In D&D, have you ever had a PC sacrifice themselves to save the party?
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- Опубліковано 10 вер 2024
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I especially loved the first story; I love it when old, forgotten gods are called upon and honored, especially when they offer a reply!
My first DnD character was a barbarian that died valiantly while holding off a demon general while his other party members were escaping through a portal.
He ended up becoming raised from the dead and turned into the general's lieutenant in his army of the damned and became quite the terrifying antagonist until finally laid to rest later on in the campaign, it was very emotional.
Had a really wacky character I played who was a warlock who switched patrons (and spells/eldritch invocations) every day. This wasn't ridiculously broken, as each build was basically just meant to be the most stereotypically [insert patron] warlock of them all, and the DM was in charge of which patron I had every day, sometimes randomly, sometimes just one he wanted to see me deal with. There was a Celestial, an angel named Gabriel, a Fiend, a devil named Mlalock, an Archfey, named Sylvestra, and a Great Old One, a [eldritch screaming] called the Dark that Hates. I promise this becomes important to the story. Anyways, the character's name was Wanderer, as he had been created in a pact between these 4 powers to see which could influence him the most to their aligment, Lawful Good(Gabriel), Lawful Evil(Mlalock), Chaotic Neutral (Sylvestra), and Chaotic Evil (Dark that Hates). He was pingponging between them, and each had their own ways of influencing him. Gabriel would show him compassion, and allow him freedom; Mlalock would explicitly possess his body, turn it into that of a Tiefling; Sylvestra would also possess and use his body to cause chaos; and the Dark would simply use his terrifying magics to influence him. Anyways, we made it to a city that was meant to give each of the characters what they thought they wanted, and for Wanderer, he suddenly was free from all of his patrons. He still had his powers, but they could no longer influence him directly, or choose his powers for him. While the other characters slowly realized that they had business elsewhere, and the city wasn't letting them leave, as they "can be happy here", he started to rethink how he felt about his freedom. Realizing that in fact, his friends being forced to stay here was much like the same imprisonment he was trying to escape, he made a decision. Running into the center of town, he started blasting everything in sight, causing a massive ruckus that drew the attention of the city guards. As his friends escaped, he sent a message to them to say his goodbyes, before blasting the artifact at the center of the city, causing the entire place to vanish. Not even I know specifically what happened, as I lost control of my character, but a few sessions down the line, we ran into him in the Shadowfell, still supposedly free of his patrons.
Oh swag
A doll who severed their strings
Love these stories
My character, Laverna, was an aasimar who died and became a sort of homebrew race between Reborn and Fallen Aasimar. When I do backstory, I do it from the character's perspective. So I only knew as much as the character did. I didn't know her life before dying, only the snippets that she'd seen. I gave the DM those snippets and said they could fill in the rest of the gaps if it fit the story.
One important part of her backstory was that she was revived by an archfey (Trilaxia, Mistress of the Golden House) and made a pact with her, becoming a warlock.
Anyways, about 70 sessions into the campaign, we were in the fey realm dealing with an archfey, Dionaea, who planned to gain control over the entire Fey Realm. Of course, he needed to kill Trilaxia to do that, and Laverna was having none of it. He was way too strong for all of us to take down, and the only option was to somehow trap/seal him away. Being a Reborn with Fey magic, and with Trilaxia at her side, I chose to sacrifice myself by sealing Dionaea's soul inside my body, thus making him mortal and killable. The plan worked and Laverna was dead.
Fast forward to session 122 (or thereabouts). I was playing a Path of the Beast barbarian, Garrick. He was fun, but I was beginning to miss using awesome spells, yet I still wanted to be in the front lines. I was ready to pick another class, either through making a new character or replacing Garrick's class for another one. When I told my DM, he was buzzing with excitement. He told me to do neither. He'll sort it out.
Garrick died towards the end of that session. A dragon got him. The rest of the party was beat up and losing hope. Sure, the dragon was hurt, but it would've taken a lot of effort to kill it with no-one else dying. The DM told me to stay seated.
Suddenly, there's a shimmer in the sky. Dozens of white feathers floated down from above. It was like a comet, and it got closer, and closer, and closer. This stream of light crashed into the dragon with a mighty battle cry.
The DM handed me a new character sheet. Her name was Eir the Soulsealer, but I knew her as Laverna. She was no longer a Reborn, nor a Fallen Aasimar. Her memories were returned to her, as were her former powers. She was a Protector Aasimar and, most important for me, a Paladin.
Knowing who she was, I said "First an archfey, now a dragon. You don't seriously expect me to save your ugly mugs all the time, do you?"
Every screamed and cheered and gasped and cried and it was amazing. She had new armour, new weapons, new abilities. She knew characters we had never met before (some dead, some alive). Through those 70 sessions, I loved Laverna. I wanted her to uncover her past, as did everyone else. And to have her fly in and save everyone just like she did in her final moments? Spectacular.
Edit: DM also gave me Laverna's backstory, now completely filled in. Turns out, she was a Valkyrie who fought in the Hoethian War (very big war that is important in the history of our world), and fell into the Fey Realm during the Cataclysm following, so she was presumed dead. That's when Trilaxia found her. She's a badass and I'm loving every second with her. Also, her new items are cool as shit!! Who knew a magic shield + magic spear combo could be so fun?!
Oh my god I love that
@@billystokes3917 now *that* is the sort of Heavenly awesomeness I can't get enough of!
I once sacrificed an awesome character to save the party. We were getting our asses handed to us by this powerful adversary, so I jumped on his back and teleported us both... to the surface of the sun.
The game came to a crashing, grinding halt as everyone looked at me in shock.
DM said there's no coming back from that. I said, "I know, but I took out the big bad, didn't I?"
The DM rewarded me with a few extra perks when I created my new character.
That’s a Goku move right there
japan tactic
My Warforged artificer mechanic sacrificed himself to fix “the great machine” that allowed time to flow using a wish spell. He was teleported away and was never seen again…
May you rest in piece E.T.H.A.N.
E3-N
So Jamison was an old, retired bard who had gotten on in years, living a life after all the adventures had passed others by. Imagine an old cowboy on his last legs with an acoustic guitar he carried with him at all times. He joined up with the party for one reason, so he could die with his boots on doing the thing he loved instead of sitting in an inn playing songs for tips till his clock ran out. So when the group was up against a demon that a cult had summoned that had knocked down 3 of our party members to almost no hit points and soon was about to finish us off, I told the barbarian of the party to take the rest of our members out as I bought us time, luckily I managed to convince him and incite the demon to focus his attention on me through a viscious mockery and persuasio as the next two turns i blew through my remaining spellslots with counterspells (lorebard) and anything he could do to keep all eyes on him all the while using the song " stand my ground" on his guitar to not only make himself the biggest target but as a spell somatic and verbal component. Casting shatter on both turns my target wasnt the demon but the support pillars in the room and with those taken out I buried myself and the demon in rubble to give my team time to get away and complete my goal of dying with my boots on for this character.
My character was Mazrim DarkWood, a wood elf Swashbuckling Rogue that was an information broker/spy before going on his adventures. A mission went wrong and Mazrim was mortally wounded by his clients. In a primal urge to survive and live, Mazrim met his Undead Warlock Patron in a fever and accepted to serve The Daughter of Decay, one of the Rulers of the Nine Hells who oversaw Undead and Vampires. Flash forward to when Mazrim met and joined the party, he was still trying to be a spy, and even accepted a mission from someone who wanted periodic updates on the party. Mazrim at this time, believed that “money was without sin,” though he never gave a report that would leave a potential enemy to the party, always reporting their movements one step behind. Flash forward again when the centaur Druid was swallowed while we fought a Purple Worm. Mazrim jumped into the Worm and managed to get to the centaur, but the acid damage was brutal and she died within the Worm with Mazrim, who wasn’t exactly a “close friend”, with her. Her last words were a plea for Mazrim to take care of the party. Mazrim emerged as the Worm spat him out, and the only thing left of Wynter the Centaur Druid, was a single centaur leg. After the grim funereal, Mazrim began to change, he began to trust the party more, though his bonds to the Daughter of Decay were frowned upon by the party. Flash forward again and the party was trying to overthrow a tyrannical order from a city. As we planned and went through combat a few times leading up to the final showdown against the leaders, Mazrim’s ties with the Daughter were strengthened, and he received a Pact Weapon called “The Seed of Decay.” My DM is a freaking wizard when it comes to homebrew, and this sword used my Hit Dice to cause extra damage. Additionally, the sword required blood daily, or my hit dice would permanently be reduced. As the battle continued, we reached the last chamber and began the battle, when the evil leaders summoned an ArchDevil, a General for one of the Lords of the Nine Hells. This guy was bad news with passive damaging abilities, lair actions, the whole sha-bang. We tried to Banish him, but this guy had insanely good bonuses and he wouldn’t budge. As the ArchDevil ripped through our lines and began to attack our cleric and ranger, the rest of us all badly wounded, I looked to my DM and asked “If I use all my hit dice and give them to my Pact Weapon, Will the Daughter grant me a boon..?” The DM nodded and what followed had everyone speechless. “Will you give Me everything…?” Mazrim clenches his hand around his sword and remembers the Druids last plea, to take care of them. He sets his jaw and nods “Yes.” Darkness and fog enveloped the room as rotten trees seemed to appear all over, the sounds of crows cawing. A portal opens and the Daughter herself stepped through. She persuaded the ArchDevil to return with her, grabbed Mazrim, and pulled him through the portal with her. Mazrim did not resist, instead dropping his Will (like the Will from a deceased person), a letter to the Party, and the locket of his loved one on the ground as he allowed himself to be taken into the Nine Hells as the party watched frozen. He now is out of my hands forever, my DM told me that the Daughter has changed Mazrim from an elf to a bat like ArchDevil to serve as her General. If I do ever see him again, it will be as an enemy and the Right Hand Man to the Daughter of Decay.
For a bit of backstory, my character was supposed to die here. I was playing Corporation with a group of friends in college, and I had to drop out because cancer struck one of my family members, so I was bowing out of the campaign anyway. The DM was nice enough to give me a final bonus action at 0 HP, and the idea was that the BBEG was going to be the one to get me (I didn't know this at the time).
This was Session 3... if you know anything about TTRPGs, then you know not to introduce the endgame boss to the party this early. They will either kill it or die trying. Worse yet, this was my first ever experience with a TTRPG, and I knew I was going to die. Whatever killed me absolutely had to go down with me.
We were on a naval warship with a mission to steal a weapon from our primary enemy force, and my team was rolling okay on stealth and sneak attacks, but were making excellent progress. I, on the other hand, was playing a Heavy named Javier, essentially a giant walking distraction with an explosive machine gun, and I was rolling great - three crits in two rounds. It should be noted at this point that the DM did not intend for this theft to succeed, so he was starting to get a little worried.
By this point, resources are being diverted away from my party, but they were still under some pretty heavy fire. I'd been rolling decently with my shots, but I knew the moment was coming soon. BBEG, a hulked-out, heavily augmented top brass, appears with an entire battalion of the most heavily armored soldiers anyone in our party has ever seen.
The DM's idea was to scare the party with the BBEG by demonstrating his power on me so that they'd have to retreat. I get shot over a dozen times - dropped to zero HP. At this point, the DM asks me what my final bonus action will be. He expected me to shoot back for as much damage as I possibly could, like Mouse in The Matrix or something, but I had another idea altogether.
In Javier's inventory was an item called the Demon Drink, a remote-controlled explosive Molotov that was, for all intents of purposes, only there to provide a ranged option our party could use if any of us ever ran out of ammo. I should also probably mention that said ammo was also explosive, and there were FIFTEEN of these Demon Drinks in my inventory.
With my last remaining action, I swallowed a Demon Drink and bum-rushed the battalion. I'd already planned on doing this anyway, but the DM was completely blind-sided.
The resulting blast was too many dice for my DM to roll, and as the reality of the situation slowly started to sink in, he explained that with my last act, I vaporized the BBEG and his entire battalion instantly while blowing a MASSIVE hole in the ship. It turns out that I had also blown a massive hole in the rails of the campaign.
To the DM's credit, he explained later that he had a long con that was supposed to play out which would have been awesome. Someone was supposed to discover my dead body and pin the blame on my party's faction, exiling them from their own corporation so that the BBEG, who would become our endgame boss, could take over and put a price on their heads - this obviously didn't happen since my body was vaporized in the explosion.
Also, the weapon my party got away with (that they weren't supposed to have)? A freaking gravity cannon. I actually felt bad for my actions when I discovered just how far I'd thrown this train off the bridge, but thankfully, the DM wasn't mad at me.
tl;dr Killed the endgame boss in Session 3 with a self-sacrifice and let my party get away with an endgame weapon scot-free. Ruined the campaign beyond saving.
A character i had, had a big boy god tier (literally) infection that had been slowly killing him throughout the campaign. BBEG was actually pretty much invincible for the most part. His goal up until that point was to cure his illness, but it wasn't until nearly the last session that he found out he had about 3 days before it became contagious and spread like the plague on crack. He'd been contemplating his death for a long time adamant he was going to survive but realized after that, he wasn't, and there was only one reasonably obvious way to beat the BBEG who at this point had killed gods, made whole kingdoms fall, and planned on ruling everything. Me and him had a love hate relationship and he'd tried to tempt me on multiple occasions to join him, on top of that i (in character) was having issues with the party, so i played a part and caused a fight between myself and the party and joined the BBEG. The party actually thought i joined him, even out of character. They realized what i was doing when me and the BBEG had our last sit down convo. I explained every flaw in his philosophy, why i hated him so much, and how better the world will be without him, i told him that i genuinely did expect him to win, but even if he did he'd be dead in a month anyway, so it really didn't matter anymore. Of course, he dragon ball style evaporated me in a fit of rage but the party learned why i did what i did through a message spell i cast before i got cooked and absolutely SUNK his base, it was on the ocean so they trapped him down there, alone, to slowly die by what my character had been holding back for the course of 2 in and out of game years.
It was so satisfying because he started off as such a dick, and only really cared for himself, thought he was so smart and he could find a way out of any situation without serious loss. He was also tormented by the BBEG, i had low wisdom and it was a mental based BBEG primarily. He was very afraid of the idea of death, and on the tail end of a redemption arc, becoming a good person who was still an ass but did good, while trying to be nice. In one fell swoop, he took out the BBEG, embraced death by his own choice, did one of the most selfless things a person can do, and didn't even try to find some clever way out of it. He just realized his time was up, and used it effectively, which ALSO lived up to a common quote of his "Time and knowledge are the only things that matter."
Short version, got sick, gave it to BBEG but had to see it through. Wrapped up character arc nicely.
Listening to John's story first got me crying at work, that was so glorious
Due to a variety of events, we ended up facing a corrupted archfey (water down for our level) in the Feywild. She had been corrupted by the Chained God, Tharizdun. After the combat, while we were dealing with other issues, there was her throne, which had the piece of Tharizdun in it. Our earth genasi fighter, Rojack, was the most normal person out of us all. We had a halfling wizard, her boyfriend a tiefling cleric of Mystra (me), a half-elf assassin, and a wood elf paladin. Rojack was just a lumberjack in his humble village, suddenly brought out into the wide world of Faerun. On our way to the Feywild, things happened and he had an ironic fate, becoming part tree (honestly we thought he was gonna die from that event, but that's a whole other story). But he was also impulsive, not always thinking things through. so he sat in the chair. And was struck by the power of the Chained God, corrupting him. Soon he would become a vessel for Tharizdun's will, and be a danger to all. not wanting to harm his friend's, and barely clinging to life as his body and soul were corrupted, he crawled to the edge of the tower. Other things had been happening, and the rest of the party had yet to quite realize what was going on. We were handling things by rounds, because of how important who did what was in that moment. And Rojack had rolled bottom initiative for that. So the player had time to think on what was happening, knowing that he was about to convey Rojack's final moments. His turn comes. All he can do is crawl at half speed. so he does that, towards the tower's edge (we were on the blasted out roof). Initiative goes back around. It comes to Rojack's turn, and we've dealt with the other things going on. By now, the player is holding in tears, because he's been dwelling on this. We were playing online so there was no one there to see this, or to try and give him any comfort. In a broken voice, he starts to speak, saying Rojack's final goodbyes as the evil power of Tharizdun starts to gain full control. With the last of his strength, while his body was still his, he pushes himself off of the tower. Not a heroic hurling, not a jaunty wave and flip, but the sad, desperate movement of a man who knew he was going to die anyway, but wanted to go out on his terms, to protect those dear to him, and the world itself.
We later learned that his soul, and that piece of Tharizdun, perhaps the LAST piece of Tharizdun in the infinite existence of the multi-verse, are now the heart and soul of a demi-plane we witnessed the forming of, locked in a stalemate. Or so we hope. And that if the stalemate has finally ended, that it was Rojack who came out on top.
We blew up the world, and by doing so, saved it. This story feels even more epic with everything going on right now. The GetherVerse is an ongoing set of story arcs, is system agnostic (can be played with any game or version), and when it came time for the current group of characters to say goodbye to 4th edition of DND, it was also time to retire a group of high-level characters. The decision was also made at this point to use no copyrighted/licensed character names, places, or anything from "official" materials moving forward. 4th edition DND had a race called Shardmind (crystal people) that came from the Living Gate (a hive mind of all the Shardmind), which protected the world from the Far Realm (Mindflayers and their elder gods).
So, when the demons and angels teamed up to fight the gods, the world was going to be destroyed, but the last epic battles and acts by the players would be to help as many heroes and NPCs survive the Apocalypse War in a massive stasis ritual being cast across the world by hundreds of casters to save thousands of adventurers and citizens. Since the terms "Shardmind", "Living Gate", and "Far Realm" were no longer going to be used moving forward, the Shardmind Arcanist Kal Sieum decided that his character would go to the Living Gate, push it through to the Far Realm, and close the connection to that plane forever. His entire people would spend eternity fighting the monsters there, never being able to return to the world they loved.
I’m playing in a Theros campaign and was playing a Variant human blood hunter, who had this curse as part of their backstory being all their power was kept in their armour so if I so much as took it off for a second my character would disintegrate their physical form as well as their soul. We were in Akros fighting a boss and my character was picked up, I proceeded to drop all my important items and tear off my armour and cause a necrotic explosion that severely damaged the boss we were fighting. I am now playing a new character (Changling bard) and I feel really good about how my character died I felt like it impacted the story and helped the party.
My favorite character was Thaddeus, the goliath barbarian modeled after Kratos. He was best friends with the party's draconic bloodline sorcerer, Eronin. Thaddeus loved all in the party, especially Eronin and the wizard, Kosvir. They had been tasked with tracking down a white dragon, the very same that destroyed Thaddeus' tribe. As the party was flying above the icy lake that housed the drakes den, it slammed through the water, blasting the party with a barrage of ice, ending Kosvir's life. There, is when Thaddeus began his chant. He dropped down, finding Kosvir burried in the snow, closing his eyes. He whispered a hymnal in Giant to him, and to Tyr, the god of justice. Thaddeus did not pray to the gods as he had to do this, alone. He began chanting in Giant, slamming his hammer onto his shield, and shouting to the party to "GO, THIS IS MY FIGHT!" This, coupled with the gifting of his wolf tooth necklace to Eronin, would seal Thaddeus name in the history books. As the dragon came down, Thaddeus slammed his hammer into the beast, caving part of its face in with the force of thunder. Thaddeus hammer had actually been a gift from Eronin, and when he went into combat this time, it had awakened. Lightning parted the sky and Thaddeus' rage, which usually turned him into a primal moster, had instead inscribed lightning bolts across his body as he brutally fought and fought against this dragon. Until the sun set, they kept fighting. And fighting. Until, Thaddeus had finally slew the beast, collapsing a nearby cave onto it's head and shoving his hammer into its eye. Now, Thaddeus has a statue of himself in the capital city, where Eronin resides now, as the golden emperor.
*Mild spoilers for "Descent into Avernus"* In my first ever campain I sacrificed myself. Twice actually. My first character, a LN monk was basically fed up with being a monk and the party not trying to save helpless travelers, that had been enslaved by some hobgoblins. (We had two paladins in the party, both supposedly good aligned.) So he tried to solo rescue them. In the end my stubborn halfling did die, but at least the party regretted their inactivity and saved the travelers after they saw him get wiped out by a fireball.
My second character, Leafs', was a tabaxi arcane trickster rogue, who became a criminal after he was saved from slavery by a shady gnome. So he hated restrains and espacially cages more than anything. He was CG, but I got to admit, he sometimes did act more like a typical CN rogue. Stealing, stealthing, trying to lie but failing miserably, all that good stuff. In the last session of this two year long campain (Descent into Avernus), after we saved Elturel and Zariel, we tried to leave Avernus via portal. But when we entered it, we didn't reach the material plane. Instead a rakshasa by the name of Mahadi, who served Asmodeus (I think), blocked our gate and traped us in a demiplane of his master's design. He explained to us, that we would only get out of there, if one of us would decide to be left behind. We discussed it for quite a while when he reminded us, that he still held the souls of two of our cleric's comrades hostage and even offered to set them free if the cleric would be the one to stay behind. But Leafs' had other plans. He would not let his friend, this sweetheart of a cleric, who ended up in avernus because he liked gutting demons just a little bit too much, suffer the way he had suffered. So he stepped forward and offered himself up, but only under the condition, that the cleric's comrades would be released too. Because Mahadi held a grudge against Leafs' from earlier in the campain, he accepted his terms and conjured a contract. Leafs' read it carefully because he knew he couldn't trust him, but failed an arcana check and saw nothing that forbade him to wander the nine hells freely. So he signed the contract with a devil (by the way not for the first time; earlier in the campain he had signed a contract for food and shelter for civilians in Elturel in exchange for "only" a little favor, which turned out to be the task to free a demon lord from his prison in avernus), which of course had an illusory script on it that specifically stated that he was to be imprisoned for eternity in a tiny cage in the deepest layer of the nine hells. Leafs' just sighed and smiled, claiming he should have known better. The other players, my girlfriend one of them, who thought of Leafs' as more of an annoyance than anything else, were completly stunned and first even refused to leave him behind, but eventually gave in and returned to the material plane. The cleric, who was the last one to leave, refused to say goodbye, but wispered "See you later" and stepped through the portal. One of my favourite moments of the campain.
Rok Nuk, the half orc rogue I'll always remember. A city was swarming with undead and my party was rushing for the coast. Rok set fires to attempt to slow down the undead horde, which did very little unfortunately. Our ranger and bard were getting swarmed right outside of the docked ship supposed to lead us to safety, so Rok Nuk, overcoming his early life choices, sprinted forward and launched himself at the undead grappling his allies. The allies got away, and Rok was last seen drawing his weapons as the horde closed in.
I was DMing my first campaign and the party was made up of four people. One of them, (we’ll call him Bob) however, was absent for a majority of the early game. He and I, sort of as a joke, randomized everything about his character; it was cursed as hell. But anyways, the three consistent party members had just navigated, over the previous session, through A magical disorienting maze arriving in a deep dark cavern with a lake in it. It was easy enough to explain how Bob found them and was able to join the party for this session (something the party would only question later in the camp as many truths were revealed). The lake in this cavern was filled with water elementals though, so two of them gave the party a good fight. The party then, instead of progressing further into the caverns tunnels decided to spend a long rest in the cavern with the lake; they slept only 80-100 ft from the water. When he noticed that the water level of the lake was rapidly rising, Bob was sentry, he woke everyone up. The water had risen to cut off dry escape, but now they could see 6-12 more water elementals shadowing the group as the water continued to rise. They would have to sprint it (athletics checks) to get away, trying to jump over the sections of shallow thin water now starting to meet the cavern walls in places. But the Artificer rolled a nat 1. Before I could, as DM, could bring down the hammer Bob used a magic item he had to imbue the other three party members with the spell Jump. The water was now close and without the spell there was no way they would be able to get away cleanly, but there were only three casts. With few words Bob bid them goodbye and told them to haul ass, as he ran the opposite way and waded into the water. Using every ability and spell he had (lvl 6 sporewarden ranger) he went balls to the wall against 12 water elementals at once. The minute or so he bought saved the party. They were stunned, but mainly surprised (newish players, never experienced a PC death before). Also my first PC death as a DM it was totally unplanned and totally unnecessary, in terms of possibilities; if the party had kept going like Bob suggested they would have been able to find a actual spot to safely rest. It was amazing for me, felt so organic.
Our teams tanky, strong, Dragonborn fighter. We were fighting a literal tank. Most of us were casters or ranged damage dealers but not the fighter. None of us could do much more than slow the tank down. He jumped on board to fight the crew but there were too many of them. He had a lot of flour in his bag of holding and flour is flamible; so he was planning to use his fire breath on it to take as many of the crew as he could before he died. Then he remembered: he also had an EXTREMELY powerful explosive in his bag of holding. When he used his fire breath, it killed him, killed the crew and reduced the tank to little more than a broken, smouldering, metal husk.
DM said he’s been in d&d for 40 years and that was the coolest thing he’s ever seen
Had a player, level 9 life cleric, 1 level warlock. His patron was actually his mother (she wasn't a deity type figure, just his dead mother that helped him out along the way). When his best friend in game died in combat, he beseeched his patron, sacrificed his warlock level for the chance to bring his friend back to life. The chance succeeded and the friend came back. The player told me specifically that he understands he would be a full level behind the party for the rest of the campaign.
6:49
"How do you know all this?"
"Child.. I am a phoenix. I have lived for several millennia. I have seen the rise and fall of countless kingdoms, civilizations come and go, the births and deaths of countless kings, queens, and heroes, and creation of untold numbers of powerful trinkets and weapons. I have been around longer than you will ever be alive, and will continue to exist when the last of your descendants die off. The knowledge of such items is as trivial to me as breathing is to you."
This actually just happened not too long ago, my character sacrificed himself to save the rest of the party and it was probably my favorite d&d moment I've ever had. Basically the character was a harengon bard named Quinn, and he was the type of guy to seem like an a-hole the first time you'd meet him, very loud and direct. But he was hired as the voice of the building party who was making an effort to take on a faction trying to control Waterdeep. Fast forwarding twords the end without giving out spoilers for the modual; Quinn had discovered the other pc's backstories and motivations. The monk/wizard was considered a God like deiti in the village she originated from, only for the place to burn down from pirates, making her lost and without purpose, but an immense power she couldn't fully control. The Rouge vampire had been cursed by the very vampire he was hunting hundreds of years prior, once cursed he was forced as a new fledgling vampire to devour his own wife and child, he's lived with the guilt ever since and just wants to break the curse. A warlock warforged who was built to kill with only that purpose in mind, to one day gain true conscious and escape the confines of war and escape to the outskirts of the nation, who is now in constant conflict with himself if he can truly be free, or if he will always be a slave to others wills to kill. And finally a half-elf paladin who constantly puts on the "I'm lawful good" face and acts as the god powered team backbone. (Apologies that was long) But after all those stories of massive impact to probably future campaign events, Quinn was just a kid from the sticks who only wanted to help his little sister with money since he basically raised her. Quinn, in the face of these great people, started feeling worthless, he had all this money, but no way to truly contribute to the party, the only things he could do where easily outdoor but any other member, and Quinn explained as much to the Monk/Wizard shortly before entering the final dungeon of the module. But the one thing Quinn held above all else was the emense care he held for those he truly cared about, so during the final fight of the dungeon, everyone had been hit badly except Quinn, he had been a backing who stayed mostly out of sight casting whatever healing spells he could trying to keep his friends up. But once the spell slots were depleted he understood that he physically couldn't do anything to help anymore and the feelings of worthlessness became present in his mind again. In a split second however he made a decision, with everyone low on hit points, and the party without any way to heal up, hecould stillbe useful, he could at least do that. So he rushed the BBEG and with his -1 strength punched him in the face spit on him, calling him names and insulting his goals and motivations. And as you can expect the BBEG took it personally and completely focused Quinn, after about three rounds of complete attention on Quinn and multiple massive blows later, Quinn wasn't looking good, (I think he was on 2 hit points). As one last insult to ensure the attention of the BBEG Quinn uttered his final words, while intensely bleeding and missing his left eye, he looked up at him and said, "In the face of all these people, these gods and kind hearts, your really gonna lose because of one kid from the sticks?" And with that a final blow was delt to Quinn, doing almost bouble his total hit points, aka instant kill. Quinn fell finally thinking he was useful, knowing he gave others the chance to complete their stories. He was buried outside an old tavern they purchased, and it was named the lucky foot (a name Quinn origanly pitched but was turned down). The party would go on to find what they were all searching for, knowing that they were there, because a kid from the sticks wanted them to.
I made a zealot barbarian fully intended to make him sacrifice himself, but the party always found a way to save him.
He is now on the path to demi-godhood and death is now more of an optional Thing.
My character, Adam Goldwick (Level 7 Human Gunslinger Artificer) was escaping from a cursed temple with 2 other party members. There were Undead everywhere, we tried our best to dodge them but when we got to the entrance, a while army was waiting for us and killing off all the innocent explorers. Adam in a heart clenching moment gifts one of the 2 party members his Winged Boots and wished them goodbye. Adam rushed in the Undead army grabbing their attention from the party and most innocents who managed to escape. Adam, did not survive the encounter.
Side note, the Pharaoh was inpressed by his bravery and turned him into a semi-lich. Basically he has a Philactery now and when he dues he regenerates at his philcatery losing 1 level.
Had me a Bard at one point, they were a kind soul with tragic history, ya know, classic hero stuff, the campaign had run for roughly 14 sessions, this being a super short campaign as a beginners intro, in the final battle were fighting this corrupted king, bbeg classic asshole monarch who refuses to do what's good for the people, my bard has two traits of note, "everything I do is for the people" and "Always looking for a good story", we chase our BBEG to the top of his castle and end up fighting on a large open balcony, where he uses the open sky to summon lighting strikes, long battle ensues and the party of 6 is wrecked, 3 of 6 are down and the last three, a halfling mage, crazy artificer, and our dashing young bard are all that's left on slivers of health, the bbeg is stood over our paladin about to start a death blow when my turn comes up. I ask the Dm to let me evoke a "This is a major moment, can I do something batshit insane" rule, she approves, in exchange for an 18 or higher on a d20, queue a 19. My character sends a message to our mage through psychic link,
"Tell them I said thank you,
It was a hell of a story,
Make sure you tell it."
And this bard, that hasn't killed a single entity the whole game, skimming by with 20 charisma and sleep spells, dashes at the bbeg, drawing their dagger and sliding it into the gap of his plates on his leg, and with a grapple, takes themselves and the BBEG over the edge of the balcony.
The party was dead silent for a solid few minutes as the event rang out, our last session, the last roll, and last success, a 19.
I still play that bard whenever I get the chance.
Had a friend’s character try to sacrifice themselves. He got a nat 20 on a strength and lifted an iron gate up just enough for us the crawl through. Several minions swarmed his character. Much to our surprise, he managed to fight them all off. The DM had to make up a miniboss on the fly to try and give him the noble death they had been planning. However, his character had the luck of gods with his rolls and managed to defeat the enemy before him. Kokoro the masked warrior became a legend of might and determination.
I have one. Back when I was a lot less experienced as a DM, I was running kingmaker. Kingmaker has a random encounter table for exploration that contains a will'o'wisp. Bieng new to dmming and not understanding that not all encounters have to be straight up fights, I let the encounter just run. The players were too low level and didn't have the gear, so the wisp was kicking Thier asses. I should have stopped there to rework the encounter, but I was an idiot. So my more experienced player friend had to draw it off so the rest of the group could scarper. We had a long talk after that about different ways I could set up encounters and I learned a lot about how to handle encounters too difficult for players to handle and how they can be used without turning a game into some sort of meat grinder.
My part was once being chased by a nightwalker and we were nowhere near able to take it(we were lvl 6). So my friend decided to hold it off and distract it while the rest of us got away. 10 minutes later, he came galloping out of the woods on a magic flying ghost Llama which used to be his pet when it was alive. Apparently blinding them is very effective
Lets see:
- Cast heat metal on myself and threw my character onto a pile of oil-soaked gunpowder, turning into a living bullet shot directly into the throat of a sand whale
- Stood between an eldritch entity (one of the big ones) and an infinite-storage magic vacuum, instantly killing myself and the entity
- Had a pit fiend heart implanted in my chest after saving the last devils of hell (that's a long story), becoming hell-infused general grievous to combat a world-ending bone titan, which still nearly one-shot me on round 1as I ate 300+ damage
It should be mentioned that these all happened to the same character in the same campaign. H4M (Ham), you will be missed.
TLDR: My character accidentally Kamikazed himself and the 200 monsters following him to save the party from a TPK in an area that was too high of level
I had a character not too long ago named Guy Gurig who was a totem barbarian go out in an absolutely spectacular way. It was partially by accident but also intentional. My character and the rest of the party were exploring a abandoned fort that a group of mercenaries had been keeping up in. Those mercenaries hadn't been heard from In about 2 months so the leader of the military group that hired them hired us to go see what was up and to secure the fort. We arrive there with no difficulties and when we do there's absolutely no one there.
Which was strange because there was an estimated 50 or so that were supposed to be there. A lot of their equipment was there as well as a large swath of mining equipment. Some of the clearly listed rosters of equipment showed that some of it was missing but other than that that was the only thing strange besides the disappearance.
We travel through the entirety of the fort till we ran into the armory and managed to get inside. On the back wall of this very old fort armory was what appeared to be a door leading into the mountain that it was part of. So we got it open with again no difficulty at all as the lock on it was broken from years of wear and tear.
We travel down the corridor some 90 ft until we entered and what appeared to be an old monastery. There were old religious items around. Painted murals upon the walls. And even a destroyed shrine. We thought it was strange as no one mentioned the fact that there was a monastery below the old fort that predated it by quite a bit but regardless we pushed on in the hopes that they were just down here when we arrived. That was until we came to the end of the very last corridor we could explore. A faint glowing glyph lie upon the wall and since I rolled a one on arcana and I knew that it was something bad. I sadly was forced to keep my mouth shut as my barbarian had low intelligence as is. They failed their arcana checks and once they put their hands on it they rather loud noise began to play like an alarm and the wall began to open up. When it opened up we almost immediately found where the 50 men have gone. They were all laying in various states so decomposition across the ground and some were even reduced to skeletal like features due to what was in the room. As the door fully opened and my character tried to shut the secret passage once again.
We could see that there was no less than 200 nadders (half scorpion half spider like monsters the sized of a small dog) coming from the back of the room where there were feasting upon the dead. They began to swarm towards and despite my efforts to try and close the door with a 19 roll and a plus 10 modifier. The door had slipped into the wall And there was literally nothing to grab on to to pull it back closed. So we chose the next best thing. We ran back towards the armory as it was a straight shot back following that passageway. We had the element of them being far off in the back of the room but with their speed we barely made it to the armory and close the door which still didn't have a lock before they ran into the door. My character held the door shut as these things tried to bash it open and destroy the door.
During this horrible scuffle I had the party swap out with me so that they could hold the door and I could remove a set of bars from the window of the armory and throw out a rope so they could get down. After having done so I moved back to the door just about the same time that they started punching holes in it and one of them stung my character with its scorpion stinger for a DC-22 Constitution save. He failed and kept taking 14 poison damage every turn. And that was just one of them. Seeing how bad that that was my character told them to get out of there and that he would be right behind them.
He knew that if he let these things go even if he got out the window. They were so fast and they could climb along walls too and would easily catch up to them. So him being a barbarian came up with the only idea that he knew how to do. He took one of his spell scrolls that he had collected and proceeded to prepare the spell fireball in an effort to fry the ones that he could before attacking the rest. So as soon as they broke down the door.
He cast fireball and then immediately after used his bonus action to rage to mitigate the damage from the scorpions as he had an item called The Ring of the nine hells that gave him fire immunity. The problem was we did a really piss poor investigation check in the armory and didn't notice that the barrels that were inside of there were full of gun cotton.
When I cast the fireball the entire place went up in a massive explosion That belt 656 fire damage, 204 piercing from Shrapnel, and 104 force. Me being at high level as well as having the tough feat and good charisma. It was looking like I was going to survive but be down of course and these things were clearly dead just from the force of the explosion traveling back into the monastery since the keep where the armory was kind of contain the blast and channeled it down into the monastery. After all the damage was calculated and the absolute shit ton of dice were rolled. I was five damage over the threshold to the insta killed. If I had acted one turn earlier my character would have survived but just be down.
It honestly sucked that my character died by so little and was literally vaporized while it was worth it to save the entire party from a TPK. As he was always the one trying to protect the party and keep them safe. So he managed to do so one last time
I had this extremely noble paladin who was fighting a yeti with his party, and we were losing. we had already lost our warlock (he later came back from a weird giant who healed him, long story) and I knew what I had to do. I was wearing mostly plate armour, so i had our wizard cast heat metal on me as I JUMPED I TI THE MOUTH OF THE YETI. AND I SURVIVED BY SEVERING THE ARTERIES OF THE YETI AFTER SURVIVING THE STOMACH ACIDS ON 2 HP
Man, now I want to know more about John’s fate. Did he become a werewolf?
Tried to. I was playing a dwarf fighter named Urist McDwarf. Urist was a heavily-armored wrestling sort, and he could throw a good haymaker as well. During a dungeon crawl, the party came upon a small band of gnolls. During the first round of combat, one of the party's clerics took a spear to the face and was killed. More gnolls burst into the room from a different entrance. Urist demanded that his allies retreat while he held off the gnolls, but the group was the ride together, die together sort.
They retreated into the hallway they cleared out so they could have a choke point. Urist used his grappling skills to prevent the gnolls from moving past each other, but they were stabbing at him something fierce. The ranger and remaining cleric shot arrows past his shoulders, and the sorcerer laid down some grease. A spear sailed over Urist's head and fatally skewered the ranger. Urist managed to hold off the gnolls long enough for the cleric and sorcerer to clean up, but he bled out just before the combat ended.
Our new characters honored the fallen at the nearby town. Then we wiped to some stirges and the campaign ended. Good times.
In our mythic Pathfinder campaign, my first character sacrificed herself but didn't die. The goal of the campaign was to complete a competition that would elevate the winners toGod hood, and the tasks to be completed involved assembling their divine portfolios: what color your worshippers will wear, finding or crafting your favored weapon, and carving out which domains you will offer, that sort of thing.
We were at the stage where we were trying to find a creature who believed in our cause enough and was strong enough to become our herald, a sort of unique divine servant and messenger. Considering our cause was "we think it would be neat to be gods and we made a shady deal with an unknown ineffable entity to help us cheat", it wasn't going very well. On top of that, we were attacked by another contestant and their followers who were upset that we (allegedly) had been raising undead minions. To make matters worse they had already picked their herald, a powerful outsider from the positive energy plane. They attacked our stronghold and slaughtered many of our followers, but ultimately we won and slew both the outsider and the would-be god.
I was playing a bard with a very warped sense of good and evil. She had been guided since childhood by the entity we had made a deal with, and saw mutation and madness as desirable qualities to spread to people in the hopes that they would enjoy them as she did, and despite being evil she did care about the people who followed us. She had reached out to society's outcasts, the shunned and the unhinged, and told them that if they believed in her enough, she would protect them and answer their prayers. But she couldn't. Dozens of them died because she wasn't good enough. She wasn't cut out to be a god. But maybe she could still help...
Sacrificing the mythic power she had worked so hard and given up so much for, she submitted herself to be transformed into the party's herald. She was wicked away to be reshaped and I had to roll up a new character, but eventually she came back as an NPC, almost completely unrecognizable. Her humanoid form was gone, replaced by a swarm of stained glass and crystal shards. Through her facets she peered into the future, seeking out dangers that might befall the party to be able to warn them of it, and to pry out knowledge hidden across the planes.
Playing a Pokémon campaign that had its own rules and engine basically for Pokémon stats. One interesting rule is their chance to hit. They don’t have modifiers to attack but they also have an armor class of 2 usually, plus evasion which is usually less than five.
So, my fighter is wearing mithril chain and usually wields a bow but he has a sword. We come to a room with a bunch of fusion pokemon, there’s a few like mawile/some ghost type I think idk, a cyndiquil/totadile, you get the picture. At the end of the hall there’s a giant steel door. I said I wanted to peek in and see what was in there through the feeding flap. Turns out to be a charizard machamp fusion, and angry as hell. This thing immediately starts ripping down the door and the DM says we should run. Well we do, we start backtracking as we hear this thing break down the door and come running after us. We had grabbed all the Pokémon we could but we came to a fork in the path we had meant to come back to earlier. I thought there might be some Pokémon down there that needed saving so I shoved my Pokémon into the hands of the ranger and told the other fighter to guard her and make sure she got out. I then dashed off the other direction and purposely knocked something over to make a ruckus so the Pokémon would chase me. I also equipped my sword and shield for a total AC of 18 I think. I ran down the hallway and eventually come to a locked door with some pokéballs behind it I tried to open the door and it didn’t work I said I grab it and use brute force, got a high roll and it worked. Jump inside the room as the pokemon follows. I ask to inspect the pokeballs and dm says roll for luck. Nat 20. It’s a lvl50 mecha garchomp. Right as the berserk pokemon rips down the door he’s met with a giant metal garchomp straight to the face. Garchomp goes after it but this thing is a fire type so I didn’t think he stood a fantastic chance. I jump in and start swinging. I figured my 1d8+3 isn’t gonna do a ton so I use my turn to grapple, knock prone, or otherwise hinder his attempt to attack. Luckily he needed an 18 to hit me and that was not happening. This went on for a few turns before I was thrown across the room and the fusion fled the room somehow, I don’t remember how.
Ended up with like twelve health left or something from the whole quest and managed to escape with my new friend.
I didn’t end up dying but I was fully prepared to, even if I did think I had a decent chance of surviving because I’m a tank.
This has also happened two other times in the same campaign, once tanking a mutant feriligator to save my absol and another time staying behind to shoot an arrow at Giratina (I think) because he ate my masterball. I took a hyperbeam to the chest and he took an arrow to the head. I did more damage but I was lvl3 and decided I should probably run. My new quest in life is to enter the shadow realm and get my masterball back. Also to punch as many legendary Pokémon as possible (I’m at 2 and a half).
My character was the sacrifice, and a long con.
I had joined my B-i-L's campaign a bit late after moving back from out of state and made a Dwarven Demolitionist (Vradnir) round out the party of 7-8 players. He was a gruff and chaotic character known for normal dwarf behavior: drinking excessively, gold lust, peeing in random places, making explosives daily, mysteriously mailing a large portion of his earnings away regularly (along with a very nice rocking chair), enhancing satchels and other random items with protective padding and plating; essentially all ordinary behaviors.
Early in his adventures with the party, he happened upon a relic and signed a contract (essentially for his soul) that allowed him to communicate with the BBEG (a goddess of death/darkness). Everyone has a price right? He waffled on the fence, never overtly sabotaging anything for her, but also never trying hard to save any of his 'comrades.'
The party was finally in the BBEG's castle, floating over the capital city we worked out of, when we were magically seperated. Vradnir's contract came due. He was teleported to the throne room where he was offered a seat and wine next to the BBEG herself.
He watched his companions fight tooth and nail to reach the throne room as he worked out his payment from the dark queen; a tinge of sadness running through him. Then she screwed up. The only thing Vuradin wouldn't let slide was her threats against any living family he had if he didn't do exactly as she ordered.
His companions were only a room away and could see him sitting with the dark queen, when he suddenly stood from his seat. In one fell swoop he lit the bandolier of explosives on his chest and pulled out every bomb he had stored away, throwing his reinforced satchel away from him. The resulting blast reduced him to nothing at the epicenter and left the dark queen gasping and gurgling on her own blood, an utter wreck missing most of her body.
Vuradin's comrades finished her off before collecting the Vuradin's satchel.
His satchel contained two letters, one large coinpurse, one small coinpurse, and some assorted items. The first letter was addressed to the party and explained that he had decided on this route shortly before they had embarked to face the queen. He apologized and left them the items in the satchel along with the small coinpurse. It went on to ask them to deliver the second letter, large coinpurse, and satchel to his wife and children (two sons and two daughters, all under 12yrs old).
I hand wrote these letters using paper that I had crumpled up and brought with me to my blue collar job, getting them dirty as I imagined they woulld look if a dwarven demolitionist wrote them after tinkering with explosives and tools. This whole ending caught the players and GM unawares, and the letters landed the finishing blow, leaving everyone misty eyed or crying as I read them to everyone in the room.
The party turned the remnants of the queen's floating castle into a garden and made a memorial for Vuradin. The party's dryad retired to tend the garden and the memorial consisted of the paladin's sword and a plaque. The world kept turning, less one dedicated dwarven father and comrade.
I was actually the one who sacrificed themselves, along with another friend. Our party was investigating a deep mine that provided most of the labor in the town. We were forced to investigate the mine but it turned out in our favor as an npc 11 year old orphan boy my ranger satyr had taken under her wing was trapped down there some how. Finally after a long 2 session dungeon run we reach a huge cavern. In this cavern there were 3 entrances but only 1 entrance, our own, had a bridge to the center. After we see this our DM started a 10 minute timer for us to decide what we were going to do as we had heard a voice that told us "it takes the sacrifice of 2 for the salvation of the rest, otherwise all will fall," implying that if 2 people were sacrificed everyone else would be allowed to cross to the island in the center. I irl text our parties wizard who has been on my side with most of the big decisions, " if i jump, will you follow?" He looks at the text and nods at me. When the time ran out, we still hadn't reached a decision. Our kid had a wand of message that we had found a few sessions back and he messaged me "should i jump?" I shake my head no at him and proceeded to take off my bow of entanglement. I look at our parties Warlock, my irl wife, and tell them "make sure he gets this ok?" Our wizard takes of his cloak and plants his staff in the ground. Together, holding hands, my ranger shaking at the edge of the cliff, we jump off. We fall into an eternal darkness, where a goddess of death makes a deal where, we wont die if we answer her call when she needs us. We agree and reappear. However before we had reappeared, our dm had taken our character sheets, and had to pause for a second to plan as he did not expect this to happen. When we returned to the table he describes as our party is meeting up with our npc and our warlocks parents which had been in the other tunnel. Then suddenly 2 shadows appear and they have the appearance of my ranger and our wizard. The party had to fight us to return us to our normal state and the fight and magic that was used during the fight brought back the goddess of death we had just made the deal with. Later we found out that if we hadnt jumped, our npc child would have as well as the parents of the warlock as they couldnt see each other only us. My wife also told me that her warlock would have pushed me off the cliff, so thats good to know about her character. Not like we got along anyways.
My cleric, Inadrin was in a similar situation, he didn't end up dying but for a few minutes we were all so sure of it.
Inadrin was an elven noble heir. He was very anxious to gain the approval of his parents and had a tendency to worry for people but never liked to show it. this particular battle was one we'd been building up to for a while. we were fighting one of the corrupted leaders of this magical institute all our characters attended; a Dean of life and growth, who had been doing human experiments to create a 'higher' form of existence.
Due to her abilities, she had 2 summons along with her, all of which continuously seemed to regenerate HP. And to top it off we were fighting around a 60 foot deep pit were a giant, living flower of her creation lay semi dormant. (keep in mind our party consists of 4 characters total). As soon as we kill her the giant flower creature which was lying dormant under us comes alive, and lets out poisonous fumes in the air. Most of us fail the save and gain 1 level of exhaustion along with the damage.
It raises up its vines and grabs our rogue and wizard. Inadrin uses his turn to cast the highest level possible of inflict wounds on the vines of the rogue, making sure to break the vines and help her leave. The wizard breaks out on his own and also runs, using some sort of teleport spell to get further; My character also uses all his movement to run but due to having a leg injury only had a speed of 15 feet.
In the next round of combat, he fails the poison save again, now getting 2 levels of exhaustion and being grabbed by the vines himself. The rogue also gets captured again, and the vines retreat to have us suspended over the pit where the flower resides. We can see the bottom bubbles with poison, anyone that gets dragged down is as good as dead.
Inadrin's turn comes immediately after, and he has a single spell slot left. He knows how to cast misty step, but will be unable to save the rogue if he does that. So he reaches out, placing a hand on the vines that grab her and smiling weakly. He tells her to run, to take the others and inform the faculty of what happened here, she tells him to stop saying things like that, but my cleric shakes his head. He's so very tired. Even if he freed himself, he wouldn't be able to make the check to not fall inside the pit, and despite all odds, say he made it to ground, he'd barely crawl 7 feet per turn. (lv 1 exhaustion gives disadvantage to ability checks, lv 2 halves your speed, so a further half to his already low speed of 15)
The wizard has no mana left, and the warlock can do nothing except the free cast of misty step she gets. So they all have to watch as Inadrin uses the last of his strength to cast a high level inflict wounds and free the rogue again. He asks her to say sorry to his parents, sorry that he couldn't become the son they wanted, and once again urges her to run, to not make his sacrifice in vain. The warlock, who he'd been slowly falling for tells him they'll be back, and misty steps away, if only so Inadrin doesn't see her turn her back on him.
The next turn, Inadrin fails the third save against poison and falls to 0 HP with 3 levels of exhaustion while still trapped in the vines, and everyone else spends their turn to simply run. BUT! towards the end of the turn order, we all feel the magic of another dean, one that's been on our side so far. She uses all her power to teleport us out of there, and we end up back to safety. Inadrin is making death saves at this point but quickly gets healing word cast on him (unfortunately, it gets the lowest possible roll and hes alive at 1 hp for the time being)
the party takes a moment for a much needed group hug, but gets immediately hounded by the authorities about what happened in the fight etc. etc. still, its crazy to think just how tense and dramatic the moment was. Inadrin is still alive, and for better or worse has lost the naivety that had him disagreeing with the corrupted professors hes fought. He uses the magic items and research they left behind for his own purposes, but cares not about which path they will lead to.
Not for the whole party, but for one of the other players. In one of the two sessions I DM’d for my old group, there was a PC, an older Dragonborn Warlock serving a nightmare devouring serpent who pulled double duty as a chemist/therapist. He had developed a very close, non-romantic relationship with a younger Tiefling Cleric, whom he had pledged to keep safe to her mother earlier in the campaign.
During one major arc, a powerful Shadowfell creature, aligned with the BBEG Faction they’d been encountering frequently throughout, had delved into a tomb to unleash a powerful immortal construct said to have been sealed there, the party in hot pursuit. The fight ended badly when the creature turned the party’s Fighter against them and succeeded in releasing the construct, forcing them to flee. The doors to the tomb, enchanted to forcibly close should the construct escape, did so. Most of the party escaped, but the Warlock and the Cleric did not, due to distance and some abysmal rolls. Warlock’s turn came, player freaking out trying to work out what to do. Remembered they had Gaseous Form, but only one spell slot left with which to use it. Used it on the Cleric, and forced her to flee with the rest of the party. He fought pretty hard for a few rounds, but was killed by the construct in the end. As he was fighting the turned Fighter and his health got low, he actually used his last turn to move away from the Fighter and closer to the construct specifically because he didn’t want the Fighter to have the memory of killing him.
I then turned his corpse into a fiend that pursued the survivors for the remainder of the campaign, even after the antagonists of the present arc had been dealt with. So that was fun.
The very first session, the party was in a test for wizard school (we didn’t know it was a test or not). All we had to do was grab an egg from a nest.
Cue 4 enemies and a giant eagle attacking us.
2 of our party members go down (making death saving throws) while my character and another are trying to get across a bridge. I block the bridge as the other person ran across.
Then, I cast thunderwave, which destroyed the bridge, myself,the enemies, and both of the other party members.
The other player got to the egg and the simulation ended (thankfully).
Shin the monk jumped on the back of a flying red dragon in order to give the rest of the party time to escape.
Crazy monk managed to play the 'rodeo clown' for two turns before the dice gods turned on him.
I almost held my tears back on the first one
I'm old enough (40s) to have played earlier editions of D&D especially when I was younger, and do a lot of gaming before the current trend towards design and point buy existed, meaning everyone rolled their characters (or cheated heavily with the GM turning a blind eye). One thing I will mention is that "heroic self sacrifice" used to be not entirely uncommon in the old days when people would get stuck with a badly rolled character and want to try again, especially given that many adventures and campaigns were designed to be character munchers and not intended for extremely long term story based play. Ironically one of my favorite PCs was one who I tried numerous times to kill off intentionally in such a fashion, and they kept surviving, being the sole survivor of no less than 3 consecutive old school dungeon crawls. It wasn't that their attributes were terrible in that case, it was that I wanted to play something else, and could never roll the attributes fitting the classes I wanted (we'd roll first and then choose class, old school AD&D had minimum attribute requirements in cases so you couldn't just choose what to be). I'm sure you can probably guess what I was playing if you think about it.... at any rate, since we rotated GMs and sometimes even settings this character survived Castle Greyhawk, Old School Undermountain, AND unlikely as it seems a visit to a version of the infamous "Tomb Of Horrors". On at least three occasions they tried to heroically stay behind to make a last stand while others escaped, and somehow survived (or escaped a trap) while everyone else got mowed down anyway...... old school D&D was sort of alien to what people (including me) do now, but this was all kind of funny at the time, especially since most of the groups realized what I was trying to do. :)
the chaotic evil assassin sacrificed himself to save the party. his mission was to save his sister, and once his sister was with the party, he did what he had to. the party magic user sacrificed as well, basically making a nuke around him, and the assassin ran in to protect him long enough for it to happen. this was the third and final chapter of "the adventures of grt" and it is legendary among our circles to this day. grt himself is a whole ass nother story, and a much longer one, for another day XD
One of my very first sessions was a homebrew campaign. I (a wizard Genasi) was chosen by a long-forgotten god to dethrone the current ruler for their corruptness. My character was told, "With this mission, as good as it will do for these people will come with great sacrifice." I just assumed it was the difficulty of the people under a spell to worship the ruler. our group consisted of a wood elf druid, a human rouge, and 2 Genasi (one wizard and one sorcerer) The other Genasi and myself were brothers. One was blessed with magic passed down through the bloodline and I was left with nothing but to learn myself. We walked into the keep of the King and began combat. After getting in great damage, I was ultimately knocked down. My character awoke after making their saving throws to all but one of our party collapsed on the floor. My brother. Lifted off the ground by his throat. "They did it to buy you time brother. We did it for you." The king killed my brother in front of my very eyes. With the strength I had left, I threw everything I had at the king. (along with a custom rampage bonus from my DM) and defeated him. The most emotional game I had ever played. 3 years of sessions to an end and I was the sole survivor.
Had a player in our group who sacrificed his character all the time. Two notable occurrences I remember:
In ToA, our bard got trapped in a room flooding with wine, and we couldn't open the door. So this guy polymorphed himself into a krill to slip between the door crack, then used his last spell slot to polymorph the bard into a krill so they could get out. Thus trapping himself in the room instead.
Another time, while playing Dragon Heist, we were exploring Xanathar's lair when my character got killed by Xanathar's disintegration beam. Everyone decided to flee except for that player, who used the classic "Bag of Holding, inside another Bag of Holding" trick to sacrifice himself and kill Xanathar.
While these seem like noble acts, in truth, he was a massive power gamer who only wanted to play whatever broken build he found that week. I don't think a single character of his lasted more than 4 or 5 sessions.
In a heavily customized pathfinder game, I played a barbarian/paladin type class called an omdura. His name was Steam Powers, and his was a god of mischief and freedom. In the pursuit of our goals at the time, we found a subterranean city of slavers. Luckily Steam wasn't pure dumb muscle and agreed to play it cool as the party worked to secure our target, on the condition that they do their best to break free the slaves and sew chaos on their way out. To accomplish and position themselves, Steam and another party member signed up for the gladiator pit fights, which is where all the slaves with class levels also ended up. Long story short, we wrecked shop through the ranks of the fights, found our target, and planned to do a quiet bow out after the next fight, while the rest of the party extracted our target.
Then the GM dropped our next opponent on us; the organizer and top fighter of the pits. And her mixed class levels were just ridiculous. Technically the same level as us but able to absorb damage like an abrahms tank and just as fast and damaging as the pair.
In a lucky coincidence, the rest of party got our target and were making their escape nearby and our mage teleported Steam and his battle buddy out of the pit so we could flee. It was absolute pandemonium as we tore through the city and ripped through guards on our way out. Then we got to a broken elevator shaft that would be our quickest exit.
The issue was, although some of us could fly, others couldn't and not everyone was great at climbing. By the sounds we were hearing, we'd be caught by the Organizer and her troops before we fully got away.
So Steam pulled out a potion of giant size, tossed his good gear into the shaft with the party, only keeping his backup greatsword, and told them to get going while he held the entrance. He did this by laying in the entrance and drinking his potion, making him grow so large he plugged the opening.
And as the rest of the party took advantage of the opening, he fought off the arriving soldiers as best he could.
The party doesn't know if he's dead or what, and they haven't returned to find out.
Basically, i was very new to dnd, we went inside a castle that was taken over by a goblin king. perhaps playing my role as a barbarian a bit to well, and genuenly not thinking to thoroughly, i shouted when finding something, this if course led to the goblins finding uss, and we almost dying. The goblin king demanded one of the party to talk about *a peacefull solution* before anyone said anything i said, *none of you would be hurt if it wherent for me shouting, i will take responcibility and meet with the goblin king* i came out of that meeting with 4 fingers left.
Paladin and Cleric who failed the death saves:
"Hey, hey! Look at me. You did it, okay? You're a hero!"
"Ha! Hero...I like the sound of that..."
Cleric died with a smile on their face and the whole table was stuck in stunned silence.
Once I was playing a robot in the world of cyberpunk. My character was an old cargo robot from an old era gone by, but had been upgrading itself into an elite combative machine. At the time we were trying to hack into a pretty big system and a threat was using a cloaking system to sort of be invisible to me and those with artificial eyes. The only player that could see them was the netrunner on our team but they would be busy. We eventually manage to use a makeshift spray paint trap to mark our target and took him down, but we learned too late he was being tracked by a trauma team. In our game, that is a very bad thing to deal with as they come in with guns blazing and are far more powerful than anything we could dream of wielding. We only had a short time to go so I picked up the body tracker and led the team after me while my crew was finishing up. In the end they mowed me down with a heli-mounted gun and I nearly died, but our netrunner managed to upload me to a nearby computer remotely just as I was getting blasted once again. My body got shredded but we all made it out alive. Minus one guy who died after but they were an npc.
We had a campaign we called "The Tomb of the Fallen" the world had ended from an invasion of a Sentient Ooze that lived by stealing the life energy of other nearby living beings, and the world had escaped being totally wiped out by moving to an underground facility that kept everyone's souls in a special database, and rebuilt people in a cycle through the years (we didn't know most of this when we played the campaign, we only found out at the very end). my character had made a deal that the group unanimously called me stupid for involving making a deal with a not so destructive but very much like it Sentient Ooze, where I got a very special book of Summoning that could summon the Sentient version of the invading Oozes, and all I had to do in return was use the book when the creature asked me to. We had travelled to a restricted area where we found out everything there was to know about "The Administrators" of this place, found that 1000 years had passed and all the invaders were dead, all except for the ones that had breached the facility, and that the one party member in the group who had no data on who he was in the system was actually one of the 100 administrators, well our party through a series of choices had managed to circumvent ever boss battle the DM had made, we avoided the instant death Spider robot, shut down and rebooted the System Control (sentient) before it could attack us, and had avoided an encounter with the last remaining Ooze, and because of that, the DM decided that we still had to have something, so he had the Ooze barrel into an elevator that led to the surface and block the only exit out of the place, right into a room where I had set up the "Reconstitution" machines to start spawning everyone, well there was no way any of us could defeat this thing, as looking at it directly causes madness, well, my Eagleman character that I had remembered the book, looked into the rituals and found one for a Sentient Ooze that was known for honor, and he found out that performing the ritual would cost him his life. He made the choice that the lives of everyone was far more important than his own, and he did the ritual, and asked the Ooze to only kill the last mindless Ooze in the way of everyone's freedom. "Your wish shall be granted" my character fell dead and the Sentient Ooze appeared, everyone that looked at him saw a different race, they saw what ever looked like the most honorable race that they could think of. And the Sentient Ooze departed, they could hear the immense battle between it and the mindless one, and that was it. Had I summon any other Ooze, they would have done more that what was asked, but I made the choice that gave everyone exactly what we wanted, millions of people were brought back, and the administrator of the group blew up the facility along with him when everyone got cleared, ensuring that last of the creature got buried there, sadly. I didn't get revived before the explosion either, so I was gone forever, instead the one party member left alive who got heralded as a diety afterwards made sure to tell stories of the Brave Eagleman who sacrificed himself so the world could live
Yes, twas my character. In a homebrew setting. Fighting the big bad, whomst was a dragon who was just had to be a fire breathing dragon. (DM was watching Lord of the rings at the time) I was playing a large human paladin in a party of five. I had a magic shield which gave me resistance to fire damage, think it was a fifteen percent negator. Anyway with the battle raging on and nearly everyone but me and the barbarian dead. I realized we wouldn't make it so I gave the barbarian my shield and had everyone else get behind him. He got down to four hp. The wizard needed another turn to get everyone out. I remember that when I had my turn I yelled, "Come get me you oversized lizard" before charging at the dragon to get it's attention away from the party. It ate my character and because of the heavy steel armor I wore it needed to take a turn to digest me and bought the party enough time to leave.
1:42 Holy crap. If I am not mistaken that last entry must be based on Jon Talbain of Darkstalkers. That call out was awesome!
It was early in a pathfinder campaign, we were in a tower filling with water and a kraken at the bottom. I had a new character that I wanted to play and I felt we were out gunned, so I took my gunslinger and jumped head first into this thing guns a blazing to stall for time. The other pvlc decide that, nope I can't die here and proceed to take an unwinnable fight and drag my unconscious character to safety and run like hell. This character was benched for a bit since second character was already ready for next fight and he went to recuperate. The gunslinger later became a mounted turret of death for the final fight with some legendary levels of sniping. 1600 feet of range, crit on an 18-20 and dealt force damage per shot. Needless to say the dm made us quite op, but that simply meant he could go ALOT harder on us.
In dark heresy, my group unsuccessfully stopped a plaguebearer from being summoned by cultists and I was the only one who didn't fail my jaded test. This meant everyone besides me had to flee. I was running a shotgun marine, and in the end after a 1v1 with the plaguebearer I pulled the pin on all my grenades because I wasn't going to win (obviously) and killed myself and took the demon with me.
Had a gunslinger fighter in one game I played. The party was fighting against a Gravity Dragon (homebrewed obviously). The dragon was powerful and did quite a lot of damage with some strange abilities.
At first the battle went well and the party was doing good. But then the party cleric, Jaun, took a hard hit that nearly dropped them to zero. In the turn they spent healing up back to a decent point, the rest of the party was dropped close to the red by an an AoE effect the dragon had that basically allowed it to generate a mini black hole that would explode.
It was my character's turn next and I had an idea. From the start I'd always had a backup plan for if the party got in way over their head. Moving in close, I entered the dragon's aura. The aura caused any creature within 20 feet of the dragon to have to roll a strength save on their turn or get pulled into the dragon's grasp. While I could have potentially passed the save, instead I willingly failed.
As the dragon grabbed my character in its claws, it didn't expect my character to then grab onto it. He looked back to the rest of the party and smiled.
"Don't worry about finding me. I'll try and find my own way back. You guys stay safe."
And with that I told the rest of the group and the DM what I had been planning as I had my character stuff an extra bag of holding I had into my main bag of holding.
The DM asked me if I knew what I was doing and I agreed. There was little chance that my character would survive being trapped in the Astral sea with a dragon on his own, but I didn't care. So in the next second in game, the dragon and my gunslinger were sucked into a rip in the world and shot off to the Astral sea, leaving the rest of the party alive.
Technically didnt save my party but I tried to. During my first dnd game in 5e I thought it would wise to split away from my party to look for loot. (Just dont, you will die). Anyway I decided it would be wise to jump into a river to see where it would lead. Turns out I swam right into the mouth of a 100 hundred foot waterfall. My monk pc called DJ Phil flung over the edge like a semi obese professional high diver only to land and survive at like 1 hp. I managed to crawl out of the water, only to somehow get knocked out by a small itty bitty fish that I managed to piss off during my glorious belly flop. I failed my first 2 death saves but somehow manage to survive with a nat 20 on my third roll and rolling high on the next roll to bring me back to 1 hp. I had such a knack of getting out of stupid situations I never should have been in, that my dm, in utter disbelief gave me a fourth death save as a home brew reward. (I dont remember the name of the reward but I think it was named after my character.) During my "adventure" Our Party was squaring off against an ooze that eroded anything it came into contact with. Have a sword and try to hit it? Sword is now useless to use. Hit it with your hand? your hand starts melting off. During the battle I managed to do some serious damage with a ranged attack. The angered ooze began to attack my party and between me and saving my party was a tar pit. To get closer to the ooze I needed to make an athletics check to jump over the pit. I fail and fall into the tar pit that just so happened to be also made of the same material as the ooze. Pretty much died the most slowest and most horrific death as Phil sank more and more into the pit in horrific agony. I probably deserved it. Thankfully the ranger in the party finished the ooze off. Probably the best campaign ive ever played. So many wild moments.
One of my players didn't sacrifice himself, but holy shit did he almost. Was DMing the one-shot Frozen Sick. The random encounter chosen was the Young Remorhaz. 3 players, all level 2. 1 starts fuckin running, 1 goes down, and the Goliath barbarian......stands his ground. And starts swinging at the thing. The heated body damage was rolling remarkably low, as well as to hit against the Goliath. Somehow, the down player managed to roll a nat 20 and get up, backing away. The player who ran. Noticed the Goliath was winning, so he started shooting his bow at it. All in all, the Goliath survived with 2 hp, and killed the Young Remorhaz. It was amazing.
Had a Dwarf Barbarian who got extremely lucky and pulled the wish card from a deck of many things after being dared to by a party member. His wish was for a flying, sentient ship, The Yula.
Our quest was to stop an avatar of Asmodeus from returning to the world through a special magic portal (that had a time limit on it cause of stars or something.) I was to supply support from the air since the ship would only take commands from me. Firing blessed bolts from above and dealing big chunks of damage. Unfortunately the DM underestimated the parties chances of ALL of us rolling TERRIBLY! Members were dropping to death saving throws left and right. So I did the first stupid thing that came to mind. I ordered the Yula to crash into the avatar at full speed and fire all bolts on my signal. I attached a rope to every bolt I could (the DM liked where this was going so allowed me some leeway) and we slammed right into the avatars chest I then fired a bolt into whatever I could hit on it. We pushed the avatar back into the hells where the avatar then pulled the Yula from its chest and threw us aside. Not realizing we had tied it up. The avatar struggled to pull away and realized the only way to get loose was by destroying the Yula completely. The Yula could no longer fly/move and being a sucker for old tropes. I decided to go down with my ship, I loaded and fired one more bolt (which I missed completely) and used my movement to move to the bow of the ship and wait for the avatar. The Yula begged for me to escape and try to make it back to the portal but I refused. Needless to say my character was killed EASILY. But it was one of the coolest thing I've ever done as a character. Right up there with riding a Magic dolphin threw the plane of water butt naked with nothing but my axe and oath to avenge my party against a chaotic evil witch we had in the party that betrayed us. That's another story though.
My wife asked me to take over dming her curse of strahd campaign that I was playing in because she wasn’t having fun with it. So my level 4 Bladesinger Wizard told the party to run to the village as the wolves of Strahd were upon them and that he would buy them time.
I ran a completely fair fight off screen, no gimmicks except what buffs the party gave him (shield of faith and heroism I think it was). He solo’ed two dire wolves and four normal wolves. A wizard won largely in melee. The party was surprised for him to show up as a brainwashed thrall of Strahd’s that they then needed to rescue
I had my wizard charge a golem golden defender with melee to let the other party members drag the downed paladin and Rouge to safety. Used a touch lighting bolt ended up giving extra attacks instead of dealing damage. I did manage to take its opportunity attacks and saved the others.
He had a low-level Druid. He knew we couldn’t escape from 20 orcs, so he used his new overpowered flame bow. All of the orcs had explosives, and he shot. We all took 5d20 + 20 damage and the game ended at that TPK.
My gnome ranger sacrificed himself to the BBEG to save his friend.
We were on the sea, on our way to a near continent to chase our lead on the BBEG. In the night, our warlock has a nightmare, culminating in his waking up. "The Walker is near," he hears in his head. The warlock's panic alerts everyone, and we all rush to the deck to see what the trouble is, but there's nothing except a thick fog and a storm. Again he hears it. "The Walker is near." This sends him into a frenzy. He runs to find the captain to warn him of the trouble, but the damn tortle insists it was just the storm. He runs back out to the deck. As everyone is looking for what's causing the warlock's panic, a shadow appears in the water. It hits the boat, and in a flash of lightning an aboleth is revealed. Now everyone hears it. "THE WALKER IS-" But before it can finish a bolt of lightning strikes the boat, revealing a storm giant alongside the aboleth.
We fight hard to defend ourselves, and only end up in one down, our barbarian, with the storm giant killed. However, the aboleth rushes the wizard, and does in most of his health. Our DM rules that if you take a significant amount of damage, you roll a d100 for an effect. Our wizard, on 3hp, gets broken bones, which deals 1d6 damage and downs him. Our DM also rules that on a down you roll for an effect. So he rolls. The fall to the ground damages him, causing an automatic failed death save because of it. We felled the aboleth and went to get the other members up as we'd usually do after a fight. The barbarian got up just fine, but our wizard had a sickly mucus covering him that repelled all healing and stabilizing attempts. We could do nothing except watch as he struggled for life. In the end, he succumbed to his wounds.
Now, this wizard was the best of us. My character, Burnrow, couldn't stand the loss of such a good person. So, he called upon the BBEG. Shouting out its name and rolling a nat 20 persuasion, Burnrow summoned the fiend that's been tormenting us. Burnrow demands the fiend to revive his fallen friend, saying he'd offer anything to get him back. The fiend smiles and tells Burnrow that he knows what the fiend wants. Burnrow says to him he doesn't have the artefact. But the fiend shakes his head and tells him: "I want you." Still not understanding, Burnrow tells him that he doesn't know what the fiend means. "I want your help," the fiend replies as he, and the DM, extends his hand.
A moment of deliberation before I walk up to the DM to shake his hand. Both the fiend and Burnrow disappear. Where Burnrow was standing is a single word etched into the deck: Revivify. Our druid quickly pulls out a diamond, speaks the word, and we cut to the afterlife. Our wizard is standing in a dream world. Everything he's ever wanted is in front of him. He's about to walk in, but he feels a tug. He turns back and sees his friends, yelling over his body to get up, but he turns away from the hell he just escaped. Almost a minute passes. The wizard looks back again, just before the connection is closed, and sees his friends in so much pain over the loss of their friend. Upon the final second before the portal disappeared, he ran back and was alive again.
I was the PC who made the sacrifice, but not for their lives. We were playing a heavily modified version of Legend of the Five Rings, and the party was as such.
An anti social sword smith, blessed by fire, from the Crane Clan. Being from the most socially inclined and diplomatically capable clan in all of Rokugan meant that her anti social nature wasn’t tolerated so much. However, she was better than her sensei while being a fraction of his age.
A hardened, demon slaying shugenja, blessed by earth, from the Crab Clan. This guy was probably the one my character trusted the most, and the two had made each other swear that they’d protect the rest of the other fell. He also had a bit of a romantic relationship blossoming with the sword smith, sort of a forbidden love since the Crab hate the Crane.
A shinobi assassin, blessed by water, from the Scorpion Clan. She had a bit of a tragic backstory of her own, I don’t quite remember all of it, but she was dishonored after slaying the ones who took her lover from her. Being the oldest, she sort of became the group mom, but the kind that’s also the cool aunt.
A fortune telling matchmaker and half Kitsune, blessed by void, from the Deer Clan. This was my character’s half sister, and probably one of the two best things to ever happen to him. She had a curse that caused all of her own romantic endeavors to end in tragedy and disaster.
And my character, Masaō. He was a Deer Clan speardancer assassin and was blessed by air. Now, the goal of the Deer is to make sure that no single clan can ever gain total dominance, by any means necessary. So, early on Masaō had to kill somebody who was innocent at the time to keep them from being a part of a destabilizing event later on. Masaō saw himself as a necessary evil, someone who did what had to be done so that others, like his sister and new wife, could live in relative peace.
On to the story.
The party had chased down the little god of hell into his domain in order to stop his awakening by the great dragon of shadows, who has possessed Masaō’s sister’s crush. We had been given a device to stop him, basically the crush’s soul trapped in a ring that we could destroy to kill him and allow us to actually face the dragon directly. We were told that the only real way to free a soul from the ring was to destroy it.
Well, that wasn’t good enough for Masaō. He stole the soul ring and used his own soul to force the crush’s soul back into his body. This accomplished three things. It forced the dragon out of the crush’s body, since two souls can’t exist in the same body. It trapped Masaō’s soul inside the ring, and he wasn’t about to let anyone else make a similar sacrifice to get him out. And, it fulfilled his sister’s curse so that she could find love.
The party ultimately slew the shadow dragon, and the god of hell by extension. But then the reality of what Masaō had done really set in. The Crab Clan player read out loud a letter I had given him in secret several sessions ago when I started planning this, in which Masaō had written out his final goodbyes and asked that his name be forever removed from the history of this great deed. He didn’t believe that anyone should ever idolize an assassin and killer like him, and that Rokugan would be better off if nobody like him ever existed again. Masaō didn’t die to save their lives, he died so that they could be happy.
I made half the players cry with that stunt, pretty proud of that.
In my first ever full campaign to reflect my inexperience I played a young, inexperienced and cowardly dwarven ranger named Kolgrim, basically a teenager. As the game progressed he gradually became a more effective warrior until the end of act one where he faced off alone against a summoned shadow demon as the rest of the party engaged the drow cleric and her minions. Barley felling it with a sliver of health left he turns and sees… a second one. By now the evil cleric has been badly wounded and attempts to bring the entire cavern down on our heroes . As the second demon attempts to possess him and stop the party’s escape, kolgrim succeeds the save to fling himself into the depths of the cavern, sacrificing himself to allow the escape. I fully expected him to remain dead but in a session I was off the party went to great lengths and revived my boy. Good times
Just last friday, I gave my party an elemental dungeon, and the final room contained their ingredient they were looking for. they could have just taken one. When they took more than one, I made 6-7 elementals appear, and when they freaked out and ran for the door, they found it blocked by a elemental force door. The barbarian grabbed a party member, and shoved his way through. The monk held on to another, and tried to escape through a hole in the ceiling was knocked back by an air elemental, then one of the paladins, who didn't take what the elementals were guarding, decided to thunderous smite them out of the air through the door and sacrifice his life, before the fight even started.
Nat 20.
The party rockets through the door, leaving the paladin on the other side of the door. We ended there, but secretly, I'm going to allow the paladin to survive the elementals for appreciating the elemental domain and selflessly sacrificing himself to get his party members out. To this day the cooless roleplay moment I've seen.
The opposite. I was playing in a mercenary campaign, taking part in an assassination/boss fight at the top of a very tall building. Said fight was going poorly and this was already a meatgrinder campaign with a party full of munchkins, so there weren't a lot of hard feelings when I chose to drop building, killing the target and my party. I thanked them for their sacrifice, and for their shares of the job.
Wasn’t a fatal sacrifice, but it was damn close.
During the penultimate boss in our campaign, the BBEG’s lieutenant started shooting *solar flares* at us. All of our characters except for my tiefling berserker and our infernal fighter did not have fire resistance. As the demon rears another throw of a flare spear, I roll an 18 to jump in front of our clerics and a 4 on the saving throw. I took a hole the size of a dinner plate straight through the sternum. Our DM said if it weren’t for the fact that I jumped in front of our clerics, it would have been an insta-kill. Later in the fight, I have rudimentary bones made from a magical material and jump again in front of our near-dead warlock and lose my right arm. By the end of the battle, I was at 3HP.
Hi, it's me again. Telling this store again for those that missed it the first time.
I was playing a Gravity Wizard in a campaign that was winding down. He was fused with a Ruin Stone, which would give him the power to undo one mistake, but at the cost of his own existence. After we fought a lich and his baddies in epic fashion before they could open a portal to the gray wastes, the party found some mysterious items that we didn't know how to use. In this world portal magic was extremely censured so no one knew enough about it, and we accidentally triggered it to open. On the other side were an army of bone devils and other such strong enemies that we were not prepared to handle. One idea was to throw the key into the portal to close it. It just landed on the other side. Seeing that our party wasn't going to survive this encounter without closing the portal, I knew my character's time had come. My wizard called upon the power of the Ruin Stone and erased himself from existence, with a command to the Paladin whispering in the wind to destroy the key. They never had a wizard. This was a mostly combat party. The paladin crushed the key with a heavy smite and the portal closed. They mopped up the few enemies that were still there and survived.
If I were the DM, I wouldn't care about the rules at that point, I would find some way to essentially say "Even though everyone else forgot about the wizard, the party still remembers him".
I had this Evil Campaign a long time ago, before the existence of shows such as The Seven Deadly Sins (this is relevant later). Each party member was a criminal so notorious, and so evil, that each had been marked and branded with magic for their specific crime. Each was branded with a Mark of Sin (told you it would be relevant) permanently burned into their flesh, never to fade until they atoned. These Marks also had the unintentional effect of allowing the criminals to tap into near-godlike power tied to their Sin (whoops).
The party consisted of myself, a possessed Undead Blood Hunter, brought back by a Lich that promised her revenge for her slaughter at the hands of her own village, in exchange for eternal servitude. She was branded with the Mark of Wrath, which granted her True Undeath, and the ability to resist any and all mental assaults without fail. And rarely, she would gain the ability to fight even after she reached 0 HP, but fall into a death state for several days after the event.
A Shifter Paladin Inquisitor, of the fox persuasion, who had used her power to taint and assault the men and women of the city she swore to protect and serve, becoming an Oathbreaker in the process. She was tried for her crimes, and branded with the Mark of Lust, which gave her the ability to charm even the Undead into fighting at her side. And rarely, she could commune with and persuade evil deities to do her bidding.
And the last of the relevant characters for this story is a Vampire Wizard, who sought power far beyond what he was capable of controlling, forcing him to devour and drain dry an entire kingdom to keep it in check. He was grafted with the Mark of Gluttony, which granted him an insatiable appetite for magic, allowing him to learn one new spell every day that he remained asleep, usually in his unique magic amulet that doubled as his coffin. He also possessed the means to, once every do often, dominate and control a being of higher status than him (this is relevant for later).
For knowledge purposes, you need to know that this campaign had an interesting start. All players began at Level 20, but had that power ripped from them along with their magical artifacts by a coven of Drow Matriarchs that sought to bring the Surface World to heel under the rule of Lolth. They spent the entire campaign exploring several continents, many not knowing who they were due to how long ago their crimes had been committed, and regaining their lost power.
Also for the sake of this story, my character eventually grew to form a relationship with the Inquisitor, one of joint blood-soaked enjoyment and pleasure. But also of something deeper for my character in particular.
It was the final battle of the Campaign, and the party had finally defeated the final Matriarch as they channeled a dark ritual. But they had failed to do so in time, and Lolth, in her true and divine form, was summoned before the players. They had fought against her for many hours, and many of them had come close to dying several times. Lolth's true divinity rendered her unkillable by normal means. I had hint-dropped to the other players a long time ago that A Divine Being could be made mortal once more, but only by the willing sacrifice of a dead man's flesh. Now, these were evil PCs, so they thought that originally meant they had to offer Lolth a body they had killed. But it wouldn't be until the very crux of the fight that the Vampire would figure out what it actually meant.
"One of us has to willingly die, and let her take our body."
When that was finally revealed, my character did the unthinkable. She stepped up to Lolth, whispered words of power and cruelty, before slicing open her throat. This set her to 0, and I willingly refused Death Saves or being brought back with my Mark's power. The Vampire then used his own power to Dominate Lolth, commanding her to inhabit my empty shell. And once they were finally bound inextricably, the Inquisitor dealt the final blow, burning my body without a trace as she wept. But as my body burned, one thing could be noted about it. Her Mark had faded. She had atoned. She was sung as a hero then after, the Undead who chose Love over Hate. And who gave her life for the woman she loved.
We had a lengthy campaign growing to its near conclusion. We had a very odd party but the only one that matters is our fairy cleric Azrael, a grave cleric. In our second to last session we were fighting a beholder in a soon to explode ruins. It was a rough fight, that we barely survived. Two of our party failed our saves against petrification ray, disadvantage is rough. We had burned though all our high level spells, with know way to restore them or even move them. Its at this moment we remembered our cleric has divine intervention. She rolled a 7 on the percentage die. So her god Kelemvor answers, asking what she needs. She asks him to "restore her companions." He replied asking "if she wished him to give life to the dying?"
Now for the un aware, Kelemvor is the god of natural death. Meaning that if it is your time to die, it is your time. And up until this point our cleric had not had to "save" a party member.
So back on point. She tells her god yes. He says to save one meant to die, another would have to give her life to keep the balance. She agrees. Now all the party could hear of this interaction is Azreal clutching her holy symbol and asking for the party to be restored, and then the booming voice of her god saying "then it will be done"
And with that those petrified crack away back to normal and a burst of healing light washes over everyone fully healing everyone. And then Azrael grows to human size and Kelemvor himself appears before her, embraces her, says it is time to come home. And they fade away.
The party lost it, pc and player. She did make a cameo in the final battle, appearing for a moment in Kelemvor's arms to smite a lich's phylactory. Saying, "is that the pesky lich that gave you trouble?"
Not to save the party, but to save a backstory NPC.
My rogue was secretly a part of a three way relationship involving the king and queen of the country (they were the Royal Spymaster, and secretly tailing the party to test their allegiances). Anyways, the main character I was playing for that campaign had been sidelined due to their own unique backstory, and I was only playing the Rogue as a stand in for the time being. Everything came to a head as the party tried to recover an artifact that would help my main character properly recover.
In the cave where it was being kept, the party encountered a Nightgaunt, and after my Rogue (and only my Rogue) failed a Wisdom save, the demon says, 'So that's where she is... thank you!' and speeds off, causing some fungus monsters to spring up. After cutting a path through them, the Rogue bolts, leaving the last couple enemies for the rest of the party. When they arrive back at the castle, a formal party is still going on, uninterrupted, but shortly after showing up, the Nightgaunt reveals themselves... along with the group of BBEG jesters who we were hunting at the time.
A fight breaks out as several demons (who were later revealed to be some kind of phantasmal killer style illusions) are summoned into the party full of civilians and nobles. Several casualties later, the battle finishes with my Rogue landing a clutch crit against the Nightgaunt that started it all. It explodes, and all the other demons vanish. With the combat over, the DM starts going into the story bit of an NPC getting mind controlled, and being forced to attack a nearby ally... the Queen.
At this point, I hadn't had my Rogue move on that last turn, and they still had a Bonus Action left, so I have them run to the Queen, and take the hit instead. The DM is surprised, but I point out it was still technically my turn in the initiative, and I had the movement to do it, so he lets it happen. The Rogue goes down, the BBEGs teleport off in a huff, and we have a solemn moment taking stock of what happened. Several NPCs are 'saveable', but most are either outright dead, or soul less. This is when we realize that the enemy BBEGs have a soul cage spell up, right after an attempt to Stabilize my Rogue works, but they can't get up.
The party mourns their friend, the royal family mourns their companion, and the Rogue's son gets a letter from mom passing the job of Spymaster down to them.
The campaign died not long after this point, but there's plans in the works to revisit the world, and pick up the plot again, and I couldn't be more excited.
Our party started at level 20 and lost in a fight against a new deity that had prevailed in leading the Orc hordes to total victory. 300 years later we were reincarnated (sort of) by taking the bodies of slain adventurers as part of a contract with a Fae. Difference races, classes, and backstories that we have to discover over time. Meanwhile we can choose to take our old class features instead of the new ones upon leveling as we rediscover how to use our power. If we die our souls are damaged, and it was no surprise when we learned we would eventually become mindless slaves if we died too many times.
Half of my party are the epitome of chaotic alignment, while my character still tries to hold to his Paladin oaths despite having lost all his prior power. This leads to Rao’dan desperately trying to keep the party alive and try to negotiate with the extremely powerful undead that rule the city they awoke in.
This culminated in my Rogue-lock that acts like a Paladin talking down this massive undead plant that has taken over a sector and stolen the pumpkin head of the headless horseman. Long story.
After successfully establishing a peaceful resolution mid-combat, Rao’dan and the party were walking out of the lair with the mcguffin in hand. Then the artificer/fighter, who had a temporary madness that made him believe spiders were his informants, blasted a mushroom servant to death at the bug’s hallucinatory command.
Rao’dan shoves the mcguffin into the Barbarian/monk’s hands and tells the party to run as the tunnel we were in began to collapse under the plant thing’s rage. The rest of the time involved cutting vines away from the party members, especially the Goliath artificer. He got everyone out that he could, including an NPC who had a change of heart and had partially switched to the party’s side, but Rao’dan became entangled.
The Goliath artificer, being of stout courage but unsound mind, ran back into the tunnel to pull Rao’dan free. And immediately got stuck Pooh-Bear style on the way out. Rao’dan used all of his turns cutting the Goliath free, and in the end was too entangled to do anything. He spent his last moments in prayer to a goddess that could no longer commune with him, as the life was crushed from him.
He returned as a broken old man that was slowly loosing his mind from the damage to his soul.
This did nothing to dissuade the party from their recklessness however, as the next session the Goliath took revenge on the spiders he now loathed by shooting one with a firearm. In the middle of the feral zombie zone of the city. The noise drew the attention of several hordes of zombies. Goliath’s solution? Bomb. This solved half the zombie horde problem, but then drew an undead dragon to our location. This may be a good time to point out we are level 4.
Seeing no way to outrun or fight the dragon, Rao’dan grabs the remaining bombs the Goliath had in his pack and attempts to jump on the dragon from the rooftop they had been hiding on. He failed miserably, and slammed into the ground at its feet. Shouting for the party to run, he set the bombs down and began to blow his ear horn to keep the dragon’s attention squarely on himself.
What followed was a miraculous few rounds of 1 on 1 with the dragon. Rao’dan used the spells Blur and Shield to somehow avoid 3/4ths of the dragon’s melee attacks, and the one sensible party member had dropped a heal spell on him as they fled. In the last round Rao’dan used his telekinetic ability to set off the bombs, which did 12d10 damage to the beast. The DM graciously gave my character a high DC acrobatics check to jump from the blast radius, which he barely succeeded on. With only a couple of HP left, Rao’dan crawled back to the barricades that kept the mindless undead away from the sentient undead, and made it to safety.
Lest you believe the party learned anything, he has almost died three more times in as many sessions due to trying to get the party out of trouble. Potential allies have turned to deadly enemies, and it is only a matter of time before his soul is lost. Last session we ended in a tower stuffed with mimics, which the monk woke up midway through the Catnap spell Rao’dan was using to try to heal and regain spells. We shall see if he can pull off another unlikely escape.
I have a story of a player sacrificing himself just for it to be in vain.
Context: Party of 5. Barbarian was the martyr, Ranger was a player that left very early in the campaign, became a lost NPC and was also the barbarians sister in game. And Wizard. The others were bystanders in this.
Overpowered BBEG Thanos-like and lots of lackeys ambush the party. He knows he could kill them easily, and the party knew it too. I meant it to be just a 'display of power' from the BBEG side. So when the he shows up, he brings the long lost Barbarians sister (the Ranger) as a prisioner and breaks her neck. Barbarian instantly goes into rage and ignores everyone to fight BBEG. The sight of the cruel execution of her sister was too much for her. OOC he says that he is sacrificing his character here, thats what his character would do. We were all sad, but ok. It was also buying the time they needed to escape.
Heres the plan: They wanted to use the Wizards flying carpet to just fly away while Barbarian fights to the death. I ruled they could do it, so they start relocating over it to escape. Eventually the BBEG drops the barbarian starts going after them. When the last character, the Wizard, gets in, all she needed to say was that they were leaving, she was driving. But instead she tried to save the unconscious body of the Barbarian, dealying their escape by 1 turn. And Im the kind of GM that choices have consequences. BBEG was next and dropped huge AoE on them. TPK.
Trying to save someone who basically died to buy the rest of the team to escape is pretty stupid tbh
Oh boy, tell me what happens next, what happens to the world
Playing a Homebrew version of SW5e (Star wars) and we are preparing to fight the BBG, one of our party (our Hutt) had been imbued with an ancient power that while giving us the edge we needed to win would in turn be the very thing to kill him if used and we were made well aware of this, Now going back a tad halfway through the campaign we had a new party member join and for the most part he did not command the same level of loyalty as the other members who had now been through a few campaigns as a party and was eager to prove he was one of us and so as the rest of us were essentially saying goodby to an OG member of our party knowing he had to die so we may live this member went of by himself and found a way to transfer the power to himself without us knowing, anyway we get to the BBG and the Hutt goes to use his ancient power and without saying why the DM tells him it fails, then our new member steps forward using the power and making the BBG mortal meaning all damage against it proir took effect BBG dies, and our new party member falls to the ground as the ancient power he used turns on him draining the life from his body, our party begins to say our goodbyes when our DM gives us our reward for defeating the BBG its a wish but just one, expecting our party who are all evil af to use it to consolidate more power as it had been our side goal all campaign and we had spent a lot of time and credits creating our criminal empire but no we all look at eachother and nod knowing exactly what the wish is for and wish for the new members life to be saved, said member regains his streagth and ask why as we had treated him as a outsider the entire time, the party simpy looks at eachother and says "Your one of us stupid we look after our own" very humbling moment for a party of pure evil charicters.
I can give you two from a game I played (Pathfinder), and to be honest, it was dissatisfying one of them.
One, me and the party was fighting 4-5 night walkers, and I ran in head first to protect a party member (magic darkness was on the filled)
Two, [context, this is something called a world dragon in Pathfinder and the DM Homebrood the liveing hell out of it] I popped into the ethereal plane and did a HellMary shot with the remaining booms I had just for it to rapidly miss due to a conselmint bones from a sand storm that it was doing. And the booms were hit in my a npc. {Side note that the npc died, and if I had killed it, one I would have been cursed to die, and two, the dragon would be reborn in full in about a few weeks.}
/this was in a game where the party was to have no magic, but everyone else was able to use it\
Yes I recently had to because some one I’m my campaign while we where supposed to be sneaky our bard played wonder wall and I threw my character in the way of hell hounds and now after rolling death saves Stuck in a cage by the way our party has a way of using a bag of holding to get out of any jail. First you pass the bag through the bars then you have the person who is trapped jump into the bag then you take the bag out and pull the person who was trapped out of the bag on the other side boom your free.
I had a Changeling Bard named Haze. We were trying to steal a book from Strahd's Castle when we were caught by him. My changeling bard decided to fight Strahd, knowing full well they wouldn't survive, but their friends would be able to get away. As Strahd walked by my changeling, ignoring them, Haze yelled, "STRAHD VON ZAROVICH, TURN AND FACE ME YOU PARASITE!" Strahd looked at the bard and said "You dare insult me in my own castle? You will pay for such insolence." Haze survived two turns then was punched through the chest by Strahd, "You held out better than most, Changeling.... You will serve me best in undeath." Haze's final words were, "Bards know when to bow out." Haze then used their ring of fireball to destroy one of the flasks of alcohol on their bandolier, causing an explosion. Haze died, but they stunned Strahd long enough for their friends to make it to safety. The DM ruled that when Haze died, their god blessed a young bard with divine inspiration, allowing Haze's last stand to be immortalized in song.
Edit: some words
Session before last, the end of my Spelljammer campaign. All characters from across three campaigns came together to fight a universe ending wizard who wanted to use a staff that had recurred across said campaigns to release his mother who planned to enslave the universe atop a galaxy sized beetle. Players first character was already dead but brought back in a mechanical body. He used his wish (level 20 bard) to revitalise the party but that cost him his corporeal body. Player’s final character then, a Plasmoid named Goostar, snapped the staff over his knee as a final way of ending the boss. The magical explosion that ensued consumed the BBEG, a decent portion of the army fighting, and Goostar, who was entirely destroyed.
"Ky-Lee... Destroy my enemies and my life is YOURS"
Had a moment like this once. In a Princes of the Apocalypse game, my character was a warlock of the Night Serpent, whose entire theme is nightmares. Their relationship was very one-sided, with Dendar essentially blindsighting him into spreading fear throughout the Material under the promise that she’ll grant him a place at her side forever upon his death. In reality, that meant nothing, and as my character travelled with his group, he eventually came to realise that, once he died, she would claim his soul to help fuel her return to the mortal plane. Of course, he could forbid this by dissociating from her, but that also meant he would lose his warlock powers.
- SPOILERS AHEAD -
Now that the background is out of the way, we cut to the end of the game, where we need to close the fire node, the last one in our adventure. To close it, it needs to be struck with Tinderstrike, but the problem is, it hovers 80 feet above the ground. It‘s too far to be thrown, and no one has a method of flight. None of us have a means of getting Tinderstrike up to the node… except me, who has Gaseous Form. The thing about Gaseous Form though is the dagger becomes part of the cloud with me, and once I drop the spell, I fall. Into the fire node. But at this point, my character has grown tired of being a conduit of fear for a being that will offer him nothing in return, and has decided he wants the world to survive indefinitely, not until Dendar is ready to destroy it. So, in his final moments, he wishes his party a life beyond fear, uses Gaseous Form to bring himself hovering above the node, and his final words are “Dendar the Night Serpent, I renounce you as my patron!” as he drops his concentration and plunges Tinderstrike into the fire node, falling through it in the process and being consumed by the Elemental Plane of Fire.
Was playing genesis and was fighting the final boss on a cliff, dude was chunking my party up pretty badly so i had my half-orc tackle the BBEG of the cliff.
End of the Skulls and Shackles campaign for pathfinder. I swapped the epic sea battle and the fight for the pirate crown around in order, because it made more sense to be a pirate lord and THEN fight epic battles.
At any rate, they had done fairly well in recruiting for pirate navy to face off against the Fantasy Nazi Mega Fleet coming for them. They managed to roll completely terribly while they were sinking ships left and center. The party witch, having used her foresight to see the cause of her death (being groomed to be eaten by Baba Yaga's to renew her eternal youth) and the party cleric (of the pirate god Besmara), both decide to conduct a sacrificial ritual on the deck of the flagship.
A natural 20 by the cleric, and a religion check of 40+ by the witch, and both of them emerged from the water as Levithan's, utterly crushing the evil navy in a matter of rounds, before disappearing under the waves.
Giving them control of (technically the SAME) CR 30 creature as it laid utter waste to the massive threat was a fantastic way to close out the campaign, leaving the new Pirate Queen with enough witnesses to claim it had been her plan all along. (She was a sorcerer with a focus on bluff).
We were a low level party of 2, a pack of wolves showed up out of nowhere. My monk told the wizard to go while I sacrifice myself, and she straight up ran the hell away. No "I won't let you die" Or "we're in this together" nonsense, she straight up ditched me.
Needless to say I didn't get to play that monk again.
It's getting towards the end of the campaign and the party is disabling the enemies overwhelming supply chains . They finally catch up to one of the BBEG's main henchman, a Lich that has ties to the party's wizard. Over the course of the campaign, it was learned that the wizard was not a Dwarf Wizard but a warforge crafted with the bones of the dead dwarven child he was told he was.
His "father", in his grief, allowed the prelich henchmen, then a professor at the school the father attended, to bring his son back to life by any means necessary. The henchmen used the bones as apart of the ritual to become a lich, and turning the bones into his Phalactary, before using magics and science to create it into a warforged.
The PC's are facing off against the lich henchmen and the combat is going grim. They were ambushed and 2 out of 5 had already gone down. I expected the battle to be deadly but the rolls were not in the PCs favor. The wizard warforge is still up and and so is another player. The lich is about to cast drain energy from another player when the wizard uses his turn to first talk to the lich.
As a GM, i was confused because the wizard seemed to have something up his sleeve. He had less than 10 hit points and verbally said he was out of spells. He tells the Lich that he will let him live if the lich lets them all go. The lich refuses. The Wizard whips out a scroll , a random treasure they received a couple adventures ago from a random treasure table I use to roll for treasure based off of CR. This long in the campaign I pretty much just generate the treasure and post it, as nothing but scrolls and money is suppose to come up and i don't disallow any spells.
The scroll he whips out is disintegrate. In my mind, I'm thinking, okay but he knows this won't kill him. I don't understand what he's doing. The PC then tells me, I cast this... on myself.
The party was floored. I saw real tears coming from one of the players. It was that perfect emotional moment in combat. The spell goes off and the player is reduced to dust in front of the party. It was such an awesome bit of role playing i allowed the lich to be disadvantage from the distraction. The fighter and Rogue combine to finish off the lich that round. They collect his ashes and bury him in his dwarven homeland, never telling any of the dwarves what they learned. Only that he died a hero.
So i played an evil warlock that pretended to be a good cleric, and the twist was that the patron was Good, actually.
So we were playing Curse of Strahd (No spoilers needed) and my character were kinda causing discourse in the group, since one of the other players had sniffed out his true alignment. Well there was more to it than that, some characters didnt like each other, one character felt like there was no unit cohesion within the group, and the group was about to fall apart.
So... Understanding this, and that the quest needed to be done for the påatron to be reborn and thus could release my characters soul so it were no longer under the oppressive foot of goodness, the conversation went like this:
Father Jonathan (My character): "Arriana, you trust me not. In this distrust you are hesitant to follow through with our plans."
Arriana: "Yes, i know that you are an evil bastard. You would sell us out for your own benefit."
Father Jonathan: "On the contrary, dear friend. I would gladly die so that you would succeed."
Arriana: "Then die now, you old bastard!"
Father Jonathan: "As you wish. Paladin, kindly lend Arriana your sword so that she might behead me. Arriana, by doing this you seal a bond. Do you swear on your soul to keep the group together and finish the task at hand? Slay the evil that plauge this land?"
Arriana: "This is a trick!"
Father Jonathan, stripping naked from all talismans and gear, gets on his knees and lowers his head: "Upon the name of my God and my Unholy faith (First time he outright claimed to be Evil so to say) i swear to you that this is no trick. If it means the group stays together and finishes what must be done, then i will gladly die here and now. Let my blood be the binding cement from which you (Indicating the whole group) build yourself into the castle you must be to defeat this evil."
And then he died. Killed by his own partymember. He had never been so proud over Arriana as he was in that moment.
Also managed to become a ghost, and through the protection and help of his good patron, could spy from within the service of Strahd for the benefit of the group.
Many, mostly mine, as we keep ending up in some precarious situations. This character Gren Stonesinger was a dwarf cleric in our DM's homebrew campaign. We were summoned by the divines to be tested before we are returned to our physical world to save it from certain doom. There is a rule, no fighting in town, which we all promptly forgot. A few sessions later, about four or five, a mob broke out in town, two large parties of other candidates had a dispute which devolved into needless violence. Que our party, we split to go shopping. As we all left our respective shops we saw the commotion slowly creeping closer. Our Dm, bless the man, states. "Role Initative" the party: proceeds to roll terribly (I forgot the actual numbers) Gren was towards the bottom and was the closest to the action. Being a dwarf I had the lowest speed of the party. Our camp was very far away, probably a few 1000 feet or so. The enemies were confused in the chaos and attacked our party. Reasoning with them didn't work, so we resorted to running. Gren couldn't keep pace and began to fall behind. He turned and loudly began to draw attention to himself charging an enemy and entering the melee. Giving the party a chance to run. It didn't last long as we began to feel the earth churn below us as massive constructs rose from the ground. The constructs began to enforce the rules of this world. They began to massacre anyone who landed an attack. Gren was last. He finally spoke to the party "I have accepted my fate. As should you". He walked to the constructs praying to his gods (He worshipped 2: the Lady of the Scales, and a Homebrew justice god.) The construct reared itself up and crushed Gren into "chunky salsa" on the ground.
I played a wizard
We were fighting a beholder, already not the best scenario for any caster.
After two turns the monk got petrified and the cleric and a homebrew teleport psion were on top of the beholder.
We were fighting over a chasm over which the beholder was hovering. After a while the psion teleported out of sight and the cleric moved downwards to get the petrified monk. I throw a house (instant fortress) at the beholder and knowing I had no chance alone due to his anti magic cone I jumped after it. It tried to catch me and return to its lair where the psion with 10hp left was hiding. While restrained by his telekinesis ray I wasn’t in the anti magic cone anymore. I proceeded to summon three greater demons to surround it. It then fired a Death ray at me.
I died and fell about a mile while my hell wasps burned through all the legendary resistances and maybe half of the beholders hp which gave the psion archer enough time to search the lair find a bow and use all resources at his disposal and a crit to finish it off.
The cleric then managed to reach me just in time for the revivify to still work
Player who (unintentionally) ended up sacrificing himself here. I was playing a paladin alongside a warlock and a barbarian. We get into an encounter where a wizard is casting a spell to hinder our abilities, which takes the form of a large orb. I discover that the spell is the source of this and decide to hit it. And so I do (tossing on a Thunderous Smite for a bit of extra damage). The spell shatters and the party regains their power. Unfortunately for me, the wizard reacts and hits me with Disintegrate. I roll a Nat 1 on the dex save, take 75 damage (2 more than my maximum), and am instantly reduced to nothing more than a pile of ash. The rest of the party manages to make it out alive.
Ok yeah that first post was incredible top tier dm top tier player top tire dnd
In the last 5e campaign I played, I played a Chaotic-Good, Nordic Half-Orc fighter, originally named "Bjorn of the Silver North." Good-natured, just slightly impulsive (during a six month period in-game, he went slightly "bard-mode," and netted himself multiple wives after a failed relationship attempt). Well, three of these wives were vampiric high-elves of the Blood Empire (think, lawful-evil-aligned empire of vampire-elves/vampires/undead/mortal citizens/servants). Well, these three vampire elves were Lina (the third daughter of the Blood Empress), Mumei and Mummo (the twin baronesses of House Redwake of the Blood Court, also yes, DM is a weeb and Vtuber fan, lol). So yes, he definitely shaped up and stopped his "bard-y-ness," after the Empress told him that if there were ANY more Blood Empire weddings, he was going to have an all-expenses paid trip to "Castation Key" (yes, in-game, the joke was that this chain of islands was infamous for castrations).
As the game progressed, Bjorn became a loyal and loving husband, and a caring, doting father to his kids. His wives all adored him, and even the Blood Empress' opinion of him became more favorable, especially after seeing him taking his parental duties seriously, and not just leaving it to the nannies.
Well, late in the campaign, shortly before the quest chain that would send us to the BBEG, the Empress tasked us with finding out why there were a group of Celestials holed up in a destroyed cathedral near the edge of her kingdom's borders. The party ends up finding out that these Daeva were the spearhead of an incoming army that was planning on "liberating" the people of the Blood Empire from the Royal Family, the Blood Court, and the homebrewed vampire goddess of vampires. These Daeva even said in front of Bjorn about eliminating EVERY member of the Royal Family, even the youngest princess and her new-born twins (twins Lina just gave birth to). Mind you, the Blood Empire, while evil-aligned, largely left other Empires/countries alone. And, the citizens were mostly happy, due to them getting to live a hedonistic life, and paying off the debt in undeath.
Well, my character wasn't willing to keep quiet about the Daeva's plans (which would've prevented me leaving w/o a fight). I OoC (Out-of Character) told the party and DM that I was willing to sacrifice my fighter, bc to him, the mere thought of losing his wives or children would send him over the edge. The DM didn't want me to sacrifice Bjorn so close to the end of the campaign, since there was a major story arc between Bjorn and the BBEG to finish up. So, I asked the DM if Bjorn could make a god call to his deity he pledged service to, Slaa, and the DM okayed it. Well, the rolls concluded with my fighter starting another major war (another story for another time) to protect some of his wives and children, since a fair number of them were staying in the Blood Empire, due to helping out with some matters of state. The Blood Empress wasn't too amused that a major war was started on the edge of her empire's borders, but understood (and appreciated) WHY my fighter did so.
TL;DR Chaotic-Good, Half-Orc Fighter was willing to die to protect Vampire wives and children. DM didn't want fighter to sacrifice themselves so close campaign conclusion, allowed god call that started another major war.
NOTE: That campaign was insane, and would probably be worthy of being made into a series of books, since the DM made his own living world for his games to be run in. Many more stories from that campaign for another time. *ask about the running gag of "how many titles can Bjorn have by the end of the campaign?"*
i dont even know John, but i nearly cried lol
I once had an artificer who built lots of armor and advanced weaponry ( rifles, pistols, cannons) and they were defending a citadel with civilians in it. The party evacuated through a back door but the artificer went into the courtyard. He held off the enemies before his defeat, but little did I know he prepared the wizard to cast meteor swarm on him. The wizard got shot to death on his escape by a crossbow. Our barbarian(also had the artificers armor), our paladin and warlock fought the BBEG after and the paladin died fighting the robot army and the warlock cast banishment on the BBEG.
Had a character called 'Angel.'
Because she was... an angel.
A cleric, priestess of Pelor [god of generally light and goodness]
We'd fought our way through an ancient temple and were pretty beat up, and we went one step too far, and found a demon Lord.
We were fucked.
So i told them to run. 'I got this. Go.'
And thanks to the rule of cool, and sacrifice, the GM ruled that the party were able to escape.
After a few more episodes, the campaign wrapped up successfully, and we moved on to a DarkSun campaign.
And about partway through that campaign, we found an ancient temple.
And in it were small magical flames, each flame representing a soul that still had faith in the old gods.
And my character was one of them.
Some 10,000 years or so later after the previous campaign. Turns out we were playing in the Green age of DarkSun or some such.
First guy just said "ARES! DESTROY MY ENEMIES, AND MY LIFE IS YOURS!!!"
Great stories
our priest made a pack to save one character which literally just got cut in half at the waist with the death god (homebrew) to surrender his life at the end of a chapter of our campaign and he did walking of into the sunset with death it self.
Wrapping up a campaign module , one of our party members had a particularly hard time with losing characters, to the point where he was playing a Barbarian named Fifth Guy, of the famed Guy clan. The lich bbeg and the party have had a long battle. My character, who ive had since near the beginning, had been a thorn in the lichs side. Counterspell to block him, wall of light to hide our party at range, and some lightning to his face. Needless to say, he had enough of my character. We get the feeling that there's one or two more turns in the battle either way as the lich corners my character and readies the final blow. He has instakill ready, my character has nothing left to escape and can't do enough damage to end it before the lich kills me. Game over. Except from around the corner sprints a raging Fifth Guy who full body tackles, on a successful grapple, the lich directly into his sphere of annihilation. Both are instantly vaporized, and combat is ended.
Hail to fifth guy, you absolute legend
Anaen. Elf bladesinger. Self centred and self agrandising and thinks everyone wants to be his best friend. Fashion obsessed and will sell evil cursed items to buy a nice shirt.
He died because I forgot to counterspell.
I could have stopped the restrained green dragon from misty stepping.
Which would have meant that every other member of the party wouldn't have gone down the next round.
Which meant that anean had to get the healer up, and then the secondary healer using his designer potions no less, and then distract the dragon while they got the rest back.
Which meant he took a hit
And tanked it as a wizard.
And then died outright on the next bite.
6 sessions. Anean lasted 6 sessions.
And is my most satisfying character death to date.
In death he was selfless as he had never been in life.
I’ve always mulled over having a Dragonborn character having a barrel/ of “Dragonborn wine” with him, but it’s really just black powder he can use to “breathe fire” better. I want to offer it to a dragon in exchange for my friends safety and then blow up the barrel. Haven’t found the campaign yet.
5:39 Dude, that's a badass ending to a campaign if ever heard one.
Edit: Hey, MrRipper! More of these stories, plz.