Bob the Fighter
Chapter: Season Three
Characters: Bob the Fighter
Bob is actually one of the ideas I had before d20monkey came along. The concept is straight-forward: A dim-witted fighter falling into horrible situations (see also: traps, monster mouths, etc). Eventually, I moved away from Bob as the basis for an ongoing comic but there is nothing stopping me from using him from time to time.
Seven days remain on the d20monkey Kickstarter and as of this writing, we’ve passed 4 stretch goals and are closing in on the 5th: The d20monkey Adventure Game. If you have a spare moment and so choose, please help spread the word for the final days of the campaign. The Adventure Game is close and I have another goal lined up just in case.
Have a great weekend!
COMMENTERS: CHARACTER DEATHS! LAY THEM ON ME!
That’s gonna leave a mark…
I’ve had dreams of the D&D equivalent of “Super Dave Osborne”, who insists on doing really stupid things that end up going horribly, horribly wrong yet somehow manages to survive.
On the plus side Bob can now have a free multiclass level as a Bard (alto).
I believe what you are looking for is Castrato
Sigh. My party has a Bob.
This killed me. I am dead. Dead from laughter.
In my party’s games, we had 1 constant rule, no matter the setting. “Anyone named ‘Bob’ must die.”
Character death (and this is not intended to be political): In a game I was running, one of my players was playing a hyper-right-wing invoker but was getting tired of it and wanted to reroll. During a fight with a group of Slaad, he gets infected with a chaos phage. Rather than make the necessary rolls to get it out, he decides that he’s pro-life and will keep the Slaad tadpole until it hatches aka explodes from his brain. This done, he rolled a fighter and the tadpole grew up to become the party’s next villain.
there are not words for how brilliant that is.
My best death? That’s an easy one. I was playing a Fey Corgi (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_2SLq5ubrbls/S4fhe80KntI/AAAAAAAAAkc/82eYz4lf1MA/s1600-h/Fey_corgi.jpg) Brawling Fighter in D&D 4e. The party ended up fighting werewolves and I (along with our Paladin and Rogue) got bitten. And, much to our surprise, lycanthropy ended up being contagious in this campaign. So we tried to come up with a way to cure that, and after several sessions of trying to go anywhere and having the werewolves just ending up running off to hunt every night, we decided that we needed to restrain the werewolves somehow. One time, we tried tying the werewolves to trees, but the three of us just broke the ropes and ran off. The next time, our Dwarven Battlerager Fighter suggested that we get the werewolves drunk and then tie them up. We all thought that was too funny to NOT try, so that is what we did.
So just after we finished getting hammered (in game) and tying up the werewolves, a bulette attacked. Obviously.
The Rogue easily escapes from her ropes and thus avoids death by being eaten. The Paladin wasn’t even there at the time (his player was out of town).
I rolled a natural 20 on my attempt to escape the ropes. Unfortunately, the penalties from being drunk were so heavy that I couldn’t even escape on a natural 20 (with 18 dexterity while sober, no less).
I ended up being a nice, easy snack for the bulette.
Top of the list for stupid, easily-avoidable deaths, though, would be the time the party sent the wizard off alone outside and ENTIRE FORTRESS OF DEMONS and saw no problem with this. I protested the entire time, and decided that, even though I was playing a Ranger, I would protect the wizard if no one else would.
No one else would.
I died.
The wizard lived.
YOU’RE WELCOME, JEFFERY.
Most of my deaths happen because the rest of the party does not appreciate my genre-savviness. Actually… All of them, except that time with the bulette.
Literally. All of them.
And the lousy ingrates always survive because I cover their asses. ALL. THE. TIME.
My recent favorite was our Halfling Rogue who wound up a pancake (a la Wil E. Coyote) thanks to the over-sized fist of an Iron Golem. His other option was evisceration by rabid cultists. I think he took the high road.
I once killed off a guy’s fighter so badly that the player quite literally tore up his sheet and attempting to shove it down my throat.
Other than that best deaths involve dominating the whole party, someone getting his wooden leg cut off during that too. Oh 2nd ed critical hit tables, how a ballancer you were…
“I used to be an adventurer until I took an arrow to the Bobs…”
GET OUT.
… No, not really.
Best character death I have ever witnessed:
My party was playing an RPG called runequest, and at the end of the session we ended up in a small town. Our fighter went to see a high level member of his cult for some special training. This being a cult of death, one of their rules was that members have to challenge each other to a dual on sight. Not a battle to the death obviously, or the cult would be a very small one, a dual to first blood.
So there he was, facing of against this deathlord, who had, in an amazing stroke of bravery, decided to fight without his armour. Our fighter, he steps forward, fumbles his attack and manages to do full critical damage to his own abdomen and chops himself in half.
We laughed.
our paladin actually died a week after the last game we had played. I realized he had blatantly lied to me (the DM) to save his character from certain glorious death at the hands of a Earth Titan. so I sent everyone in the game, except the player, a message that the character had actually died, and they played the rest of the game with the pally acting normally but not interacting with any of the other PCs or environment. it was hilarious until the player realized that the funeral pyre they were constructing as for him…
suffice to say the player learnt his lesson: the DM is god. even out of the game.
So basically the paladin was in a “Sixth Sense” situation. That’s really clever though, I’d have loved to see that guys face when he figured it out.
I’ve had many character deaths, but my magnum opus follows:
We play a roman-themed D&D game, and my character, a high charisma low intelligence pretty-boy, decided he wanted a hammock made especially for him in the Trireme. Our artillerist fumbled the roll, but my character wasn’t intelligent to determine the hammock was a death trap. Not too bad, so I get in. Saving throw. Fumble.
Ruh-ro.
I immediately start suffocating and drop my sword. Nearby allies (Including one I had JUST been speaking with) get to make perception checks. They all fail- even the one next to me- except one who is on the other side of the boat (and just so happens to be the hammocks creator). Instead of calling out to anyone she silently sprints towards me, and arrives after I’d stopped breathing.
I died on a boat, surrounded by my allies, because of a faulty hammock.
I don’t think anyone can beat that.
Having the name Bob on a character like this reminds me of the story of ‘Turtle Bob’ who died in much the same way as the Bob of the comic. I can’t actually find the link, but essentially, in a GURPs campaign, Turtle Bob was the party Tank. Huge, but nearly impossible to injure thanks to his ridiculously high armour, including a giant shield on his back.
He kicked in a door against the warning of his party, his last words were “It’ll be fine, I’m Turtle Boooooooooobbbbbbbbb”. The door lead to an elevator shaft, which was currently empty.
I *am* Bob in my D&D game. Granted, it is usually because the rest of the party will gladly spend 30 minutes deciding how they are going to open the casket in the middle of the room, to the point of diagrams, fulcrums, levers and whatnot.
I can only take so much of that before Barbatok (my female dwarf barbarian) will walk of the the casket, door, chest, whatever and open it, kick it down, smash it with an ax or throw a (sometimes) dead, flaming kobold on the mystery square.
honestly a corpse makes a better trap detector than a 10-foot pole.
Psionicist. Bag of Rocks. Animate object(or whatever the equivalent in your system of choice is. WIN
In DnD 3.5, you don’t even need the rocks if you go Shaper =p
not a player death, but certainly somewhat embarrassing:
we’ve assaulted the high keep. the baron, who happened to be an ageless master wizard, is confronting us in the main hall after we’ve torn through his guards like they were made of paper.
as he semi-monologues, he starts menacingly walking down the stairs. without any discussion our sorcerer and rogue/shadowdancer displayed pure genius teamwork.
sorcerer cast ‘ice patch’ on the steps as the wizard was setting his foot down. rogue shadowjumps to the wizard as he lays at the bottom of the stairs and delivers a massive triple natural-20 crit sneak attack.
wizard’s dead, no big fight. GM is speechless, we all look at each other and the paladin’s like ‘well… that’s that. you fellas gonna do your usual ‘take everything that’s not nailed or tied down?’
Not quite as embarrassing, but similarly anti-climactic was in a DnD campaign where our party was attacked by a wizard-summoner.
After a couple rounds fighting a horde of nasty beasties summoned by the wizard, a fight that was going poorly, our party necromancer fired off a disintegration ray at the enemy wizard and rolled a natural 20 to hit. As we were still learning the ins and outs of the D20 system we had never seen this happen before, and discovered that a ranged touch attack could indeed score a critical hit. The critical hit was confirmed, massive damage was rolled up and the wizard exploded into a cloud of dust. Fight over.
Recently I had a character die.
My 6th level Barbarian/Duskblade (don’t ask) was fighting a 7th level fighter and having a bad time of it. But just as it looked like certain death, a sudden reversal of fortune and my Duskblade landed an obviously fatal blow on the enemy. Whew, that was close!
That’s when the dead fighter kept fighting, even though he was dead. Turns out the fighter had an evil spell cast on him (one totally unknown to our party) by his evil 10th level Cleric ally, that keeps the target of the spell actively fighting beyond death for a number of rounds and immune to hit point damage during that time. (a spell of questionable game balance) My uncomprehending Duskblade with 2 hitpoints left kept on fighting a couple more rounds and landing more hits on the dead fighter hoping to drop him, but it was no use.
After the fact our party discovered that the princess and companions our party was hired to escort through the wilderness was a set up. They were really human agents of the Drow sent to kill us.
The encounter consisted of a 10th level cleric, a 7th level fighter, and a 5th level rogue and ten 3rd level Drow, vs our 6th level party and 5th level hirelings. Naturally the ambush fell when 2/3 of our party was asleep.
The DM expressed disappointment that only one of our party died in the fight. Needless to say I and at least one other player in our party felt like victims of unfair play. It was very out of character for our DM to ambush us like that, as his well established style was never that of a killer-DM. We had tough fights before, but never anything so unbalanced and without warning.
I think the best death of my party was one where our horribly-underlevelled group attacked the king of the land, and had his courtiers descend upon us in fury… despite only being a 7th level party, we killed two L12 Necros and an L15 cleric in the encounter. Afterwords, I proceeded to immediately don one of the helmets we found, and make a “rather fetching” remark (it was orange, I had to make the joke), which triggered a rune of explosion. My DM facepalmed so hard he had a red-spot for a week.
I, on the other hand, have this awesome story of how Jayne lost his head *after* the bout~
These characters are cool. I would definitely like to see them from time to time. 🙂
Hmm… Someone’s been looking at the old Grimtooth’s traps, it seems. Awesome.
Okay. That was hilarious. So much so, I have decided to comment for the very first time!
P(re)S–I love your comic! I’m an old-school (or maybe just old) gamer from way back. In high school, I was playing and running AD&D 2nd Ed. So, there’s your age verifier. In fact, I havn’t enjoyed D&D since 2E (maybe a bit of early 3E…) In any event, your comic reminds me of the fun I had with monster hacking and beast slashing and DMing up a devious plot to screw the party over…that is, a well-thought out storyline to satisfy the player’s need for adventure. My most frequent gaming endeavors involved Palladium RPGs (especially Heroes Unlimited and Rifts), but fantasy gaming was where I got my start and where my best death story will (finally) begin.
I was playing as a paladin (3E). I couldn’t have been more upright or cheesy, and things were going well. Until our party was dispatched to aid a seaside village being culled by vampires. We arrived in town, and I quickly hatched a plan to arm the villagers and lead them to righteous victory against the blood-sucking evil doers.
Unfortunately, the villagers were so frightened and sickly from being vamp food, I was pretty much on my own when the time came to attack. As the rest of my party remained in stealthy hiding on rooftops, flinging arrows and magic death upon the vampires, my paladin bravely stood alone on the village green. With sword in hand, I waded into the vamps, and with a valiant effort, the evil buggers were destroyed!
However, since the villagers did not participate in the cleansing of their village, I was quite distraught. My empassioned pleas were not heeded, and they were not even grateful for my party’s aid. This destroyed all reason in my paladin (I made 14 different wisdom and intelligence rolls, all failed!!) and in despair, my paladin shed his weapons and armor and dove into the sea. He swam and swam, ignoring all calls for him to return to shore (again, 14 failed rolls!). In the end, my poor (now crazy) paladin was never seen again.
Death by disappointment. 😎
I have had two character deaths in Pathfinder Society, both on the same character.
Raltz Nighvanus is a Bladebound Magus. I had created a leveled version of him for the Ruby Phoenix tournament. We were fighting on a pit of coals, against about four Bards. Yeah, BARDS. Soundstriker bards, to be exact.
Raltz dropped a Black Tentacles, grappling all of them, and flew into the air to get off the coals. They ALL hit him, and he fell unconscious, and fell to the ground, then promptly smoldered to death. Fortunately, our cleric of Asmodeus stepped up and cast Breath of Life. There was a light… then fire. Lots of hellfire, and evil laughing…
The second time was far worse. We were trapped in a crypt with ghouls and a ghast cleric. We were almost TPKed, and Raltz was paralyzed. Then, after our Cavalier fled, he coup-de-graced me by chomping into my throat. I paid for my body to be rescued, and a Resurrection spell, and he has an impressive scar across his throat now from being eaten.
Two memorable deaths. First the one that didn’t happen to me.
Fighter was climbing down a rope for a ventilation shaft in Undermountain. The DM gave him multiple hints that it wasn’t going to end well. He got to the end of two ropes, having tied the second one on when he got to the bottom of the first, then figured it couldn’t be too much farther to the bottom or he’d survive the fall anyway. Didn’t exactly work out for him.
This one happened to me. We had a new player at the table. We found a bell pull alarm that the wererats had set up at a sentry station. My runepriest & the paladin were making our careful way down a 300 foot corridor when the new guy was goaded by the rest of the party to pull the alarm. The paladin & I took off down the hallway trying to salvage any kind of surprise advantage. The rest of the party decided it was safer to flee. The paladin & I spent 10 rounds fighting back to back before the rest of the party finally caught up & saved our bacon.
Then the actual reinforcements arrived…
YESSSSS!!! Finally, a Bob cartoon! I thought he’d look more…Dirk-like.
Late to the party, but:
I was DMing, I think AD&D 2E, and my players had just got to the final boss of the campaign, an evil priest they had been chasing for over a year. The party psionicist started the fight as he typically would: going intangible, so he’d be safe from physical attacks whilst melting faces. This time, however, he rolled a natural 20, which was a critical failure. So, we go to the special table for critical failures, and he rolls again: natural 20. Basically, he disintegrated himself. Best part? To the rest of the party, it looked like business as usual, “Bob” would always disappear at the start of a fight. They never did find out what happened to him.
Lol, the diagram is my favourite part.
I may totally be stealing this for my first DM campaign. >.>
I have not yet encountered character death (fortunately). The closest I’ve ever come, was our Paladin, he and his player forever labeled Lawful Stupid afterward, got bored. While the rest of were doing checks around the area, four giant ruined pillars with a staircase leading down to an underground dungeon, he was growing bored-er. My warlock senses a massive amount of elemental energy surrounding them, and our mage figures out it’s concentrated in this massive puddle of mud.
Our genius picks up as big a rock as he can find, and throws it into the puddle. We were promptly attacked by three angry air elementals and four angry mud elementals, one of which now had a very big rock as a smashing hand. This group almost wiped out the entire party, and my unaligned tiefling warlock tried to drown him in the mud puddle.
Just read this strip after playing munchkin this weekend, “i kick open the door *splat*”
I was a Bob, once. A noble and mighty warrior, yes, but an incredibly unlucky and unwise fool, too. His reputation was such that he was commanded to sit outside and twiddle his thumbs while the rest of the party examined a powerful artifact with a wise, old NPC. Bob attempted to eavesdrop from the roof, but fell through, landed on the artifact, activated its ancient and terrible power, and caused massive devastation, including the death of the wise old NPC.
Sigh, Bob what have we talked about before? Armor, please.
Nowadays, I just let the zombie bash it down, much easier to get a replacement.
This is horrible. I play a fighter…named Bob. His specialty is pretty much nearly dieing. (the DM’s goal is basically to beat on him until he dies…usually doesn’t work out so well for him)
And this is EXACTLY why I always play characters that can summon or create minions. That way they can soak up all the death rays, ballista bolts, flaming oil traps, lethal drops into anti-magic field covered spike pits covered with clever one-inch thick illusory terrain and other nastiness that my DM always seems to try to goad me into.
My favorite so far is still the explosive rune covered hallway with accompanying psionic dispersion field, You’d almost think he was specifically trying to kill my level 8 shaper… =p