When our favorite roleplaying character finally meets their maker, we all hope it’ll be in glorious battle, standing firm against all odds to protect what they hold dear. Or maybe they’ll go peacefully in their sleep after a long life of accomplishments. But who are we kidding? These are roleplaying games, and in roleplaying games nothing ever goes the way we expect it to. Here are just a few ridiculous ways your beloved PC can meet their end.
1. An Overdose of Healing, D&D 3.5
Has your group ever joked about healing someone so much they go all the way around and end up at zero?* It turns out that can actually happen. If you visit a major positive energy plane, you will be continuously healed by the plane itself. However, when the healing exceeds maximum HP, you have to make a fortitude save or explode. Yuck. And you have to do this every round, so unless you have a quick escape hatch, you’re pretty much toast.
The weirdest thing is that you can hold it off by dealing damage to yourself. After all, it only becomes a problem when the healing goes over your normal HP limit. I’d like to imagine that somewhere, there’s a group of planar explorers constantly stabbing themselves in the leg.
2. Making Magic Bread, Burning Wheel
Burning Wheel is a gritty fantasy setting. It has realistic weapons, punishing injury rules, and a highly detailed dramatic narrative system. It also has hilarious baking accidents. You see, in Burning Wheel there are consequences for failing to cast a spell. Your character can be seriously injured or even die. That sounds fitting if they’re calling down lightning or shapeshifting into a dragon. However, it can also happen while casting simple spells like Raise Bread.
Raise Bread is exactly what it sounds like: a spell that makes your bread rise into delicious, flaky goodness. However, if you mess up the casting roll, you’ll be just as dead as if you were shooting fire from your eyes. Your epic sorcerer will be found, collapsed over their oven, hand reaching to grasp the greatest confection in history!
Addendum: For reasons unknown, Raise Bread was taken out of Burning Wheel Gold, the most recent addition. But don’t worry, it’s still compatible if you can find the previous edition’s spell list!
3. Exploding Jewelry: D&D 3.5
There are plenty of items in Dungeons and Dragons that will kill whomever wears them, but most of them at least have the decency to be cursed. The Necklace of Fireballs works exactly as intended, just with a terrible design flaw. Each necklace has a number of red orbs on it that when thrown – you guessed it – explode into a fireball. That’s a handy item to have, no?
However, if the wearer is hit by a fire-based attack,* there’s a good chance that every orb will go off at once. If you have a higher end necklace, it will almost certainly kill you and the rest of your party. Their spirits will haunt you in the afterlife for not accessorizing better. Seriously, just go with a wand next time.
4. Getting Sick Twice, Torchbearer
Torchbearer is a game that eschews conventional hitpoints. Instead, characters have a number of conditions that track how well they’re doing. Characters can get angry, afraid, injured, or sick. Some of these conditions are more serious than others. Sickness in particular levies a penalty on almost every action. Harsh! What’s worse is that if you ever get sick when you’re already sick, you die.
That’s it. No appeal. Straight off to meet the reaper. The strange part is that sickness is hardly debilitating. Your character can still raid dungeons and fight monsters. The penalty is roughly equivalent to working when you have the flu. Not fun, but it could be a lot worse. However, it seems the only stage after moderately sick is dead. The big lesson to take away from this is never go to work when you’re sick. You could die. I hope your dungeon has a generous sick time policy.
5. Not Being Angry, D&D 3.5
The Barbarian Rage is a hallmark of D&D. Even non-gamers have some idea of what it does. You go into a blind rage, making you stronger and more resilient. Mechanically, one of the effects is extra hitpoints. That’s great if you’re fighting some evil wolves or whatever, but when you stop raging, the bonus HP goes away. This can put you below -10, and we all know what that means. You calm down, and immediately fall down dead.
Now it’s not unreasonable to say that someone who is super angry could ignore the pain from injuries that would otherwise incapacitate them. We’re all familiar with the trope of someone channeling rage in a fight before collapsing from blood loss. However, D&D rarely includes bleeding rules. Instead, barbarians can ignore the effects of an instantly fatal wound through the sheer power of rage.
I guess those anger management classes weren’t such a good idea.
6. Winning an Argument, Burning Empires
Burning Empires (BE) is a game with strict narrative rules. Players can’t just do whatever they like; they have to frame it in terms of scenes and plot occurrences. It’s a game more about commanding armies and leading powerful factions than personal combat. Therefore, it’s difficult to kill another important character, be they PC or NPC. That is, unless you can make them argue better than you.
How does that work? BE has the Duel of Wits, which is basically a combat system for arguments. Like real arguments, it rarely goes completely one way or the other. The loser can generally demand a compromise. Oddly, one of those compromises is “Escalate to Violence,” meaning you can demand one round of combat with the other guy. Only the loser can demand this concession.
This doesn’t guarantee a kill for certain, but BE’s combat is so lethal that if one character is built for it and the other isn’t, death is likely. So, in the immortal words of C3PO, let the wookie/dude in power armor win!
7. Your Beloved Got in a Fight, D&D 3.5
Isn’t it great to find true love? It’s even better if your paramour is an adventurer like you; you’ll have so much to talk about! Or, if by some chance they are an adventurer and you’re not, they can shower you with more gold pieces than you’ll be able to spend. That is, until they get in a fight with a particularly vindictive wizard.
The Book of Vile Darkness has a spell called Love’s Pain.* The spell’s target takes no damage or any other ill effect. Instead, their dearest loved one takes 1d6/two levels of the caster. There’s no range limit, not even a save! Pretty much the only defence is to be in an antimagic field.
So you could be going about your business one day and then keel over dead because someone was angry at your significant other. Worse, this could be someone you’ve broken up with but who still carries a torch for you. There’s also some amazing potential for awkwardness. Imagine an evil mage casts this on your spouse, and then the sexy bard starts convulsing in agony?
8. A Bomb on the Other Side of the Planet, Dark Heresy
The Warhammer 40k universe has never done anything small. Its ships, empires, and wars are all enormous. So, as it turns out, are its accidental explosions. There’s a substance in 40k called promethium, which is used as fuel for pretty much everything. It’s also used to create explosives because – according to the Inquisitor’s Handbook* – it’s highly flammable. It has an explosive radius of four meters per kilogram of the stuff.
Because the book makes no mention of anything that would stop this from scaling up,* we can extrapolate out from there. As mentioned, promethium is a fuel source for almost all vehicles in 40k, which means it would need to be stored in large stockpiles. If we take something the size of a modern day gas station* as our base, we’re looking at around 162,000kg of the stuff. That’s probably a little low considering how massive everything in 40k is, but we’ll go with it.
If that blew, it would create an explosion nearly ten times the size of Washington state. We know promethium is easy to set off because it’s explosive power comes from flammability. Even if the stuff they use as fuel doesn’t have the same explosive power as the weaponized version, it would easily create an explosion more powerful than anything in human history. This would almost certainly set off other stockpiles, leading to a chain reaction on densely populated Imperium worlds. All you need to wipe one of these planets clean is a moderately sized incendiary bomb.
9. Scratched to Death in a Catastrophe, D&D 3.5
This is an oldie, but a goodie. Cats have long been the bane of level one characters in Dungeons and Dragons, especially if said characters are wizards who have already exhausted both of their magic missile castings. It’s even worse if you’re a commoner. The cat has a respectable 14 armor class and 3 attacks per round. Each attack will only deal one damage if it hits, but at low level that’s all you need.
While this might be a problem for the wizard or commoner, surely a well made fighter would have no problem defeating the furred menace? That’s probably true, but imagine if there were… two cats. Or even three. Then they would get flanking bonuses, somehow allowing them to scratch through metal armor. Also, they’re pretty damned sneaky with hefty bonuses to hide and move silently, so they’ll get the drop on you!
They can jump too, so make sure to wear a helmet!
10. In Character Creation, Traveler
Traveler is the only game I’ve found where your character can be dead before you even start playing them.* Essentially, your character has the option of continuously taking extra tours of duty in the space navy, with each tour giving you more skills and abilities. In classic Traveler, each time you took one of these tours, your character had to pass a survival test. Failure meant that character had died in the line of duty, and you had to start over. New Traveler preserves this in a special option called Iron Man Mode.
Ironically, this prologue death mechanic was actually good for players in some ways. Traveler’s character generation system was incredibly random, and it was easy to end up with a character you had no wish to play. All you had to do was keep taking more tours of duty until that character kicked the bucket, then you got to roll up a new set of hopefully better stats.
If that wasn’t enough, there was another, even more powerful element to it. Each tour of duty made your character more capable, and the big limit was that your character might die. Except that if they died, you just started again, repeating the process until you have a character with the optimal number of tours. Take that, Grim Reaper. You only make us stronger!
This dynamic, along with most of the entries on this list, was almost certainly not what the creators had in mind. Rules don’t always work out the way they were intended, especially for independent games with limited play-testing. On the other hand, it’s no coincidence that half this list is from 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons. That system had endless pages of poorly planned material.
As players and game masters, we have to be on the lookout for these kinds of problems. We have to think like designers, identifying issues in the rules before they come up at the table. Unless of course, you think any of the above is sufficiently hilarious, in which case carry on.
Treat your friends to an evening of ritual murder – in a fictional RPG scenario, of course. Uncover your lost memories and escape a supernatural menace in our one-shot adventure, The Voyage.
I’m pretty sure the “dead if you become calm” feature of raging was intentional, as a way of discouraging barbarians from going all out at the drop of a hat.
As for the Book of Vile Darkness example, well, that was the whole intended purpose of that spell. If you’re the sort of jackhole who would bother learning and casting such a spell, it pretty clearly marks you as one of the bad guys. It is explicitly a horrible and spiteful to do to someone, which is why it has the Evil tag. It’s a fucked up way to die, yes, but that’s kinda the whole point of The Book of Vile Darkness to begin with.
I believe Cyber Punk had the Die In Character Creation randomness as well.
So does Mutant Chronicles, though you have to get through enough career cycles to get to the point where your character can die of old age.
deadEarth had it, but it was bad. For one thing, a strict reading of the rules meant you could only ever have three character sheets, so if it happened three times, you were barred from playing forever. Which might be considered a reward.
Wait, someone beat me to it.
2. Burning Wheel Classic had Fiber Ball, Burning Wheel Revised had Raise Bread, Burning Wheel Gold has Magic Whistle…
4. Dysentery is a hell of a thing.
6. You can escalate to violence after losing a Duel of Wits in Burning Empires provided the situation allows it. It’s pretty tough to kill someone in one blow, unless you have your argument with serious weapons at hand. Also, you’re still bound to the consequences of the Duel of Wits if you kill your opponent, and escalating means you give up any compromise you may have earned.
DeadEarth was an obscure post-apocalyptic RPG largely known for being terrible, and one of it’s more memorable aspects of it was that chargen was potentially lethal due to rolling for the various mutations caused by the exposure to radiation that every character had. Some of the mutations available killed the character, and most of others were plain ridiculous. Since the amount of mutations you had were based on the age you rolled, and thus out of the player’s control, you had no way to avoid dying in chargen.
What makes the DeadEarth example truly infamous, is that in chargen, you’re only allowed to discard the first two characters created, the third must be kept. Which means that by the rules, it’s possible through bad luck, at no fault of the player, to be unable to ever play the game due to your characters dying in chargen.
That’s harsh! on the bright side, I guess if it happens to everyone, at least you don’t have to play DeadEarth anymore.
I seem to remember the old DC Comics superhero game had a nonzero chance that a superspeedster character would be join the Speed Force’ in character creation, but I haven’t played it to be sure.
Here’s someone who DID (try to) play deadEarth. Gape in horror at his characters, and the crappy rules that spawned them!
https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/tag/deadearth/
That Speed Force’ll get you every time.
West End’s DC Heroes game had that “get absorbed by the speed force” thing. It pains me to speak ill of West End, but the older Mayfair DC game was much better.
True story:
I was DM’ing a high-level D&D game, where the players faced this group of enemies:
1 half-white dragon/ettin battle sorcerer who had hots for…
1 ice giant cleric of a frost goddess Auril
10+ ice giants who were normally guarding the wd/ettin’s base
30+ evil mercenaries of various species
1 ancient white dragon who was in cahoots with the cleric
Player characters bluffed (epically) their way into the ettin’s stronghold (because he and his giants had taken villagers of the mountainside as captives and forcing them to mine for something in a too-small-cavern-for-giants). They managed to completely convince everyone that they had been sent by someone much higher in foodchain of command to observe that everything is going as planned. They also found out that the ice giantess was on her way to the stronghold, and figured that they’d take them out all at once. And for that, they had a plan.
What they did not know about was the dragon she was riding. And that gave them sweats as they waited outside, pretending to be official inspectors of the main baddie of the campaign.
Okay, so now what? The rogue/ranger remembered that he had a fully charged and unused Necklace of Fireballs, and he hatched a plan: cleric/wizard would do a rod-quickened Delayed Blast Fireball while the giantess and ettin were having an argument about things, and he’d use his high stealth to…
1) take the bead set to tick-tick-tick
2) run in the middle of the enemies while sneaking and succeeding in this as well
3) set the necklace and bead down at the last second
4) and make both saving throws needed to survive the blast or in case of bad luck, just take automatical half-damage (improved evasion), rest filtered with fire resistance (30).
Results:
Rogue/ranger survives totally unscathed
Ice giants, toast; rest in puddles.
Evil mercs, toast; rest in ashes .
Half white dragon/half ettin, almost dead.
Ice giant cleric, half-way dead, but very pissed off.
Ancient white dragon, seriously hurt, and extremely pissed off.
I like it when players come up with extremely ridiculous plans, and actually succeed pulling it off. And even if that campaign was like 13 years ago, players still remember it well. :D
Those metamagic wands sure do come in handy don’t they? The necklace of fireballs does sort of feel like it was meant to be used all at once against really tough badguys. Just keep in a bag of holding the rest of the time.
Yup.
On the other hand, we played a one-shot game, where one PC decided to spend most of her starting gold (I think characters were like 3rd level or so) on a backpackful of Alchemist Fire, figuring that as a sorcerer she’s pretty much stocked on everything she needs, and something like ring of protection +1 is not enough to make the difference, so go for offense.
It was a really bad time for her to fail both Balance check and Reflex save.
Didn’t die (just went to negatives) — but the incident lives on in our memories, as a cautioning story about what seemed like a good idea at the time versus actually being a good idea.
HA! That sounds brilliant!
Theoretically, a character can die in character creation in any game. As long as you develop a backstory, a character can die in that story. This works for any system, but…
Fate is a system where you need to make up previous adventures for your character. If you actually role-play them, it is possible to die.
Most of the time in Traveller you couldn’t keep staying in forever till you die… you had to make a reenlistment roll. Most services needed 5-8+ on two dice to reenlist. That said in Megatraveller, where you were injured rather than dead, I still had a character die during character creation.
One of the career paths (bureaucrat) required you to attempt re-enlistment and required you to reenlist if you succeeded.
Success was 3+ on 2d6.
Each term takes 4 years.
After certain age breaks, you start having to make saves every 4 years or have stats go down because of your age.
So somewhere as my character was slightly over their 100th birthday, one of my physical stats dropped to 0. Which means you have died of old age.
Various versions of D&D have had so many strange ways to die it’s not even funny. From somewhere, I forget where, there was a comment that all Wands of Wonder in Second Edition (I think it was in a book for the Forgotten Realms setting) used the same activation method. Simple verbal keyword, which was the same for all the Wands. You didn’t even have to be carrying the thing, it could be in your backpack.
Which lead to things like magic mouths shouting the keyword in dungeons, just to maybe fire off that wand of wonder the character might be carrying at an unexpected moment.
I always like Polymorph Other into a fish…
Yer too old! No PC for you!
This one is very specific but saw it happen once to a character in Dark Heresy. As the group was rolling their characters, the Feral Worlder rolls on the Emperor’s Tarot (a random roll that gives minor bonuses/penalties and/or quirks) and rolls “Mutation without, corruption within”, which means he had to roll once on the Mutations table.
He rolls the dice and the mutation is “Bulbous eyes”, which means his face kinda looks like a frog, which is a mix of funny, ridiculous and hideous all at once. He begged for a re-roll and, reluctantly, I agreed (I was the GM). He re-rolls and BAM! Perfect 100, which means his mutation turned him into a Chaos Spawn, a malformed mass of mutated flesh and shifting bone driven murderously insane by constant agony.
Technically not death at character creation, but oblivion would have been a mercy compared to what the poor guy got.
Like Traveler, Zombie Squad is another game where you can die in character creation.You play as ex-military criminals sent on suicide missions on the edge of space. So during creation you have to roll for each term in your background and there is a decent chance you can die from an event.
In M.A.G.U.S., an in/famous Hungarian rpg, there is a roll at character creation called Special Training. In certain classes if the corresponding trait is 18 or higher, one can roll a d100 on Special Training. If one critically failed the roll, e.g. rolled a 001, the character died. It was absurdly ridiculous in cases the 18 or higher trait was Charisma or Perception.
Hah! Died from being too pretty I guess.
Now I’m imagining an 18 perception character undergoing such special training, winding up with such good perception he looks beyond the confines of our universe’s physical dimensions, and gets eaten by a cosmic horror because the dust mote looked at him funny.
I’m guessing you got to charismatic, accidentally gave to many people ideas about you liking them, and they kill you in the cross fire
Re: Healing overdose: I made a kind of an intuitive leap to thinking of it like popping a balloon by overfilling it, though it also makes me think that Futurama episode with Melllvar. Though there is a collision between thinking in terms of vitalism and thinking of what it means physiologically. Exploding because your body’s been overfilled with life energy kind of makes sense to my D&D brain, if I just assume ‘healing’ means something other than returning a body to its default state. In more scientific/realistic settings, I lean towards imagining a healing overdose resulting in something like Deadpool’s always-healing cancer or whatever it is going on with him.
Re: Barbarian rage: I lean towards thinking of it as running on adrenaline and continuing despite fatal wounds, which people can sometimes do in real life for a short time. Then they go into shock and/or bleed out. I don’t think it quite goes with the feel of D&D, leading to something of a mechanics/tone disjoint, but my D&D games have tended away from grim and gritty.
Re: Killer Cats: I’m reminded of the Killer Carp of Dwarf Fortress yore. Toady One just gave them default bite damage, which turned out a bit much. Of course, DF is known for a lot of WTF ways of dying or killing things.
That carp will mess you up.
This relates to number ten on the list. There was a game that came out in the late 90’s called Twighlight 2000, and it was about a nuclear war in the year 2000. In character creation your age was random because you rolled a die to see if war starts. If it does you drop in with your current age and skills, but if not you aged 7 years and gained skills. During this time you could enlist in the military to gain combat skills at the cost of taking a random amount of radiation damage (which accumulates and can not be cured), and as you got older you took penalties to your intelligence, sight, and agility. Add all of this together with an age cap of I think 71 and you got a blind radioactive geezer who can’t walk or go into any sort of radioactive area at the risk of dying, and all of this right as the GM tells you where your squad is. But hey, you got plenty of skills to take on the enemy you can’t see or aproach.
Waaaay back in the day, we played AD&D 1s Edition. This was before the days when you got max HP at first level. Our DM allowed us one re-roll for anything we rolled in character generation, but we had to take the re-rolled result RVEN IF IT WAS WORSE.
Our Cleric started play with 1 HP.
There’s a 1st level Druid spell, Trip: Causes 1d4 damage.
Our cleric is scragged by a deranged Brownie.
In an early version of Rolemaster, we’d just barely started, and I got killed by a snapping turtle
An ordinary non-giant non-monster snapping turtle
It got a critical