So, I have a random question for everybody, what's the best PK or TPK you've ever (almost or fully) pulled off?
My two best are with fire, and not on this forum. I was just a little player too!
Like so:
For context, they just fought monsters that spewed acid they the found out was flammable. While the creature they fought was on land. Surounding them is a lake of liquid (presumably water), that they haven't touched. That has an unknown number of blobs floating around somewhere in the range of LOTS. So Gaia wondered if the liquid was flammable...
The Post:
"Umm, seeing as none of us have touched it, is it even water," Gaia asked, looking back, before stopping and fishing through her pack. Pulling out a matchbook, it always paid to be prepared, she struck one and tossed it into the 'water', hoping to the maker above it was, in fact, water. Or that the acid didn't float like oil on water, though, if it did, the cavern would become very well lit and rather pretty in a couple of seconds. "That should give the answer," she said as the match arced through the air and fell towards the 'water'. She watched to see what would happen should it not be caught, pulling her pack back on.
And hilariously, the lake was flammable! It was like oil on water! So, anyone else have anything bright, cheery, and (possibly almost) deadly?
It might help if you actually inform people what they are before you abbreviate the words.
A PK is a Party Kill or Player Kill where you kill someone on your own team. It's a term typically used in tabletop RPGs.
A TPK is when the whole darned party dies.
In this context, folks are being asked to talk about any times where they've wiped out a party member or the whole party, presumably by accident. You can also, in this context, be talking about forum RPs, not tabletop games, but I reckon both are good topics for discussion.
All I'll say about me PKing people is this: the next time you think a party member is being murdered in a bathroom by the bad guys, don't NOT look in there because someone makes a fart joke.
Are we going to pretend that when a RP becomes inactive that all of the characters involved in it are dead? Because then pretty much every RP I've been in ends in a TPK. I like to imagine they are all just standing around in a circle waiting for that one dude to say something before they do anything else and inevitably succumb to dehydration, starvation, or the elements one by one while a soft, sad piano piece plays in the background before it quietly fades to black.
A PK is a Party Kill or Player Kill where you kill someone on your own team. It's a term typically used in tabletop RPGs.
A TPK is when the whole darned party dies.
In this context, folks are being asked to talk about any times where they've wiped out a party member or the whole party, presumably by accident. You can also, in this context, be talking about forum RPs, not tabletop games, but I reckon both are good topics for discussion.
All I'll say about me PKing people is this: the next time you think a party member is being murdered in a bathroom by the bad guys, don't NOT look in there because someone makes a fart joke.
Ah. Well that makes sense. I never got into the tabletop stuff much so some of their terms get lost on me.
I don't think I've ever had a decent player kill... maybly cause most of the rps I'm in die after the introduction stage and I never make it to the mid game.
@Atrophy there's a telstra ad at the moment talking about.the Australian nbn and slow internet. Everyone is moving and talking with a lag and the ad goes, "don't live with lag, upgrade your internet now" I'm just imaging a dead rp with character that have a loading bar above their heads for the next action xD
I remember one time when I played D&D in my history teacher's room, our knight had a horrific day. So we start out and he ends up getting to hug a spike ball on the first trap roll. We enter a room only to find the history teacher's character in there as a boss. For context, we were all playing new characters and the teacher's was like... level 70. So after we all dodge and got beat up by the lvl 70 black jesus, everyone in the party besides the knight runs out and the knight gets trapped in the room and promptly becomes new wall paint and ornaments.
Of course, once our paladin resurrected him, the paladin promptly stabbed the knight for shits and giggles which lead to him taking a double arrow shot to the face, a lute to the head and a failed shield bash originally aimed at his chest, going to his groin. And if that wasn't enough, we chucked him back into the boss room.
Being a knight is hard. This is why I played ranger :^)
Why your teacher made a DMNPC as a boss is beyond me, but... being a knight is awesome in D&D 3.5, thank you.
I think the reason I don't have a lot of PK or TPK stories is because I've been in mostly level-headed groups that think tactically in tabletop games and don't try to murder each other. But now that you mention the knight/paladin shenanigans, I remember a story...
Once upon a time, I was playing Pathfinder. I was really new to Pathfinder and to the gun rules, and I've always loved playing paladins. Goody-two-shoes is my playstyle. So, I made a Holy Gun: a paladin with a pistol who was ready to shoot straight for justice! But I specifically chose to worship the deity of redemption because I didn't want to play your "EVIL MUST BE PUNISHED" paladin. I wanted to play someone who could get along with non-good party members and see past their faults. I wanted to play someone who tried to build others into good people.
My paladin's companions included a very zealous Lawful Good cavalier, an oracle whose details I forget, some other spellcaster, and then this roguish fighter type that was a little bit of a pragmatic edgemasterr. Important to note: the cavalier was being played by someone who normally played chaotic neutral doorknobs who kill for sport and the edgemaster was being played by his best friend. (I didn't play with these guys for very long.)
Well, long story short, our first adventure saw us fighting kobolds. We captured a few of them, and of course my paladin wanted to show them mercy. Now, the cavalier's player was kind'a new to playing good, so he latched onto my idea of "keep the bad guys alive" and was pretty fervent about this.
The roguish fighter was pragmatic, as I noted. He observed that we really couldn't go lugging these captured kobolds around. He actually had some good logic, too: first, dragging them around would slow us down, and we had a town to save; second, they'd try to escape; third, if they escaped they'd go get more kobolds; fourth, they would do their darnedest to make our lives miserable; and fifth, he was being in-character and his character didn't feel like kobolds were people. So, he wanted to kill 'em.
Remember how I said the cavalier was pretty zealous about this "don't kill the kobolds" thing? Well, as the fighter and cavalier were arguing about what to do, the fighter demonstrably just cut off the head of a kobold to stop the argument and get us moving. So, the cavalier charged him.
Now, cavaliers have this thing called a "horse." When you charge on a horse with a lance, you deal double damage. Because the fighter wasn't expecting this, the cavalier got a free round against him (according to the GM's ruling) and just rode the fighter down. BAM. Knocked him out in one hit. Then he was going to kill him...
The GM should never have let this scene get to this point, note.
So, me being the gentle paladin I was, I tried to shoot his hand so he'd drop his weapon and not kill the fighter. I didn't want to kill anyone - I just wanted to stop him from performing a coup de grace on the fighter. But, see, I'm a little famous for having really good rolls. I got a 20. I rolled damage with my pistol. I got max.
Did I mention we were level 1, our Oracle had used up all her spells, I didn't have Lay on Hands yet, and neither of us had ranks in Heal?
Needless to say, the cavalier and fighter both bled to death.
P.S.: Holy Gun is a trash archetype. Mysterious Stranger 1 / base paladin onwards is waaaaay better.
...holy crappola. And here I was all happy about killing things with fire and missing out on two or three level ups because it was online rather than tabletop. :P
Anyway, yeak, PK is player kill and TPK is total party kill, @NuttsnBolts. Sorry I'm a bit late back to the party. This'll work for either online forums or tabletop games, though I'd hate to do a dice one with you, @Shorticus becuase I'm the guy that always rolls the ones to fives, so your 20 rolls would kill. -__-
But let the shenanigans roll out!
And never use a flamethrower on a wooden creature in a wooden house when said wooden creature is in front of your only exit (same character, same universe, she was NOT one of my more long term tactical thinking characters...).
You think 20's kill? Wait until you hear about exploding dice.
So, Savage Worlds operates on the idea of exploding dice. Namely: if you roll the max number on a given die, you roll it again. You can do this indefinitely.
So, once upon a happy time I rolled a d6 for damage. And it exploded. And it exploded. And it exploded...
I did 45 damage with a dinky little rapier that day.
You think 20's kill? Wait until you hear about exploding dice.
So, Savage Worlds operates on the idea of exploding dice. Namely: if you roll the max number on a given die, you roll it again. You can do this indefinitely.
So, once upon a happy time I rolled a d6 for damage. And it exploded. And it exploded. And it exploded...
I did 45 damage with a dinky little rapier that day. Translated, that deals enough wounds to auto-kill a lot of mean things.
Haha, I almost told this story when I wandered over yesterday.
I'm not sure how legit this is, as Rilla sort of manipulated events and he was the GM, but it's still funny enough to warrant telling.
It was a simple day out for any fledgling adventurer party, we'd left the city perhaps an hour previous and were walking through a grassy plain holding a single tree. Out of no where, our party of Dwarf, Elf, Thief, Necromancer and others were beset upon by what can only really be described as a huge ferocious ostrich. Being a little unfamiliar with early game encounter logic, and feeling an axe throw wasn't that unbelievable, my Dwarf lobbed an axe into its chest as it ran straight into him. Understandably, it collapsed like a sack of spuds and I prepared to finish the beast off.
Unfortunately, Rilla was not best pleased that we had rekt his solitary chicken with minimal effort or bloody casualties.
Now, by this time the normal amount of people had dissapeared, A.K.A we had two idle players standing around, a thief and a mage I believe. The mage was to suffer a pretty rough demise, as Rilla had a literal horde of ostrich-chicken-monsters come to slay us. The mage was bitten and ripped apart, but Rilla did not stop there, oh no. He had to punish my upstart Dwarf for the audacity of murdering his chicken, and so with a mighty slam it launched poor Forsoff through the air, head-first into the idle thief player's ass. Needless to say, Forsoff was left dazed and confused as he picked himself up off the floor, only to find the thief had broken his neck on the tree branch and was now dead.
tl:dr giant chicken throws Dwarf headfirst into thief's ass, thief subsequently flies into branch and breaks neck, laughs were had, chickens were eaten, good times.
Let me set the scene for you. I was the resident shitposter in a session a few years back, playing a Dwarf Bard called "Blackjack" who exclusively played Tenacious D songs and spoke (through me) in Jack Black's voice, peppered with as many Nacho Libre/Brutal Legend/School of Rock/Tenacious D references as possible. My best friend -- who was pretty much the king of minmaxing -- played a half-orc barbarian who more or less carried me through every fight, so I dumped all of my skill points into useless crap like leathersmithing, flower identification, etc.
One day, we come upon a Hill Giant. The party consists of Blackjack & Pylo, played by my friend and I, and a mage, a paladin, and a druid.
The Hill Giant swings a log at all of us. Pylo, having put enough skill points into Jump to have Epic Jump, dodges it easily, even with the -6 he takes on the roll for having me on a Hodor-style basket backpack. The light-armored druid and paladin make the jump as well, but our Paladin gets crushed by the tree and into a boulder. While the mage tries to heal our internally-bleeding paladin, the druid chucks a spear at him and Pylo charges with his axe. Because Blackjack is wearing armor and will probably stumble and get fucked up if I roll to leap out of the basket, I have no choice but to cast Rage on Pylo. As are house rules, actually singing while playing a bard gets a +3 on the roll, so I start singing the chorus to The Metal. HILL TROLL TRIED TO DESTROY THE METAL, BUT METAL WAS MUCH TOO STRONG
It works, and we kill the troll. While the druid and the mage heal the paladin, I ask the DM if the hill giant is circumcised, and get a tentative "Nnno?" Using the Leathersmithing skill I mentioned, I proceed to make a helmet out of the giant's foreskin. The DM tells me if I wear it it'll be -15 Charisma because it's a fucking dick hat, and since charisma is my highest stat I chuck the helmet because the joke wasn't funny enough in the first place. My friend decides to keep the helmet in his inventory because the giant didn't actually have any gold, so he'll at least sell the hat at the next market or something.
Anyway, after that, we make it to the kingdom we were originally trying to get to. Along the way, the druid gets us all arrested for crashing a rally of the kingdom's resident machine-god, and we're brought before the king to confess to our crimes. Along the way we manage to cause a distraction in the royal courtyard long enough for us to break free from our cuffs and get into a separate room, where we find a bunch of similarly-sized noblemen waiting to speak to the king. We pull the classic knock-em-out-and-wear-their-clothes trick to fool the king because we all have really good bluff scores, but as it turns out, Pylo put on the outfit of the royal crownsmith and has to present the king with a new crown.
The King asks to see the crown he's made, and Pylo pulls out the dick-cap.
The DM just says "He has you all executed" and has us reroll characters.
i remember playing a Sci-fi tabletop game (cannot for the life of me remember the name of it) but i remember being our ships pilot and while the rest of the group searched a abandoned ship i stayed in the ship waiting for pickup. sure enough they ask me to pick them up but they had a couple of bad guys behind them so they just wanted to jump from the airlock to our ship. i have to roll to see if i can get close enough for them to make the jump. i rolled a one and crashed the ship into my group and the enemies. it blew up killing my party and the enemies
Let me set the scene for you. I was the resident shitposter in a session a few years back, playing a Dwarf Bard called "Blackjack" who exclusively played Tenacious D songs and spoke (through me) in Jack Black's voice, peppered with as many Nacho Libre/Brutal Legend/School of Rock/Tenacious D references as possible. My best friend -- who was pretty much the king of minmaxing -- played a half-orc barbarian who more or less carried me through every fight, so I dumped all of my skill points into useless crap like leathersmithing, flower identification, etc.
One day, we come upon a Hill Giant. The party consists of Blackjack & Pylo, played by my friend and I, and a mage, a paladin, and a druid.
The Hill Giant swings a log at all of us. Pylo, having put enough skill points into Jump to have Epic Jump, dodges it easily, even with the -6 he takes on the roll for having me on a Hodor-style basket backpack. The light-armored druid and paladin make the jump as well, but our Paladin gets crushed by the tree and into a boulder. While the mage tries to heal our internally-bleeding paladin, the druid chucks a spear at him and Pylo charges with his axe. Because Blackjack is wearing armor and will probably stumble and get fucked up if I roll to leap out of the basket, I have no choice but to cast Rage on Pylo. As are house rules, actually singing while playing a bard gets a +3 on the roll, so I start singing the chorus to The Metal. HILL TROLL TRIED TO DESTROY THE METAL, BUT METAL WAS MUCH TOO STRONG
It works, and we kill the troll. While the druid and the mage heal the paladin, I ask the DM if the hill giant is circumcised, and get a tentative "Nnno?" Using the Leathersmithing skill I mentioned, I proceed to make a helmet out of the giant's foreskin. The DM tells me if I wear it it'll be -15 Charisma because it's a fucking dick hat, and since charisma is my highest stat I chuck the helmet because the joke wasn't funny enough in the first place. My friend decides to keep the helmet in his inventory because the giant didn't actually have any gold, so he'll at least sell the hat at the next market or something.
Anyway, after that, we make it to the kingdom we were originally trying to get to. Along the way, the druid gets us all arrested for crashing a rally of the kingdom's resident machine-god, and we're brought before the king to confess to our crimes. Along the way we manage to cause a distraction in the royal courtyard long enough for us to break free from our cuffs and get into a separate room, where we find a bunch of similarly-sized noblemen waiting to speak to the king. We pull the classic knock-em-out-and-wear-their-clothes trick to fool the king because we all have really good bluff scores, but as it turns out, Pylo put on the outfit of the royal crownsmith and has to present the king with a new crown.
The King asks to see the crown he's made, and Pylo pulls out the dick-cap.
The DM just says "He has you all executed" and has us reroll characters.
While I'll never buy into the "bards are the worst" idea and would point at clerics as the best min-maxer class in 3.5, I'll just go ahead and say that's an AWESOME story.
Now that I've thought about it more, I once got a DM to kill me out of spite.
Okay. Once upon a time I'd made a Fighter in 3.5 whose specialty was chucking javelins. He had all the necessary stuff: brutal throw, adamantine weapons, the Master Thrower PRC... He wasn't the strongest character ever made, but he had a tremendous wallop with those deathsticks of his. His Strength score was pretty absurd, too.
Anyway, my GM was getting annoyed with him. He started creating encounters that would counter him specifically. You know: Protection From Arrows (because magic stuff was actually rare, even though adamantine wasn't), monsters with Deflect Arrows, etc. I was okay with this. It was my fault for making a one trick pony character. I guess my GM thought he had me beat.
We're not more than level 7 or 8 when my GM decides it's time to whip out a lich. It's obvious that he intends this guy to be a badass: he's tough, he's got minions to support him, he's got a Staff of Seriously Bad Magic Dude in his hand, an Ioun Stone floating around his head... the guy was a spook. And the truth is we didn't have much of a counter: our monk was a monk, our rogue was a rogue whose sneak attacks would do nothing, our wizard was... Frankly, our wizard sucked and was already out of spells by this fight, and the DM NPC had been balefully polymorphed and we made no attempt to turn her back into a human which is probably why we were getting punished with a lich fight at level 7/8.
Anyway, I assessed the situation. I was lucky and got a really high initiative roll, and as the guy always marching in front, I was able to start closing in. I didn't even try chucking javelins because the DM had made it EXTREMELY VERY CLEAR that the lich had SUPER TOUGH BONES which SUPER REDUCED PIERCING DAMAGE. It was laid on pretty thick.
Anyway, turn 1 goes by. I spent it closing in. The monk and rogue are dealing with the Lich's minions. The wizard gets paralyzed by the Lich and some other bad stuff happens. But then it's my turn again.
I look at my DM and say this:
"I grapple the lich."
My DM blinked. "What?"
"I grapple the lich."
"Why?"
"Because he can't cast spells." I left out the part about Silent Spell and Still Spell letting you cast while in that situation because I correctly assumed my DM wasn't that savvy with the system, and I didn't want him retroactively saying "Oh, he has Silent Spell and Still Spell." But I grappled the Lich, and the Lich's BAB and STR were abysmal, so even though his touch stuff (being a lich) would normally be AWFUL to deal with, I pinned him. And that's all I did: I kept him pinned and unable to cast spells.
A few rounds later, the monk decides to jump in on this, having cleared out the minions. The rogue decides he wants to join the grapple as well. Pretty soon the Lich is being grappled by all three of us at once and is getting punched in the ribcage and pelvis every round. Did I mention the monk had some sort of holy handwraps which gave her +2d6 damage vs. evil or something? So, yeah. Lich got killed before ever doing more than paralyzing a single member of the party.
The session ended. The next session came around, and one of the first things that happened is my character got chucked off a 10,000 foot high bridge and died. Such is the wrath of the DM. (I didn't have any potions of featherfall or anything because YRRRRR LOW MAGIC SETTING in which we have a wizard and liches are thrown at us.)
Spiteful (T)PK is just sad... A player managing to outwit the DM regularly is worthy of glory. But if someone should die, it had better bee in a worthy way. say by having a mountain fall on them. Or by being bitten by a rodent while (s)he sleeps.
Been playing a RP where there's one guy in particular who dies in almost 80% of all the sessions we play(no one else of the PCs has died so far except 1)
Either he tries to betray us, tries to shoot up the ship(he was the captain), walks into a radiation chamber in hopes of getting superpowers, follows the well-protected demolition expert to an obvious car bomb etc.
It's made the rest of our PCs question why we even bring in new crewmembers in the first place :P
4x Laugh
