Poor Ninja. Dude seems to suffer from perpetual combat failure. And that’s gotta be especially galling when you find yourself standing next to a miniature god of war. Bad enough to suck in regular combat. But when you’re fighting on the vasty plains of Heck, swinging and missing at adorable spider demons, it can get downright discouraging to look over and see your allies KOing balor platoons.
As our unhappy aasimar laments in today’s comic, mean-spirited dice are part of the problem. Getting a run of nat-1s is always unfortunate, bu we tend to notice our crappy rolls more when the stakes are high. Whether it’s God-Pharaohs or Hive Queens or Tiamat that needs face-punched, we all want to feel like we’re moving the needle and making a difference.
I think this has a little something to do with immortality. Given the many, many, many scheduling conflicts that plague this hobby, campaigns have a habit of burning out and fading away. So when one finally goes the distance, we imagine an epic finale. We want to stand triumphant atop the pile of corpses, not buried at its bottom. We want to become legends, both in the fiction and among our gaming groups. Years later and bullshitting with your friends, the phrase, “Oh hey, what was your character’s name in that campaign?” feels friggin’ awful. Ain’t nobody out here trying to become a footnote.
This mess gets compounded thanks to build skill and system mastery. Easy enough to tell yourself, “It’s a team game,” when there’s a next encounter and another foe. Sure your damage output dropped off five levels ago, but you’re still contributing! But now, in the end game, there a no more tomorrows. The power gamer in your group has decided to cut loose and go all out. Your looked-fun-at-the-time build can’t keep up. And your last chance at glory is fast fading away.
So as we contemplate the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, what do you say we trade tales of our own final fights? Did you acquit yourself like a hero, or did the dice desert you in your hour of need? Did you have to watch a buddy steal the final kill? Whatever your woes, tell us your tale down in the comments!
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I once had a character that I tried to kill off in the final session. He was a profoundly broken man who had already lost his best friend / totally-not-love-interest several sessions prior, and I thought going out in a blaze of glory would be a good way to end his story. The dice had other ideas.
He tried to rescue the party from an extradimensional horror that had already shrugged off an attempt to break reality around it by attacking with a lighter. He won. He got in a gun fight with nazis despite having no skill with guns. He won. He tried to tackle the BBEG off the edge of a cliff. They didn’t go over the edge. When a heroic sacrifice was needed to fix a hole in reality, he didn’t have the necessary skills to do it, so another party member had to. In the end, a character that was actively trying to die was one of only two party members to make it out of the final session unscathed.
Sometimes the dice want you to live.
I hope your dude found happiness in the epilogue!
One of my characters got to pull a famous last stand, holding off enemy pursuit so the rest of the team could run and fight again. Buuut that was because I had to leave my old group due to a new work schedule, so I have little love for the event. :-/
I don’t care too much about Ninja, either. Dude’s a contract killer. I’ll grant him he’s more aware of what being a ninja means than, say, a certain dragon. I’ll give him props for fighting on the side of the world, too, because that’s fair. And I will say this, as well: even if Ninja doesn’t die “gloriously”, he dies fighting the hero’s fight. That’s got to be worth something.
You can earn medals just for showing up.
I had to stage one of those “scheduled death” moments for a friend who was moving. It too was vaguely unsatisfying. You want to earn that mess, not have it handed to you by DM fiat.
Okay, everybody. Let’s all say it together:
“PUG PUNCH GOOD!”
😀
Pug punch REAL good!
PUG PUNCH GOOD!
PUG PUNCH GOOD!
Man, that’s an *impressive* pile of corpses Pug has accumulated. You certainly can’t call her “short” with a pedestal like that to stand on.
As to the question, yeah, sometimes that grand climactic campaign-ending battle just doesn’t go the way you want. Last time we had one, we won, but my own contributions didn’t end up contributing much… I *wanted* to exterminate the @$#%ing aboleth (and my character even more so), but a combination of battlefield-lockdown effects and unhelpful dice meant that my role amounted to “draw fire”.
Big oof. I hope at least your buddies went out on a high note? There’s something to be said for helping the other guy to be epic.
I remember one epic final boss battle where I polymorphed into a dragon and pretty much immediately got killed.
I guess advice from the Evil Overlord List applies to heroes, too.
Dragons have a way of declaring “shoot me firs” to the world. At least you looked cool in the process!
Lets see. Paladin dies a glorious death blowing up the pass through the mountain, blocking the incoming army. Secret Agent dies a glorious death by throwing himself on a grenade, thus saving the rest of the group. Fighter takes out the BBEG by bringing the roof down on himself.
My dice actually love when I do a heroic sacrifice and tend to roll high enough for the action to succeed spectacularly. I don’t get a chance to do that often though, because when I get to play (vs DMing) I tend to get stuck as the party leader/healer. So I’m running around trying to keep the rest of the party alive and working toward winning, instead of shining as a solo. So the other players get the stories to tell and I get, “yeah, after I did a drive by healing on you and kept the minions off your ass.”
Heh. I once tried the “bring down the roof” strat. Spent the whole flight plugging away at the ceiling, and finally got the kill… As well as killing the party’s favorite NPC in the AoE.
It was not a popular move. :/
In most of the DM’s worlds I’ve played in, they’ve all had the added rule that, “magic items will go “BOOM” if broken”. That particular character had a pair of spider climb boots, went up a set of stalagmites and stalactites, stuck his +5 vorpal weapon in the ceiling of the cave and snapped it (giant strength ring). The rest of the group was keeping the Balor busy and as soon as they saw me at the top of the stalactite, they took off running for the exits. I waited until they were almost there, yelled some insult at the Balor (don’t remember what it was, this was decades ago) to catch his attention and stop him from running after them. As soon as the last character cleared the room, “snap”
Actually, the spider climb boots were the thieves, but he gave them to the fighter to do this since the player wasn’t willing to lose his character.
I dunno. Being legendarily dice cursed tends to stick out in people’s minds.
“Remember that one time I sucked?” is not a life goal for me. XD
My Frankenstein’s Monster grappling with the villain to prevent them from escaping their exploding lab.
“Let me go you pathetic monster!”
“No! You are the monster! Me? I AM A MAN!”
It was a convention game so I think my character was able to survive it in the end cause the GM fudged something (it was a Powered by the Apocalypse system which I’m not familiar with in the slightest) but I don’t care.
I think this story also kind of works for this topic cause the original reason I was grappling the villain to stop them escaping was because I had an ability that would’ve let me survive the explosion, but due to a bad dice roll I had to make a choice on using this ability or keep grappling the villain (they were some kind of ghost creature and I had an ability that let me ghosttouch).
With my clever strategy ruined I had to make a choice. And it made it even more epic in my mind.
Oh man… You got to go out in glory, KO the villain, AND survive? That’s a triple-whammy! The badass one liner is just the cherry on top. 😀
It was the final fight of one book in a Pathfinder Adventure Path, rather than the final fight of the whole campaign, but speaking of bad dice luck…
So one player HATED bad luck. Particularly crits being scored against him. That’s why he built a character who had like three different abilities that could, potentially, negate crits against him.
You’ll note that I said “Potentially” and probably guess where this is going.
So as expected, the baddie crit him. x4 normal damage with a naginata, power attack, the works. All three of his crit-negation abilities failed to work. His health was still good, so only above-average damage would defeat him, and of course near-maximum was rolled. The healer rushed forward with a Breath of Life spell, and would need to roll nearly minimum to fail to bring him back to life. Of course nearly-minimum was rolled.
We like to say that his death that day happened because he challenged fate with his crit-negation build.
Fate won that battle.
I can just imagine this poor schmo losing his shit. Bet his face turned a wholly original shade of crimson. XD
It was the (very unsatisfying) end to a long-running campaign. Two of the DMs in our rotating roster decided to nuke the campaign without consulting the other DMs or players. Railroaded into a locked chamber where only DM-magic worked, my rogue began lobbing grenades like a madman. The DM noted that the villains took limited fire damage, but the bombs did more damage to the walls than to the bad guys.
The walls.
In a moment of inspiration (and desperation), I lobbed a grenade at the far corner (one of the few spots I hadn’t searched yet and near an exterior hallway– I blew a hole in a secret door. It didn’t save the rest of the party or my rogue, but the one party member who consistently made his saves vs the poison gas, the monk, was able to sprint to the corner, punch his way out, and escape to tell the outside world what had become of us.
Well that sucks. Did you guys decide to press on without the offending DMs?
Wait, Ninja’s an aasimar? What’s Paladin’s race then?