Character Death: Share your stories.

[TheLaughingOne]

So it happens even to the best of characters. A poorly made decision, a bad roll of the dice, Or a Crappy GM or players ruin it..

BUt have you ever had a glorious death for your PC?

A Resolute guard in an attempt to protect their friends like Ganner Rhysode, holding off the Vong so his companions could escape in Star Wars, or Nux, who ascended to Valhalla, Shiny and Chrome, by flipping the Rig to block the canyon in mad Max: Fury Road.

Or Saint Ollanius Pius, who stood before the might of Horus, empowered by Chaos Truely Undivided, to protect the Emperor of Mankind, despite having absolutely no chance. (and anybody dare mentions any terminator armored space marines I will have the Ordo Hereticus and Commissariat on you so fast you'd think they dropped podded in on a cyclonic torpedo!)

I felt kinda like sharing a couple of mine. A good character death is wonderful, more fulfilling then almost anything, though they have to have some point.

The last character i had this happen to was in d 5e D&D game, ST gave us the option to pick backgrounds he enhanced for running in game, i had chosen folk hero.. But in rolling my stats, i only had 1 stat higher then a 10.. And it came out as an 18. Having planned a rogue i put my 18 in dext, and meandered his stats into their other slots (The ST had offered to let me reroll, but i had plans..)

Now, Alunda Kensi was not your normal thief. he wasnt a sneaky backstabbing wall climbing Ninja.. He was a merchant. a Gem trader/cutter. And not very good at that. he made his living going to the kingdoms corrupt guards and buying the goods they had stolen for rather cheap.. How he kept his profit was by palming gold and jewels while making the deal, having gotten them drunk while talking business to start. The kingdom was throughly and completely corrupt in its rulership, and a rebellion started up. On what was to be his last trip to the guards, the rebels attacked, and in the chaos he simply tried to sneak out, dagger out incase of attack, not that it would do much, close combat he had almost no HP, but, could throw a dagger like a Ballista. It wasnt needed however, as when he turned one corner, he ran into the corrupt duke who had taken over the lands after assassinating the old king. Dagger first. The duke died, and the men chasing him mistook it as Alunda having dueled the duke and killed him, and for that, he was held as a hero!

It went sour as soon after the leaders of the rebellion let the propaganda get to far, with rumors of Alun being the old kings long lost son, and other fantastical tales. So in the middle of the night, before things could get even worse, Alun escaped off into the country side, joining up with a group of adventurers who had heard of his "heroism". That said, they quickly figured out how much of the story was true, but kept him along as he had his uses, some minor skill in lock picking, bartering, appraisal, and stunting with his dagger (throwing the blade to cut down chandaliers, nail an escaping villians foot fo the floor, ande ven eliminate a few guards quietly)

I am amazed he made it as far as he had, i think part was the Cleric had a thing for him, and made sure to heal him first.. or it could have just been a heal minor wounds would bounce him almost to max. But in the end the part was up against a Dark Lord, a wizard who was part way to becoming a Lich while channeling the forces of the unnatural outer realm beings. The abomination tore through the party with relative ease, Alunda having hidden most the time as a powerful fear effect had broken his spirit. When it ran out the Abomination had begun monologue-ing, how his triumph was near, and UN-LIMIMTD POW-AH!!

Seeing his chance he threw his dagger, and plunged it into the Abominations eye (rolling a critical) and using an action point (the GM liked that thing so brought it over from 4th edition) Tackled him (also rolling a critical). Which, is a fairly useless action for someone of his size and strength. But being an evil wizard he had made his home with rivers of lava surrounding it. They plummeted some 10 stories from the top of the castle into the lava below. Hence the day was saved by the most unlikely, the small cowardly, incompetent sneak merchant. I left the game after, as rule was when your character dies, your out (though you can rejoin when another slot opens, but you had to be out for a while. But never got the chance to rejoin as had to move with job..))

It was a major scene at the table, and everybody loved it, Even the GM, who had plans (PCs werent going to die, but rescued at last minute through plot means and all, he just ended up rewriting it a little and they continued) But Alunda was remembered for his sacrifice, his dagger kept and heavily enchanted in his memory.

So, while not the best telling, I hope its inspired people to share ome of their stories of past Triumphant Ends. As sometimes in games, your character will die, but it doesnt have to be a sad and meaningless thing.

[HannibalBarca]

When I first started playing tabletop D&D, my brother and I made characters and DM'ed for each other.  One of my first characters was a dwarf fighter.  My brother had one as well, who was the younger brother of mine.  They had an older brother who was later brought into the campaign, precisely because my dwarf brother died a heroic death.  The party of heroes had come to the aid of an endangered town of humans and halflings, who were harassed and raided by a nearby orc tribe.  The plot of the adventure was very much based on The Seven Samurai.  However, instead of defending the village, we preemptively attacked the base of the orcs, which was mostly underground.

Our party bit off more than it could chew.  We tried sneaking in, were found out, then in a rash decision, decided to, once again, hit them head-on to hopefully throw them off-balance and possibly break their morale.  Problem was, we were in their territory, and we ran head-on into a barracks full of orcs, dozens and dozens. 

It became obvious we had to make a break for it or perish.  So my hammer-wielding dwarf warrior guarded the door while the rest made their getaway.  Much like Boromir did in Lord of the Rings, he built a wall of bodies around him defending that door to the last.  He was in a suit of dwarven plate armor, so even being a lowly 2nd level character, he managed to avoid a lot of damage.  The rules for overbearing hadn't been written yet, and the thought of the orcs simply piling on him or bearing him down like the Smith clones did to Neo in the second Matrix movie didn't occur to us.  So I kept on rolling, and my brother kept on rolling, and my stalwart dwarf managed to kill every orc but one in the room through a lot of lucky rolls.  The last one was the more powerful chieftain. 

When the rest of the party figured out the orcs weren't pursuing them, they doubled back yet again and finished off the chieftain.  We roleplayed the last words of my dwarf, and he handed his hammer to his younger dwarf brother, telling him to return it to the clan stronghold.  His brother swore he'd return his body as well and build the tomb himself.

After that adventure, we stretched that one character death into another entire month and a half of playing, returning my character's body to the city of his birth, rolling up the eldest brother dwarf and him joining the party, and defending the dwarven city from an invasion by a greedy neighboring human kingdom.

[thaumaturgeterashi]

I have a story of character death. But instead of one character dying here, the entire party died.

This story takes place in advanced DnD (second edition).  The heroes were a half gray/half aquatic elf (Magus Zeal, my character), a halfling cleric of Ares (Mike Arkon, my brother's character), a figther whose name I don't remember, a halfling thief known as Zell Braggart and a human swashbuckler known as Instantaneous Death.

You read that right.  This guy had spent several campaigns trying to kill of his character.  You can probably see how this is gonna end.

Anyway, Magus had found a serpent staff and was cursed by it; mumbling in his sleep, couldn't bring himself to drop the staff, etc.  My mumblings led us to a pyramid, in which our thief had to cut off her arm just to open the door (she had a ring of regeneration, so it was all good.) We actually spent an entire rl evening trying to leave the pyramid because the DM mentioned the door slamming behind us (it wasn't until she said 'the door is open. you leave. game over.' that we realized we weren't supposed to open the door). Eventually, we entered a room with two eyes that shot lasers and a bunch of other traps.  This happened over a decade ago, so my memory's a little hazy.  Somehow, our human friend got blinded while our thief and fighter were exploring the well in the room (that was filled with skeletons and was beginning to fill with water - there might have been a paladin pc/npc with them, I don't remember).  Shortly after our cleric started featherfalling down the well, I lost sight of our swashbuckling friend, only to find him moments later wandering blindly toward the well.  I tried to stop him, but I think one of us slipped or something, and we both wound up falling in.  The weight of two adult males broke our cleric's featherfalling spell, and all three of us landed at the bottom.

Our DM decided that, since our wizard (me) and our cleric were carrying so many potions and reagents, that the landing triggered a chemical reaction that resulted in a massive explosion, killing everybody's characters.  I didn't think of it at the time, but looking back, I probably should have mentioned the rising water, but it's too late now.

So, that's how an entire adventuring party died in one fell swoop.  We never played with that DM again for unrelated reasons (RL drama, etc).

[zzy123]

Oh man. I had a character in forum based RP once who was trying to be this noble knight but it never worked out for him. He had no head for intrigue but was trapped in such a world and all good he tried to do just ended up going bad and every decision he had to make became harder and harder. There were five PCs in particular who were all super good at intrigue and very, very deceitful. They had this alliance between them going on where they controlled the underworld in a big city as well as the government.

But luck was somehow on my side.

There was a big meeting between the five and my character had recently been betrayed and had guards hunting for him. I knew I was a goner but I thought - where's the last place they'll look for me?

Somehow I managed to sneak into the meeting and decided to just charge the table where the five other guys were. The dice gods must've been on my side that day because I managed to kill all of them in like two rounds of combat before going down under a hail of crossbow bolts and swords. The underworld AND the corrupt half of he government completely collapsed and there was a huge civil war where even more PCs died, including a king. Eventually my character's veeeery distant cousin took the throne and became the first queen to rule in her own right. I proceeded to make her maidservant/assassin as my next character. Never felt so victorious.

[Egoiste]

Most of my P&P RPG experience involved Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play 1st and 2nd Edition. So yeah, I've had a few characters die.

... by a few I mean all of them. Except for a one or two which were allowed to retire in order to become NPC mentors for newer characters, such as a wizard whose survival was largely due to gaining a helpful insanity (being a wizard with a crippling fear of using magic is kind of a helpful insanity when you consider how frequently magic users come to horrible ends in this game), and one other who died later when I used him in an online RP

Now if you're familiar with the system I'm talking about you can probably appreciate that the vast majority of these deaths were shame-filled, ignoble and roundly unimpressive. One character had a random encounter with a halfling offering to bake his likeness into a pie, but as his dooming was, 'The bun, the pastry, and the pie, yea, they art Morr’s dishes!' he was afraid of pastries. Unfortunately another party member took said Halfling up on the offer and when he showed my character the result he found the resemblance so disturbing he gained an insanity point which was enough to tip him over the edge. From then on any contact with pastries would tend to leave him crippled by flashbacks of his pie-trauma, and given that it was currently pie-week it was only a matter of time before this happened in a combat situation. The other party members were pretty good at looking after him thought, but the GM was determined he wouldn't survive, and he didn't. He died on the last day of pie-week. Killed by some random cultist, while reliving his pie-based truama.

That's probably the worst and yes in some ways my favourite character death.