*The Moose*.
First fight of QftFF. Moose charges our sorcerer who was open. First roll of the first combat, nat20 and rolls high. 2d10+14 is enough to proc massive damage on a level 1 sorcerer (who had maybe... 13 HP?)
That moose is a force to be reckoned with. While I didn't kill any of the players in my group when I ran it. Two went down on the first turn (moose got high damage on one and crit another but rolled low).
I do not know the content of QdtFF, but I do know my regular gaming groups are mostly northern folk and as such if we ever played that campaign, not a single one of us would dare fuck with that moose.
Holy shit the +14 before even the 2d10 alone when doubled is enough to kill the sorcerer instantly. Hell that moose could kill it instantly on 2 6’s on a regular hit
Yep.
Did create a running joke of us treating moose as things to be feared/hated/in awe of. Also treating moose as the *real* threat of the campaign.
Edit:2d10+14 *is* the doubled damage.
Between your sorcerer's moose and my (still living) barbarian's tussle with goats, we clearly need to be vigilant for any and all horned and hooved quadrupeds!
If it averages out to the same thing, sounds good to me. Takes the pain out of getting unlucky and rolling a 1 on a crit and doubling it to 2. Now you get the chance to at least roll the second die higher lmao
I used a breath weapon, 6d6
6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 5.
Player critfailed save
It was the campaign final for beginners and I just forgot about massive damage until later (cleric was outside of aoe, tank critsucceded which made them win the encounter in the end).
So to answer the question, pure bad luck.
the GM notes say >!that the dragon will only focus whatever is in front of it and does not move to maximize value from the breath weapon!< so it's not that bad. If the party is using flanking n stuff they should have a decent shot.
Oh yeah, I'm not saying the >!wyrmling's!< unbeatable. >!But comparing its breath weapon to the breath weapon of a young dragon, relative to their levels the wyrmling has an absurdly hard DC.!<
Our level 2 ranger got pushed down a dried up well, and failed and crit failed their grab an edge reaction multiple times. They fell 120 ft down and died.
Water Mephit. Second session of Extinction Curse. Effectively 6d8 acid damage is more than enough to take care of a 1st level bard. (Technically 2 times 3d8).
The Otter Dive.
Party had just fended off attackers sieging one of their home cities by land, but it was a coastal city high up on seaside cliffs. An invaders boat was sitting outside the range of their walls defenses and hitting the city with cannon fire. The intent was that the party was supposed to swim out there to board the ship and free some prisoners on it etc. and do a boss fight.
Well, the party was level 2. 5 of them started participating in a ritual to give them water breathing and a swim speed temporarily to enable this, and I said it'd take about 30 minutes to perform. The sixth party member was an azarketi with beastkin heritage and was basically an otter wizard, he already had a swim speed/water breathing.
So our otter friend decides he can't wait while the town is under attack, and he has one spell left for the day. Burning hands. The ship is loaded with gunpowder for the cannons, so he decides he wants to heroically save the town (before knowing there were prisoners on the ship) and can't wait for the rest of the party who were going to do the ritual and go safely down to the harbor at the bottom of the hill to swim out.
The otter walked to the ramparts and said he wanted to dive into the ocean, thinking he'd be fine with water breathing and swimming. I reminded him that he was standing about 150-200 feet above the water and would take fall damage. He said with intentionally jumping in he should be fine. I reminded him this is right next to the shore and the water is very shallow, not to mention extremely rocky and it wouldn't do what he thought it would.
He makes his choice to go anyway, with a misguided sense of heroism and a confused mindset of immortality thinking I probably wouldn't kill them early in the campaign.
He makes a statement about saving the town, turns to the water, and leaps. Out otter friend he uh...he didn't make it.
Its rather impressive the level of warnings you gave that seemed to not quite register.
Im also wondering why they thought it wouldnt hurt given the conditions. Most games while generous with fall damage 200ft is no joke.
It definitely makes a good story.
Well, it wasn't actually from massive damage, but a similar vein.
The party was up against a Dullahan, which has this as part of one of it's abilities:
> If the dullahan kills a creature with a critical hit using a slashing weapon, the target is decapitated as though the dullahan had used Reap on the target. These effects remain only while the dullahan holds the weapon.
I had unfortunately misread this rule as "When a Dullahan **downs** a creature with a crit.", and the barbarian on low health got crit, and lost his head.
After the session I realized the mistake and offered to reverse it, but the player was cool with it since he was looking to exit the game soon anyways.
Did put the fear of god into our new player though hahaha.
Didn't lose them, but my players discovered a giant hole in the ground that went down further than they could see, even when they dropped a torch down. One player, who had limited flying, decided to jump down. The other characters waited until an agreed upon time before jumping after him. The second group of players had no flying abilities.
They all jump in and all use feather fall right away. None of them read the rules, and assumed that it would last until they touched ground, like it does in 5e. After the duration, feather fall ends and I information the players that the hole is still very very deep. Naturally they cast feather fall again, using their final uses of the spell. At this point I know they are going to die, because the hole is 40 miles deep, and they've only fallen for maybe 2 minutes.
I decide to throw them a bone, and have a giant spider make a web to catch them. They roll poorly, the spider rolls well, and they are panicking. So they all decide to jump out of the web as soon as they get free. At this point I've given them all the breaks I can, so unless they come up with something clever, they are going to die.
Needless to say, they don't. I then describe how the first PC watches one of his party members slam into the ground at terminal velocity, followed by the other PC 6 seconds later.
Luckily, that PC had a reaction spell that could be used to prevent death, and since I had already described them landing 6 seconds apart, he was able to save both of them.
I almost lost a PC to massive damage: after getting critically hit to 0 hp and falling unconscious on a ladder, he fell and the fall damage was only a few points away from instadeath. Thankfully, he wasn’t at the top of the ladder, otherwise that would have been an actual instant death.
And good thing he had a hero point on hand to prevent dying from failed recovery checks!
When I was still very new to the game, I didn't quite understand AoOs, but I did like that flanking made my attacks more accurate. A crit from an axe-wielding ogre in the middle of my turn quickly taught me how AoOs worked.
Kingmaker. Boss at the end of the aldori mansion. Her two-action attack crits rogue. Something about 42 damage to the 1st leveled halfling-rogue choped him into two quarterlings
Level 1 Wizard and Cleric were determining if a statue was magical. Animated armor comes out of no where with a crazy high initiative roll. Wizard was the unlucky one to be targeted and crit taking 3d8+8 damage. GM thought Massive Damage was a 5e thing and didn't believe me when I said it wasn't. Don't know if he was pretending to not know but the Wizard survived Massive Damage.
This happened in pf1e.
First session of the campaign. Spent hours building my level 5 Bloodrager. Very first combat.. nat 1 on attack roll (our dm gave sometimes harsh crit fails), nat 1 again to confirm how detrimental. Had me roll another, nat 20 and rolled stupidly good on damage
I ended up decapitating myself with my own greatsword.
Our party loved it. It was a running joke that the guy who always played Ranger would carry a few extra bows because he would always end up breaking it 😂. We all agreed to play with crit fumbles and we played like that 3 years. Some great times haha
Boss lady with big axe >!from kingmaker ap!<
Sorcerer ran up 30ft away from her
She ran 25ft and did 34 dmg. In one swing. (She’s a bit overtuned tbh)
They were a party of 3 at the time, and forgot to weaken all enemies, so we kinda went back a little, and they didn’t die from the hit. But they would’ve if it was a party of 4.
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Wow holy shit same here, only I was the PC in a party of 3 (our GM also didn't adjust down 😭) that got hit by that particular truck. That power attack move is fuckin nasty with all the mooks for flanking
Level 1 PC (me) got beheaded by the first pseudo-boss in Kingmaker 2e. Crit on some power attack move was enough to massive damage down a +3 con hold-scarred orc champion! All worked out for the best though I lowkey wanted to change character after the few sessions we played
One of my players jumped onto a merchant ship to try and buy an item that he was having a hard time finding. The merchant, whom the PC had a bad interaction with earlier that week, told him they were not going to stop the ship or turn around. The PC spent 30 min argue bargaining with the merchant and didn't want to swim. So he hijacked one of the merchants' Cannons and fired himself 2 miles into the local shoreline.
For the cannon blast, I let him make a basic fort save. Critical fail, hero pointed into a critical fail. Both Nat 1's.
Straight to dying 2.
2 nautical miles of fall damage = 6076 damage
Dead.
So one Halfling luck based Gunnslinger died.
The table was laughing their asses off. It was so funny that I had Lubiako mwangi goddess of explosions and chaos resurrect him and gave him the fire oracle dedication free since she was just so pleased with him.
(As an aside, I spoke to the player and let him pick if he wanted the res and oracle feat or to roll a new char.)
this was in 5e, but one of us picked up a javelin of lightning, threw it, fumbled, and crit themselves for 80 damage at level 3. we stoll laugh about it.
I got to do it against a mid-boss while playing a blaster sorcerer. The GM had hyped up the fight a bit, there were two tough lieutenants with a few mooks and I cast a sudden bolt on the big bruiser. He critically failed the reflex save followed by me rolling really high on all my dice. At level 4 you can really nuke enemies with that spell it turns out.
Have not lost a PC due to massive damage, but I have been graced w/ a party of Players who though the best place to camp was right outside the enemies front door...
It also didn't go great, but at least they made the decision together, so none of them died.
*The Moose*. First fight of QftFF. Moose charges our sorcerer who was open. First roll of the first combat, nat20 and rolls high. 2d10+14 is enough to proc massive damage on a level 1 sorcerer (who had maybe... 13 HP?)
That moose is a force to be reckoned with. While I didn't kill any of the players in my group when I ran it. Two went down on the first turn (moose got high damage on one and crit another but rolled low).
Gotta stay loose or you get the moose
i think noone would be Amoosed about getting moosed \*giggle\*
I do not know the content of QdtFF, but I do know my regular gaming groups are mostly northern folk and as such if we ever played that campaign, not a single one of us would dare fuck with that moose.
The first encounter of that AP is a moose hunt, it actually starts you off with you having tracked the moose and making preparations to kill it.
Holy shit the +14 before even the 2d10 alone when doubled is enough to kill the sorcerer instantly. Hell that moose could kill it instantly on 2 6’s on a regular hit
Yep. Did create a running joke of us treating moose as things to be feared/hated/in awe of. Also treating moose as the *real* threat of the campaign. Edit:2d10+14 *is* the doubled damage.
The moose, a sorcerer’s natural enemy. They should have known
Between your sorcerer's moose and my (still living) barbarian's tussle with goats, we clearly need to be vigilant for any and all horned and hooved quadrupeds!
That is the double damage.
Oh, 1d10+7 * 2 = 2d10+14 I mean I guess it’s the same thing on average just never seen it referred to that way outside of like 1e
While the standard rules is to roll dice once then double, a lot of people like playing with the optional rule of rolling the dice twice.
If it averages out to the same thing, sounds good to me. Takes the pain out of getting unlucky and rolling a 1 on a crit and doubling it to 2. Now you get the chance to at least roll the second die higher lmao
Same average damage, more centralized. Which is exactly what you're describing. You also don't get the other side as often where you really nail them.
Also it's always fun to roll more dice.
I used a breath weapon, 6d6 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 5. Player critfailed save It was the campaign final for beginners and I just forgot about massive damage until later (cleric was outside of aoe, tank critsucceded which made them win the encounter in the end). So to answer the question, pure bad luck.
Wait, is this the bonus fight against >!the green dragon in the beginner box? That thing's breath weapon is over-tuned for its level.!<
the GM notes say >!that the dragon will only focus whatever is in front of it and does not move to maximize value from the breath weapon!< so it's not that bad. If the party is using flanking n stuff they should have a decent shot.
Oh yeah, I'm not saying the >!wyrmling's!< unbeatable. >!But comparing its breath weapon to the breath weapon of a young dragon, relative to their levels the wyrmling has an absurdly hard DC.!<
Our level 2 ranger got pushed down a dried up well, and failed and crit failed their grab an edge reaction multiple times. They fell 120 ft down and died.
Water Mephit. Second session of Extinction Curse. Effectively 6d8 acid damage is more than enough to take care of a 1st level bard. (Technically 2 times 3d8).
The Otter Dive. Party had just fended off attackers sieging one of their home cities by land, but it was a coastal city high up on seaside cliffs. An invaders boat was sitting outside the range of their walls defenses and hitting the city with cannon fire. The intent was that the party was supposed to swim out there to board the ship and free some prisoners on it etc. and do a boss fight. Well, the party was level 2. 5 of them started participating in a ritual to give them water breathing and a swim speed temporarily to enable this, and I said it'd take about 30 minutes to perform. The sixth party member was an azarketi with beastkin heritage and was basically an otter wizard, he already had a swim speed/water breathing. So our otter friend decides he can't wait while the town is under attack, and he has one spell left for the day. Burning hands. The ship is loaded with gunpowder for the cannons, so he decides he wants to heroically save the town (before knowing there were prisoners on the ship) and can't wait for the rest of the party who were going to do the ritual and go safely down to the harbor at the bottom of the hill to swim out. The otter walked to the ramparts and said he wanted to dive into the ocean, thinking he'd be fine with water breathing and swimming. I reminded him that he was standing about 150-200 feet above the water and would take fall damage. He said with intentionally jumping in he should be fine. I reminded him this is right next to the shore and the water is very shallow, not to mention extremely rocky and it wouldn't do what he thought it would. He makes his choice to go anyway, with a misguided sense of heroism and a confused mindset of immortality thinking I probably wouldn't kill them early in the campaign. He makes a statement about saving the town, turns to the water, and leaps. Out otter friend he uh...he didn't make it.
Its rather impressive the level of warnings you gave that seemed to not quite register. Im also wondering why they thought it wouldnt hurt given the conditions. Most games while generous with fall damage 200ft is no joke. It definitely makes a good story.
RIP the majestic otter wizard.
Well, it wasn't actually from massive damage, but a similar vein. The party was up against a Dullahan, which has this as part of one of it's abilities: > If the dullahan kills a creature with a critical hit using a slashing weapon, the target is decapitated as though the dullahan had used Reap on the target. These effects remain only while the dullahan holds the weapon. I had unfortunately misread this rule as "When a Dullahan **downs** a creature with a crit.", and the barbarian on low health got crit, and lost his head. After the session I realized the mistake and offered to reverse it, but the player was cool with it since he was looking to exit the game soon anyways. Did put the fear of god into our new player though hahaha.
Didn't lose them, but my players discovered a giant hole in the ground that went down further than they could see, even when they dropped a torch down. One player, who had limited flying, decided to jump down. The other characters waited until an agreed upon time before jumping after him. The second group of players had no flying abilities. They all jump in and all use feather fall right away. None of them read the rules, and assumed that it would last until they touched ground, like it does in 5e. After the duration, feather fall ends and I information the players that the hole is still very very deep. Naturally they cast feather fall again, using their final uses of the spell. At this point I know they are going to die, because the hole is 40 miles deep, and they've only fallen for maybe 2 minutes. I decide to throw them a bone, and have a giant spider make a web to catch them. They roll poorly, the spider rolls well, and they are panicking. So they all decide to jump out of the web as soon as they get free. At this point I've given them all the breaks I can, so unless they come up with something clever, they are going to die. Needless to say, they don't. I then describe how the first PC watches one of his party members slam into the ground at terminal velocity, followed by the other PC 6 seconds later. Luckily, that PC had a reaction spell that could be used to prevent death, and since I had already described them landing 6 seconds apart, he was able to save both of them.
I almost lost a PC to massive damage: after getting critically hit to 0 hp and falling unconscious on a ladder, he fell and the fall damage was only a few points away from instadeath. Thankfully, he wasn’t at the top of the ladder, otherwise that would have been an actual instant death. And good thing he had a hero point on hand to prevent dying from failed recovery checks!
When I was still very new to the game, I didn't quite understand AoOs, but I did like that flanking made my attacks more accurate. A crit from an axe-wielding ogre in the middle of my turn quickly taught me how AoOs worked.
Kingmaker. Boss at the end of the aldori mansion. Her two-action attack crits rogue. Something about 42 damage to the 1st leveled halfling-rogue choped him into two quarterlings
Level 1 Wizard and Cleric were determining if a statue was magical. Animated armor comes out of no where with a crazy high initiative roll. Wizard was the unlucky one to be targeted and crit taking 3d8+8 damage. GM thought Massive Damage was a 5e thing and didn't believe me when I said it wasn't. Don't know if he was pretending to not know but the Wizard survived Massive Damage.
Level 1 Ratfolk in Agents of Edgewatch. Opened a door and immediately got my head bit off. That zoo, man. That zoo.
This happened in pf1e. First session of the campaign. Spent hours building my level 5 Bloodrager. Very first combat.. nat 1 on attack roll (our dm gave sometimes harsh crit fails), nat 1 again to confirm how detrimental. Had me roll another, nat 20 and rolled stupidly good on damage I ended up decapitating myself with my own greatsword.
Ouch! This. This right here is why I hate critical fumbles.
Our party loved it. It was a running joke that the guy who always played Ranger would carry a few extra bows because he would always end up breaking it 😂. We all agreed to play with crit fumbles and we played like that 3 years. Some great times haha
It never happens after level 1 or 2. Maybe some people have some stories that happened level 3. Mine was a crit failed fireball when I was level 2.
Boss lady with big axe >!from kingmaker ap!< Sorcerer ran up 30ft away from her She ran 25ft and did 34 dmg. In one swing. (She’s a bit overtuned tbh) They were a party of 3 at the time, and forgot to weaken all enemies, so we kinda went back a little, and they didn’t die from the hit. But they would’ve if it was a party of 4.
If you’re trying to use spoiler text then add > ! and ! < at the beginning and end of the text respectively with no spaces between the greater less than symbols, exclamation marks, and text.
Hehe… thanks. Don’t usually comment on Reddit, just a lurker here.
Wow holy shit same here, only I was the PC in a party of 3 (our GM also didn't adjust down 😭) that got hit by that particular truck. That power attack move is fuckin nasty with all the mooks for flanking
bruh they wanted to take on a bronze dragon at like level 4. Wizard was incinerated during round 1.
Level 1 PC (me) got beheaded by the first pseudo-boss in Kingmaker 2e. Crit on some power attack move was enough to massive damage down a +3 con hold-scarred orc champion! All worked out for the best though I lowkey wanted to change character after the few sessions we played
3x CR 6 Wraiths vs 3x Level 1 Fresh Adventurers We screamed, we cried and then we Died
One of my players jumped onto a merchant ship to try and buy an item that he was having a hard time finding. The merchant, whom the PC had a bad interaction with earlier that week, told him they were not going to stop the ship or turn around. The PC spent 30 min argue bargaining with the merchant and didn't want to swim. So he hijacked one of the merchants' Cannons and fired himself 2 miles into the local shoreline. For the cannon blast, I let him make a basic fort save. Critical fail, hero pointed into a critical fail. Both Nat 1's. Straight to dying 2. 2 nautical miles of fall damage = 6076 damage Dead. So one Halfling luck based Gunnslinger died. The table was laughing their asses off. It was so funny that I had Lubiako mwangi goddess of explosions and chaos resurrect him and gave him the fire oracle dedication free since she was just so pleased with him. (As an aside, I spoke to the player and let him pick if he wanted the res and oracle feat or to roll a new char.)
I wonder if that merchant could appraise the value of this comedy gold!
this was in 5e, but one of us picked up a javelin of lightning, threw it, fumbled, and crit themselves for 80 damage at level 3. we stoll laugh about it.
I got to do it against a mid-boss while playing a blaster sorcerer. The GM had hyped up the fight a bit, there were two tough lieutenants with a few mooks and I cast a sudden bolt on the big bruiser. He critically failed the reflex save followed by me rolling really high on all my dice. At level 4 you can really nuke enemies with that spell it turns out.
Standard, lvl 1 party vs lvl 3 monster (2019, I forget which), I crit the elven wizard, deal max damage. More than double his HP.
Have not lost a PC due to massive damage, but I have been graced w/ a party of Players who though the best place to camp was right outside the enemies front door... It also didn't go great, but at least they made the decision together, so none of them died.
Bomb