead box” however, shows that a character and a player are willing to go all out in the scene. They get a big dice bonus and can ignore all damage from one attack, usually with suitably cinematic injuries, and if they are reduced to zero vitality this scene, it is over for them.
I actually find that it is a good compromise between “Game as a Battlefield” and “Narrative Storytelling” styles, as it allows a character to be defeated but ensures that a character’s story remains in the hands of the Player that made it. I’ve been pondering ways to work it into other systems.
Dang. That is pretty slick. I’ve never played, but I can practically hear the collective intake of breath as somebody says, “Guys? I’m checking the dead box.”
*Cue Saiyan screaming*
I had a pretty good one a few years ago in a viking themed campaign I designed. Odin appeared in their feast hall one night and tasked them with finding out why the lands to the north had stopped paying the Aesir (Viking Pantheon) tribute.
They found out it was because the land had been taken over by the Jotun (giants) and raided the castle where the leader was staying, in the fight the Beserker (slightly modified Barbarian) was killed by the giant king, one of the players was playing a Valkyrie (modified Paladin), i allowed them to raise the Beserker for the duration of the fight and at the end, when the lands were restored both the Valkyrie and the Beserker returned to Valhalla to drink and fight for all eternity
Nice! Was that end-of-campaign stuff? All bets are off when it’s end-of-campaign time.
Yeah it was the last fight of the game, so I wasn’t gonna make the poor guy sit on the sidelines and watch but it made for a great epilogue for his character.
My favorite character death was a kitsune titan mauler barbarian/mammoth rider. The GM had his own version of kitsune in his homebrew setting. Mine had been runecursed so that she could hulk out – grow in size and gain Haste – but every time she did it, there was a difficult to pass Fort save or she gained a rune-shaped scar and if she ever gained runescars equal to her Con bonus, she dropped dead instantly. No save, no putting it off. Dead Right There. She was the result of magical experimentation by what we called ‘sky nazis’ in the game. They kept nonhumans in forced labor camps and occasionally used them for ‘study.’
Well we were dungeon-diving with the local giant-monster-hunting barbarian population, and their queen and her entourage had come with us. When we made it into the dungeon’s sanctum we started running into creatures with the same curse my Barb had, but mindless and practically undead. Then we found a big bad – a sky nazi caster who proceeded to inform us that he was simply going to collapse the ruins with explosives and teleport out and leave us to die.
The queen’s personal spellcaster stepped up and started counterspelling his attempts to teleport himself to safety, so that he’d be forced to hold off collapsing the dungeon, and we’d all have time to escape.
My barbarian ordered her pet to follow another PC, took the queen’s greatsword, hulked out, and walked back into the room with her greataxe and the queen’s greatsword, and started trying to murder the big bad while delivering an ‘If you want to make more monsters like me you have to survive me first’ speech.
It was a clearly suicidal action and she had no real expectation of surviving it, and the dungeon collapsed while the rest of the group made it out once the queen’s NPC caster ran out of counterspell options.
Had she actually died I would have preferred she stay dead after going out like that, it suited her. But the DM later told me he enjoyed the character so much that if I ever felt like bringing her back he was okay with the queen’s caster NPC having teleported my character away during the collapse. I don’t think I would have, though – that end was just too good.
Interestingly, “deus-ex-nah-i’m-good” is the vocal component to the detonate spell:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/detonate/
One of my characters had some good times with death, even though it might seem to have been a revolving door. Every time I had died was not due to bad luck or carelessness, but because I had used some mechanics and positioning(praise god for immediate actions) to take the lethal a hit that would have killed another member of the party.
It was 2 deaths and a petrification over the course of a level 7-16 epic, it made perfect sense for my character as an older gentleman in a party of practically children, and because of my sacrifice the party went out of the way to get me back. What really made it was that the resurrection was with “reincarnate” and I was a teifling, so the DM had to use a custom race table, and I was using dragon blood to remove the negative levels, and needless to say shit got serious, and I dramatically ruined my characters “happy ending” scenario for the greater good.
I also wrote another character entirely around the Idea of Fighter #37, Though in my case it was Ninja.
Now the tone of this campaign was alot more light hearted and goofy, but long story short, another PCs ancestor saved my village of ninja assassins, incurring the life debt of the whole village. Said ancestor has died, so now a Ninja of the village has appeared to accompany the other PC (and her descendants if necessary) until said debt is repaid.
So the idea is that I play the entire campaign subservient to another PC (although be careful what you ask for, as I am an LE assassin) to the extent that I will die if it is to fulfill their goals or instructions.
Should (or when) i die, another member of the village shows to destroy my corpse for security, and take my place. The DMs setting even made it that as a native of this dimension, my characters could NOT be resurrected.
Build wise the replacement would be very similar (mostly just diffrent types of perform, craft, profession) but each would have their own unique token, age, personality, outlook, voice acting, and relationship to the other PCs. It was made as a great way for me to rapid fire a bunch of roleplaying characters.
What kept killing you?
nothing, I’m still on my first ninja, but the campaigns still young, this DM is doesn’t pull punches, and I’m playing highly offensively.
So what did you reincarnate as?
Half dragon, then forest dragon (second one actually made me weaker, lol)
He was a married man adventuring solely out of necessity (king literally ordered it) so his dream of retiring at home and having a kid was ruined, Plus as the BBEG was a dragon god and his army of dragons.
In the post game he had to flee to the elven forests and hide, even though he won.
What, they don’t have dragon-sized apartments back in the capitol? Tell the king to read up on his Dickson:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Knight
I have a few, all with the same character. Snikkrot Hornbreaker, the cleverest of goblins, has been renamed Snikkrot Many-Deaths. The first time was pretty simple: during an underwater fight against an aboleth, after finally fighting through what must have been the ninth illusion of the fight, lil Snikkrot got tentacle-slapped to death. The rest of the group finished the fight, rushed the corpse of their annoying green friend back to town, and used most of his share of the loot to bring him back.
The second time was kind of annoying. We were assaulting a temple of Asmodeus, and were under the effect of a magic ritual that made us all immune to fear, and could be “spent” on a single reroll, ending the fear immunity. As the trap-finder, Snikkrot had the dangerous job of going first, and had to spend his reroll to pass the save for a trap that would have sent him to hell. Probably Asmodeus’ level of hell, which would have sucked, what with the whole “in your base stabbin’ your dudes” thing. The reroll succeeded, at the cost of loosing fear immunity. Which made the super-charged Phantasmal Killer trap in the next room much worse. Snikkrot saw every Asmodean cleric, zealot, and devil he’d ever killed all coming for him, and his tiny heart gave out. Death #2. The group used an oil of life for that one, but Snikkrot had stolen it from, ironically, a priest of Asmodeus a few months earlier, so it was fine.
The most recent death was possibly the strangest. We were hunting a monster that was essentially a ship-sized crab that ate ships, and had set up residence near our home city’s shipping lanes. Snikkrot spent the fight 1) riding a magical flying ally into the fight, 2) getting swallowed, ally and all, 3) cutting his way to freedom, 4) using magic items to gain flight and invisibility in order to stealthily plant 20 pounds of gun powder (pilfered from a mad bomber almost a year ago) on the beast, only to 5) discover it had blindsight, and get snipped in half by a critical from a claw the size of an elephant.
At this point, Snikkrot has become convinced that death doesn’t apply to him. He’s also planning to fund a team to recover the crab monster with the intent of getting a ship built inside it’s shell, so his followers (more goblins) can go be pirates if this defending-the-city gig doesn’t work out.
Ever hear of story feats?
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/story-feats/arisen-story
37?!? In a row?
Yes. Fighter has been 37 dicks in a row.
IMHO, I thought the number would be bigger. Like maybe 1,137…
Game once a week, die once a week for a 21 years, and you’re still not quite at that number of deaths lol.
This sort of reminds me of the videogame “Destroy All Humans!” wherein every time you die in the game the protagonist is replaced by an identical clone
Destroy All Humans 2 was my first sandbox. I’ve still got the one liners stuck in my head.
Yeah, that’s one of my favorites. It’s a shame it kind of falls apart in the second act.
I had exactly the opposite happen, where my rogue-disguised-as-wizard decided to sit a tough fight out so as to not spoil his disguise. The party was fighting a golem inscribed with a rune of death that connected to each person who attacked it. Once the rune triggered and the entire party failed their saving throws, I was the last party member alive.
We had no means of resurrection available, and the GM wanted to continue the campaign with a new, higher level party. So I had to find a way to retire my character satisfactorily. So I did what any self-respecting rogue would do: collect all the loot off my team’s corpses. Later, with some help from the GM, the new party encountered my old character and I sold all the unique magic items the players were attached to right back to them.
Heh. I guess everyone has their own version of “happily ever after.” It’s just a little different for a rogue.
Did my comment a few comics back inspire this?
What, you mean this comment?
I don’t see a resemblance. Certainly I didn’t pen the script for this comic immediately after reading that comment, which I don’t recall and probably never read. >_>
While my inane questions aren’t inspiring comics, I have to ask:
Does the Handbook universe have an “Eleminster” figure?
That is to say someone whose presence makes adventurers pointless as they have the power, reach, and inclination to solve any problem of sufficient scale.
Someone who always needs a contrived reason not to solve problems for you and prevent adventures from happening. *Angrily shakes cane at 5E’s insistence on the Forgotten realms*
I know of a nondescript shopkeeper who might fit the bill:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/epic-level-npcs
But how will I ever get this feat then!?!?
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/achievement-feats/graverisen-achievement
I can’t think of an “Excelent” death, but we were in an arena fight when a NPC got crit with a slashing weapon… the crit generator rolled Beheaded and that was that. We brought him back as a Kisune using a Salve of the Second Chance… he was human… still, he could have rolled Troglodite, so not bad at least.
2/4 party members went down in my Starfinder game last night. First boss of the first
night clubdungeon. I seriously need to figure out what the resurrection options look like in that game. If there isn’t anything of suitably low level, I might just reskin this as “genomic panacea.” Thanks for the tip!Interestingly I haven’t really seen either. For whatever reason, games I’m in (other than Paranoia) seem to not have much in the way of character deaths.
In fact (other than Paranoia), I’m not sure I’ve ever had a character of mine die. Huh.
I have had characters perform spectacular kills and the explosive sacrifice of a goat in the attempted slaying of a chupacabra though. But that’s basically the opposite of the question for this strip.
Well then. I think I’ve got a pretty solid idea for “Wile E. Coyote: Paranormal Detective Agency” Toon game now.
My favorite was in a Star Wars game I was running. A player had gotten tired of her character, and felt the need to be in charge of the group was grinding her down mentally. During the next session the group entered a crashed star ship looking to salvage enough gear to get them off the junk planet they had been stranded on. The character was minorly Force sensitive. She (and the other Force user in the group) had begun to have bad feelings about the ship, and had decided to leave when they were attacked by a Darksider. She heroically held him off while the group escaped. Three weeks later, while finally building an airship to move around more freely they found themselves under sudden and vicious assault. They easily dealt with a wave of scavengers, only to see the Darksider. They begin a hasty battle and are barely fending off his advance when another enters the fray. After several minutes of fending off impending death they are driving back their new nemeses, they fire up their new airship and begin to fly away. With a final attack, the other force use knocked the helmet off of the Darksider’s new henchman to discover their old leader.
Nice! I’ve gotta ask though: Was this set up between the player and the GM, or was it purely the GM’s move to turn the ex-PC into a villain?
Well, the only PC of mine that ever Died was my Rogue on Halloween special Game Night. All my other PCs somewhow always struggled through, must be because i like playing Fighters so much maybe, they are though.
So we were a Group of Four, in the Woods with some very very Powerfull and pisst of Feycreature at our Neck, (something like Slenderman). It merely touched our Swashbuckler and he Died. Being the dude with the absurd sneaking stat, my Rogue used his Scroll of Invisibility and bailed leaving the Sorcerer and the Alchemist to Die.
Not-Slenderman slaughters Sorcerer. Alchemist who was still fighting at that Point ,all alone grows wings and flys off. Not-Slenderman searches for my Rogue, but he can’t find him because off a Modified Sneak Score of absurdly High.
My Rogue escapes into the Woods. Scroll Runs out. Takes out second Scroll. Epically Fumbles UMD, setting the Scroll aflamed. Now Runs through the Woods hoping no one saw that. Gets cought by a Group of Five quicklings who proceed to stab him in the Gut. Every single one Crits.
So there he died my Rogue, after leaving his Party to Die, like the Coward he was bleeding out, not even killed my the BBEG, but by his Minions. A very Fitting End in my Opinion.
Funnily enough the Alchemist Beastmorph, being our Big Meele Buiser (which pretty much almost always die First in a Horrror story), and being a Child at the same Time (who rarely die in Horror Stroys), managed to survive by virtue of being able to Fly. Whats even more, he was the ONLY Pc who wasn’t extremly selfish, he only fled when everyone else was Dead or had him abondend.
Sometimes, the last girl is a hulked out flying werewolf chemist. An extremely common trope in horror stories. 😛
Correction: Several extremely common tropes in horror stories.
I once played a Chaotic Good Dwarf Fighter in Temple of Elemental Evil. I had taken to recruiting an army of gnomes to patrol the town we started the game in, eventually refurbished a ruined castle as their HQ, and held a banquet to celebrate their efforts to maintain peace while I adventured.
During the feast some sort of creature (I don’t remember what exactly it was called) that was described as a large, hellish, demon toad dropped out of a portal and grabbed my second in command gnome that I had recruited very early on and had come to like a lot as an NPC. I assumed the toad’s plan was to take my gnome back through the portal, and so I declared that I jumped on to it’s back, attacking with both axes, in the hopes that I could use them as hand holds to stay on its back. Both axes hit home, and the DM allowed me to stay on its back after a successful ride check.
However, he warned that if I was taken through the portal there might not be a way to bring me back, but as the toad was taking the captain of my armor and my dwarf was a fervent believer in sacrificial loyalty, I declared that I was willing to risk it, and that, if the toad took me through the portal, I would spend eternity fighting the beasts of the planes, specifically ensuring I kill the toad.
The toad did leave through the portal with me riding it’s back, but my attack distracted it from my gnome enough that he survived the encounter. The DM explained that there was no way to bring me back to the material plane, but that the gnomish army would continue to exist, and that the second in command had chosen to take my mount, my pet guard dog, and the banner of the gnomish army I had raised, and travel through the lands telling the tale of the mighty, bold, sure hearted “Stonegut the Dwarf”, who road a daemon toad in to hell in order to save a soldier under his command.
I accepted this result as frickin baller, and then followed Stonegut up with an incredibly dim witted half orc paladin who thought he was a dwarf.
Was it one of these guys?
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/demon/hezrou/
Almost had a TPK from one of them back on Level 7 of the ol’ megadungeon. Ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.
Also, shame on you for not turning 2nd-in-command-gnome into your next PC. That’s the go-to play right there!
I believe it was one of those guys. Been a few years since it happened.
Also, I didn’t take over the Gnome NPC cause I’d been toying with the idea of playing a half orc paladin that thought he was a dwarf and my PC death gave me the opportunity to try that out. He was fun. 😀
I love that raised-by-another-race trope. My buddy the dwarven druid was raised by elves:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/charactersheet.png
haha, that’s an awesome drawing. 😀
Yes I have seen 2. One was my own. A suicide bombing to kill the BBEG. The other was just such a fitting death the entire table laughed their heads off. The problem is that most RPGs aren’t setup to allow for good deaths. Firstly there are rarely good ways to take damage/hits for allies making heroic sacrifice difficult. Secondly there are typically really good options for escaping combat making staying behind to hold off the enemy fairly pointless. Hard Boss fights are unlikely to be beaten if any party members goes down. Also most games feature some kind of resurrection mechanic common enough that it makes no sense not to use it. Where there is no resurrection mechanic it is rare for GMs to make the game difficult enough to truly threaten a player death(now days anyway ;P).
What system did those deaths happen in? What made them satisfying?
Ah yes. The random comic.
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