Most Spectacular PC Deaths, PC's "Not" going out like punks Options

[Arethusa]

Those qualify as spectacular to you?

[RedmondLarry]

Yup. They are ones that players still talk about 3 years later.

Or, perhaps I'm mixing these up with the "dumbest ways to die". :)

[Panzergeist]

The shifter would have died sooner or later after failing a regeneration test.

What ever happened to the dumbest deaths thread, anyway?

[Lantzer]

Mekton game. A character jumped out of an aircar traveling Mach 0.5 at 150 feet altitude.

His left arm was found in a tree, completely intact, if you skip the fact that it didn't have a body attached to it...

I don't think Paranoia deaths count. They are far too easy to accumulate.

[Method]

Does earthdawn count? I was once playing ED with this GM that had a ridiculously obvious anti-PC agenda. It was our first session with a new set of PCs so we started out living in a carne (sp? you know, those underground cities everyone hid in to escape the horrors... I think that’s what they're called anyway) oblivious to the fact that mana had receded and the horrors were mostly gone. For whatever reason we had to get out, but everyone in the town had been locked in so long very few knew the way out.

Anyway, this GM was trying to rail road our team into some kind of nasty encounter and pretty much blocked any action we tried to take. NPCs wouldn't talk to us, tunnels collapsed, rooms would have doors that lead to rooms with more doors ad infinitum. So long story short, after about 4 hours (real time) of this BS I decided that my character would insight a riot in the carne and after a good hour or so of chaotic pillaging and wonton destruction my brand new character wound up being burned at the stake.

It took longer to generate the character than it did to get him killed! Needless to say we never played ED again....

[Foreigner]

Method:

That reminds me of an entry I once saw in Blaize O'Glory's RPG Character Post-Mortem Hall of Fame.

(It's in the Archives under "Q, R, S". The character's name was "Roger". He was a Call of Cthulhu newbie.)

Apparently, the guy who ended up playing him had pestered the GM so much that he and the other players had grudgingly decided to let him in.

After creating a PC for him, they sent his character ahead of the group. He went up into an attic, armed only with a flashlight. After looking around for a while, the PC calls to the others:

"Hey, Guys! It's all clear!! Waaaaaaaugh!!!" followed by a rain of gore as what's left of him falls through the attic door. There was an invisible monster of some sort up in the attic.

Epitaph: It took 20 minutes to make this character, and 20 seconds to paint the walls with him...

--Foreigner

[Adarael]

[Smiley]

One time we had to kidnap a young decker whose father was a grand poobah with Microdeck... THE Grand Poobah of Microdeck. Yes, that's right. Brian Gates. We lured him (and his un-GODLY bodyguards) to a bar and (long story short) we finally get him into the truck and speed off. My character follows on her BMW Blitzen. We get to the warehouse and are asked by three people we've never seen before to hand him over. Our prearranged contacts are in the corner, dead. Me and my two teammates are already in bad shape and we're offered more than the already agreed-upon amount to drop the kid and walk away. I'm all for it, and urge my teammates to do as they say. I argue that it's more money and that we'd have no hope of surviving another firefight. However, the player who'd made his character THAT DAY and who was only going to play him THAT ONCE (which should have been a biiiiiig CAUTION sign) tells them to stuff it. The most vivid memory I have of the ensuing Reservoir Dogs-style bloodbath is me turning to him and saying "You've murdered us all!" I was mistaken. Having the highest initiative roll, I sling a few bursts into the three strangers, wounding 2, and then am cut in half. My team makes a few miracle rolls and kills the three strangers, drops the kid, collects the money, and takes off. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the aforementioned player took the time to loot my body and abscond with all my gear. How I hate him.

[Trax]

I hope you gave the guy a really big slap on the head in real life for being such a jerk.

[Smiley]

Meh, we all had a laugh after I calmed down. If my character had been a little older and if I'd had more karma invested, I'd have been pissed. Now when someone says, "RUN, NIGGAZ!" we all do.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

[Mr.Sinister]

We just did a run last weekend (from an adventure book) where my crappy decker* was driving and we came to a checkpoint. The decker rolls down the window, hands the papers to the checkpoint guard, everything was fine, and then BLAM! Surprise attack, Ranger Arms sniper rifle shot to the head. Dead decker. He took it like a champ.

* - Not all deckers are crappy, this was a "mule" character I rolled up to do technical stuff. So, if you're a hard-core decker, I'm not ripping on you or any other deckers. I'm just saying that this particular decker was crappy. I gave the character sheet to a friend because his character was still recovering from wounds sustained the previous weekend. I handed it to him and said (almost as a prediction), "It's a mule character, he's not the greatest in a gunfight, but he can do some cool stuff. Use him as you like, to be honest, if he dies, I don't care."

[Striker]

This one is spectacular because of the collateral damage it caused:

The team had taken a helicopter on their run, including a hired NPC rigger.

Well, they were attacked by a nasty spirit, and the chopper took bad damage...and because the attack had had an electricity secondary effect and the rigger was plugged in...his poor little brain was fried.

The only other character who had any knowledge of flying was used to fixed-wing aircraft, and he wasn't even very good at that (his reason for having 2 points in the skill was background...his hobby was flying single-prop sports aircraft). That character rushed to the controls as the chopper went into a spin...
And discovered that he'd never manage to bring it down safely. The rigger might have done it, but not him without a VCR or indeed the relevant skill.

So the player asked the others: 'We're dead. Want to go out in style?'
They said yes.
He used what minor piloting abilities he had to steer the chopper into the base of the skyscraper their main opponent (an AA corp) was based in. The GM ruled that, while the team was wiped out, the fire went out of control and took the tower out (that was before 9-11, by the way).

[MagicalGirlPrett...]

I remember one time, about a year ago, we were doing this high-powered campaign based off something that had happened in a previous campaign. (Our GM posts here as Wounded Ronin, so he can verify that this actually happened). Now, we've always run pretty high-powered campaigns, even right from the beginning (Our infamous first battle shot up a good portion of a working-class Seattle neighborhood), but through some creativity and luck we haven't lost that many players (With a few notable exceptions, including the now-infamous mortar-attack battle, which was the result of a first-time player being thrust into a leadership role after every last veteran was killed, incapacitated, or unwilling in-character to take charge). However, a little over a year ago we had a player that just didn't seem to get it. He'd do the most ridiculously idiotic things imaginable like open obviously-rigged doors and charge headfirst into a room full of heavily-armed soldiers (that sort of thing), and through a combination of group sympathy and sheer luck he actually managed to come out OK. But there was one run when things just kind of fell apart, allow me to explain:

Previously, one of our characters (A Cybered Elf), had been incarcerated after chasing down a vampire linked to a sex cult our group was hired to investigate. She did some really cool things in-character, but it resulted in her arrest and some pretty serious jailtime. Anyway, she became a notorious figure talked about a lot by the UCAS press, and various doctors went on talk shows all over North America to discuss her case, and I guess the Alamos 20K got the idea to kidnap her and make an example of metahuman "inferiority" by torturing her over a live matrix feed. Fortunately, an anonymous benefactor caught wind of it and notified the remaining holdover from that group, and she and her new group got together to break said Elf out.

Things went pretty well, we managed to track down and stake out the facility and were discussing the plan of attacks, when all of a sudden this guy decides to go play a little Quake II (if you know what I mean), and suddenly charges in. Now, there was a disturbingly high-powered mage in there (That my character, a Racoon Shaman and her Raven shaman partner had to mage-duel in one of the most amazing battle scenes I've ever RPed), as well as about 20 VERY heavily-armed and cybered men in there. So, he's up on the catwalk, and the the mage casts Ice Sheet on the grating beneath his feet. Disaster. He slips and falls...into a pit of tar. But that's not the end of it. He then proceeds to get up, somehow manages not to get killed by being shot up by said heavily-armed men, and is promptly blown to pieces when he tries to exit through the rigged front door. That kind of left the room speechless for a long time, and in the end we all laughed it off and had a great time.

That was one part of the greatest and most spectacular run I've ever been on, but that was about the most spectacular PC death I've ever witnessed. I'm proud to say I've only unintentionally lost a character once in 3 years of playing Shadowrun, and we don't typically lose too many, but that was one of the best.

There was also a time our GM wrapped a character who had also tried to go solo on a tough mission and got himself captured by the enemy, in fireworks, and we, being the loving, compassionate team that we are, started shooting when they threatened to kill him unless we left.

[Wounded Ronin]

He speaks the truth.

[Perssek]

So. Spetacular deaths.

When I started GMing Shadowrun, around 1995, I made a campaign where the PCs had to deal with a lot of Lovecraft´s Myth, not excluding ANYTHING. By the middle of the campaign, they would start to run even in they saw a shadow of something that does not seemed to be human (or meta-human, for that matter).

So. They are employed to help this strange cult in the middle of the Nevada desert who´s being attacked by go-gangers (seven samurai, anyone?). They kill the guys, after a week or so of ambushes and traps, but start to notice that the people in the village have some strange cults in a nearby cave.

One of the members (a street sam ork), also a new player, decides to investigate while they are in their cult, sneaking into the cave and taking a peek at their rituals. The team tries to dissuade him, but fails. He goes into the cave as they move into their vehicles to get the drek out of there.

One of the PCs, a merc who had bullets enough in his back to be considered chromed, is the most scared of them all, being the oldest surviving member of the team, and zaps away in his bike. By distraction, or simple smartass-iness, he runs with the team´s money (he always guards the money). The rest of the team runs after him, in their truck (yes, they rovered around in a truck!), firing warning shots above him to make him stop.

Well, the merc fails to notice that it´s his friends shooting at him. He thinks it´s the Things Men Was Never Meant to Know who´s shotting way over his head, just to make him look at them and go instantly insane just by doing that. No sir. That´s not gonna happen. No way.

He brakes his bike into a U-turn, turns his IR googles on (so he can´t SEE them properly), and fires his friendly Assault Cannon (HE rounds) at the nearest heat source - the truck.

The first shots don´t hit, and the team assumes he´s gone nuts because of something Things Men Was Never Meant to Know did to him and fire back, with all they have, before he turns into something and kills - or do something worst! - them.

The TNs where too high, and none of them hit each other until they were close enough to collide. THEN the merc comes to his senses, and his last words, before they all turn into a massive fireball rolling through the desert, was "oh, it´s you guys!"

The PC who went into the cave discovered the village people were pacific rock-huggers, and left the cave to wonder where the team was, and why there was a sudden fire in the middle of the desert.

Not a very spetacular, but a very stupid way to go.

[toturi]

Oh my god, this is one for the new CLUE files. STUMPS!!!

[Paul]

My short list of favorites:

• Shotgun fight at five feet between two trolls at a circus on a roller coaster. A Troll PC named "Gyro" and a rival ganger, whose name I forget now. Funny as hell.
  
• Russian Roulette and Insomniac Jack. A moon shaman that was Mel Gibson form conspiracy theory on crack, who used drugs to stay awake took the fate of the team in his hands with a Russina Roulette game. We rolled six sided dice, whoever rolled one first lost his brains. Oops Jack lost. I'll miss his ATM assualting ways.
  
• The most stupid was a guy we called "Steve" who decided to fire a fragmentation grenade into a ceiling that I had just described (For whatever reason, hey this was 11 years ago now..) as twelve foot thick marble. Whoops.
  
• Someday I'll get 3278 to tell you guys about the guy who tried to carry a wood chipper with his character up a seventy story building....

[Paul]

[Aes]

It wasn't shadowrun, but ages ago me and some frinds had a game in a similar setting. Now, the thing is that our GM had requested that we made "evil" PCs specifically, to which everyone happily complied.

Personally, I were playing a female elf pyromancer (sacrified a bunch of flexibility but could do just about anything with fire on demand) with a penchant for packing big guns. She also happened to be a chronic chain smoker and five minutes seldom passed without me announcing she were lighting another cigerette with a cantrip.

Several months of running from the law and causing general trouble followed, ending one night in a spectacular chase scene. We had grabed some suitcase filled with full lists of all the local mafias dirty deeds over the years, planning to blackmail them. Sadly, a few botched rolls by the teams dwarf meant we were discovered and chased into a nearby oil refinery. Fleeing on a catwalk over a vat of gasoline, the pursuers mage fired some sort of spell that caused some of the supporting structure above us to collapse. Failing my dodge roll, my character was the only one to be pinned.

So as the rest of the group fled and the pursuers closed, the GM turned to me and asked if I had any parting words.

Me: "I light a cigerette with my cantrip and inhale deeply"

The Dwarf player: "I turn around to glance at our elf and grin as she lights her 500th cigerette in our carreer. Yes, I've kept count"

As the player waved a sheet of paper filled with lines about, indicating that he had indeed kept count I continued:

Me: "I smile back at him, throw the one-finger salute with my free hand and toss the cig into the vat of refined gasoline below us."

2 minutes passed as the GM -- giggling madly with glee -- ran into the adjoining room and returned with a bucket full of dice (he was also a warhammer player) and tossed them all over the table, announcing that anyone who felt like trying to soak some of the damage were welcome to try. It was the last time he asked us to roll up evil characters tho >:)

[MagicalGirlPrett...]

[Kremlin KOA]

hey I'm more miffed that I didn't get a card I have PLAYERS who shake in fear at the word troll after one of my games

[Grimtooth]

This wasn't necessarily a player death but more like a by-stander death.

My group was running in Eye Witness. If i remember right there was a scene in an office high rise. Well somehow an attack 'copter entered teh scene but it was several floors below the group.

They blew out the window and dropped a very expensive desk on the chopper.

No one on the street below survived.

[Striker]

Well, if bystander deaths count...

500k :nuyen: worth of explosives. One residential area. One trigger, wired to the security system of a very, very paranoid dwarf explosives expert.

When the SWAT team kicked in his door, four city blocks were annihilated. The body count was in the high three-digit range. The dwarf was instantly catapulted to the number one spot on four different 'Most Wanted' lists, with a seven-digit bounty on his head. Unfortunately, he managed to get plastic surgery before the rest of the team could sell him out for that fuckup...

[CoalHeart]

Only 3 digit kill count off of 4 city blocks? that's rather low. A single apartment building can have 3 digits alone. And you can pack a single block with many apartment buildings. :)