Last week we asked about your age, and we’re going to continue to do so this week!
We’re coming up on our 4th anniversary this week (expect our usual yearly wrap-up this Thursday), and this year, we thought we’d do something fun. At gaming conventions this year, we asked our interview subjects about their favorite critical hit story (from any game.) We got some great responses, and will be typing those up this week, but we’d like to open the floor to you!
If you have a favorite critical hit story, please share it here, and we’ll compile them into a page along with the responses we have already.
Here’s the first one that comes to mind for me: It was running “Book 2” of my first real D&D campaign. Book 1 involved following a magic scroll to various bad guys and taking them out to finally confront the big bad guy (who, in no uncertain terms, was Darth Vader… keep in mind we were pretty young.) Book 2 was going from planet to planet (Spelljammer-style) finding pieces of a mysterious artifact to stop some other bad guys. During Book 2, there were also moving of players around (for various reasons I won’t get into here) and so we had new players we were meeting in High School pretty regularly. One of them was our friend Sion who told me he wanted to play a Wizard named “Splatt the Wonder Tribble.” (Remember, young.) I’m not sure I introduced him in any way beyond “this guy wants to join your party.”
Anyway, on the planet they landed on, they tracked down a powerful old wizard who had his hand practically grafted to the piece they needed and was drawing on it for power. The wizard had plenty of magic defenses up, and I expected a big old powerful magic-user versus the party fight. Spells prepped and everything.
Well, Sion had just started playing D&D, and I’m pretty sure didn’t know what his spells did, and the only items I had given him to start was a robe and a staff. But as everyone else prepared to fight, it came to his turn in the initiative, and Splatt opted for the direct route: “I use my staff to try to knock the item out of his hand.” I laughed, and let him roll the attack roll.
You know what it came up.
Piece went flying out of his hand, another PC scooped it up, mission accomplished. So much for that fight… but it was awesome and memorable, many years later.
That’s mine, though maybe I’ll remember another. What are yours?
A few months ago, I was DMing a session of Our Primal/Within campaign. During one of the fights featuring several adversaries, I picked my trusty orange and Black d20 and I started rolling for 5 attacks.
I got a 20, 20, 20, 15, 20.
I don’t even want to calculate the odds.
That dice has now received more death threats than Kirstin Dunst after she suggested that Spiderman could be killed in a movie.
I love my dice.
.-= The Chatty DM´s last blog ..Creativity and the RPG Mind: Part 1, Introduction =-.
Oh man the best part is I was a player in that game and I remember that crit too! When you said you were writing about Splat and crits that was the first thing I thought of. He was actually introduced to the party by randomly falling out of the sky and landing face down on the ground, and that’s usually how he entered adventures too.
My first experience of a critical hit was back in Second Ed. AD&D, but it was not my critical, more’s the pity…
I had rolled up my first ever character, with help from a young lady who would later be my wife and mother to a geek in training, a fight mage with a handful of nice easy-to-understand combat spells. After a few ‘open with burning hands, hit with the longsword’ kind of encounters, I came face to face with my first bugbear and his greataxe.
I think there might have been a small injury from his greataxe, then I saw my first critical. Considering my character would have had maybe 7 hp max, a critical from a great-axe was going to hurt.
The DM, trying to be fair and honest, rolled in plain view and I got to see my first example of a greataxe rolling max damage. One quick roll on the hit location table later, we were looking at death by massive damage from a critical hit to the groin.
Years later, I have had my share of criticals; I have seen my archers make impossible shots, I have watched a rogue perform a perfect sneak attack on inattentive guards, but I still get a twinge in my crotch when the DM mentions bugbears…
I’ve got two that come to mind:
Recently, during a fairly one-sided battle, the players were getting stomped by a group of elite assassins. Garr the barbarian was nearly down, battling back the minions, while Balthasar the rogue was being revived by the warlord, Titus. Gaelen, the ranger had, up until round 4, missed with every attack. Fighting back the irritation of not hitting once in three rounds, he opts for twin strike and aims for the assassin poised to finish off Garr. The dice get tossed and roll across the mat; 20….20! He crits twice, bloodying the assassin. Because of the crit, he then free action makes a basic ranged thanks to the power of his bow and hits! Action Point and fires Two-Fanged strike; one more crit! He hits with the other attack as well, getting wisdom added to the damage. The assassin dropped, freeing up Garr, and culmintating in a solid shift in the tide. The heroes defeated the encounter almost entirely due to that single round.
Back in the early days of 3e I was playing a ranger/fighter with a double-sword. The party’s first mission took us through a nasty dungeon to rescue some knights. In one room we had a chance meeting with a particularly nasty cleric who slipped out a secret door and escaped.
Later, when we returned to the palace with the knights, we spoke with the queen on what we saw. She ordered her advisor to come out and provide his wisdom in this situation. Of course, it was none other than said nasty cleric. I state that I quick-draw and throw my sword at him. The DM laughs and says, “sure, at a -4 for it not being ranged, and another -2 for distance, why not?” I roll a 20; followed by a 20 to confirm, and because the DM was using the alternate 3e rule of auto-kill, I roll again to confirm auto-kill, 20. I skewered the cleric to the wall, causing panic and orders to have us killed. The players acted quickly using different magic what-have-yous and teleported or flew out of the chamber. Later that evening, after the game, the DM told us that was the BBEG of the story and he didn’t expect such a rash attack. We all laughed and continued the story as we were now considered outlaws from the kingdom and still had to fight off the cleric’s minions.
Unfortunately, the game died off after a few more sessions due to scheduling conflicts and the sort, but that was one of my all-time favorite sessions thanks to that freak lucky roll.
Great idea for a post!
My favorite story was with my PC back in 1e days (and we were kids and played pretty loose with the rules, so I’m not even sure how legit the details were), but I had Jester, the insane dual katana wielding elven fighter-thief.
We’re decently high level and we’re working on clearing out a demon infestation when we come across the big final battle. There’s this nasty lead demon flanked on either side by some other pretty powerful demon minions. We’re outnumbered at least 2 to 1. The main demon is shouting curses at us and taunting us with the things that he’ll do with our corpses and so on. The rest of the PCs are getting pretty worried and trying to figure out our strategy. But Jester asks if he can borrow a companion’s ring of invisibility.
With taunts and curses flying, I manage some great move silently rolls, sneak up behind the lead demon. Then (as the DM after he stopped laughing described it) the demon’s chest bursts open and two katanas slowly turn visible. As the other demons watched their leader slide dead off the blades, everything was silent except for a gulp from one demon before it turn and ran.
Critted both katanas with backstab on both. I don’t think the DM even cared what the damage was – it was just one of those fun moments where he just went with it and instead of having a drawn out battle like many, many others we’ve had, it was a far more memorable cake walk.
So, when would you like to see our favorite critical fumbles? 🙂
Ken: Critical fumble stories are good too! I can now think of two stories that involves both a critical hit AND a critical fumble.
I should also add: share as many stories as you like!
I was lamenting not remembering any of my own critical hit or fumble stories when one popped into my head!
Our friend Richie (Sion on here, who played Splat in Dave’s story above) ran an excellent Star Wars game using the West End Games d6 system, and this moment made me absolutely love that system and its wild die mechanic for the rest of the time we played it.
I had a horribly ripped off Boba Fett bounty hunter who was inside of a star destroyer and encountered some storm troopers. I fired my blaster at one and critically failed, the blaster bolt ricocheted off of his armor, the ceiling, and came right back at me. I rolled for my mandalorian armor, and rolled a 6 on the wild die, critically succeeding which sent the bolt right back at the storm trooper and killed him!
Of course then I proceeded to chase the other trooper back to the barracks, but instead of running like Han Solo did I threw in a thermal detonator and closed the blast doors. 😀
Ah, Star Wars D6 and the Wild Die.
This was the first session of a gamestore game, my character was an Imperial captain who had just defected to the rebellion with a stolen fighter prototype, garnering a big ol target on his head, and he was meeting with the rebel cell/other PCs to get the hell out of dodge.
As soon as contact is made with the rebels, A heavily armed, fully armored bounty hunter bursts in, shouting my character’s name. The bounty hunter that was supposed to plague the characters for a good long while. You can probably see where this is going.
My character gets a good roll and goes first, yanking a stormtrooper blaster from his bag and firing a single shot that just barely managed to hit. Then everyone stared in stunned silence as the wild die on damage came up 6 *FIVE TIMES IN A ROW*. The big bad NPC had just been spontaneously combusted inside his armor 2 seconds after his intro, and the GM had to step outside for ten minutes to figure out what the hell to do now. My character plunked down 40 credits on the bar, said, “Sorry for the mess.” and walked out over the smoking corpse as the other PCs stared with their jaws on the floor before following him out. Was never able to replicate that feat, but since, whenever he pulled out a blaster all the other players cringed a bit in fear and respect.
I was playing in a 2nd Edition game with my buddy Chris. His brother was running it. All the PCs were roughly level four, and I was just joining; the DM said I had to make a level 1 character.
So, I make a level 1 knight and join the party. We are in a particularly bad battle, and I have 2hp left. I’ve missed my enemy, some sort of orc, roughly three times. The DM says, “If you miss again, he’s probably going to kill you. Do you want to try to run away?”
I say, “Nah, I just haven’t rolled well since I’m wearing my class ring on my die-rolling hand.”
Everyone laughs, so I make a big show of removing my ring and grabbing my d20. I then say, “Watch this sh*t!” and toss the die.
It’s lands on a natural 20. All the players started yelling congratulatory things to me, and I smile at the DM and say “Told ya.”
Obviously, I had no idea what I was going to roll. It could have been a 1. But by taking a wild gamble and just going for it, I created a gaming memory that all the players probably won’t soon forget.
D&D again – we were trapped in a temple with a vampire-led gang of zombies after us.
1) We can escape through a secret tunnel under the altar (if I recall correctly), but it’s slow to open and close and the zombies are busting through the door Hollywood style. So we need to buy some time.
2) Earlier in that adventure, the DM introduced basically alchemical grenades that we had been using to good effect against the undead.
3) Loren, our deep gnome fighter’s background was a breachgnome that was knocked unconscious trying to defend his city from an army of undead. He’s carried the shame of being one of the only survivors.
Keep those facts in mind as the gnome decides to gather up all of the remaining “grenades” we have, run out and throw them at the gang of zombies. The door is almost gone already, and he’s hoping the blast will take out most of the zombies and slow them down the few moments we needed to get out and seal the secret door.
With a dozen of these “grenades” in hand, he winds up and… rolls a critical fumble.
As the smoke and dust clear, the wounded gnome gets up from the ground and sees the massive crater separating him from his companions, and the zombies finally breaking through the door. The gnome’s player just took a deep breath and said, “Loren looks at the crater, then the zombies, and then his friends. He draws his swords and says ‘Go now. This time I’ll hold them. This time I won’t fail.’ and charges the zombies.” The player fully intended to be rolling up a new character shortly.
However, what ensued was another fighter muttering, “Forget that!” drawing his weapon and leaping into the crater to spend a round or two climbing up to get into the fight. Our spellcasters and archer started blasting from behind cover, and we had a heck of a fun battle wiping out the undead.
Best critical fumble ever. It led not only to an powerful role-playing moment, but also an awfully fun fight with unintentional terrain effects and everything.
3rd Ed D&D, spear wielding 17th level fighter. I had gone through a lot with this character, levelling him up from 10th when he joined the campaign after my previous character got fireballed to death (quite ironic considering he was a Cleric of a Fire deity).
Myself and another player had attacked a settlement (leading a small army) and as the battle raged outside we fought our way in. We destroyed a group of skeletons, dodged fireballs from flying Wizards and broke into the Great Hall.
Waiting there was a Swordmaster and his apprentice. My colleague left me to deal with them whilst he kept the rest of the skeletons from coming in, and we started duelling.
Despite using Expertise to boost my AC, I was getting worn down and low on HP’s. Knowing that my next round was likely to be my last chance, I change my stance, went from 5 point Expertise to 5 point Power attack…and critted the main guy, doing over 100 points of damage and dropping him.
Even better, I then Cleaved and critted again, dropping the apprentice in one hit. It felt like the culmination of the character’s years of training, and as it also turned out to be the last time I played him it was a fitting end.
Not a story of one particular crit, no this is the story of me critting on the Paladin in my D&D 4e campaign. I’ve had a history of luke warm dice as a player over the years, but as a GM, and especially in my 4e game, my dice run HOT. But as hot as they are in general, they literally HATE the Paladin. In 16 sessions, I’ve had at least one crit on him in probably all but 4 or 5, and in one session alone I critted on him 4 times. And all of that with the best armor and highest AC in the party! Needless to say that he wasn’t really thrilled with it, but being the party Defender he sucked it up like a trooper.
Mine involves the opening salvo of the first five sessions of my 4E Eberron campaign (which started back in January.) In every one of those five sessions, the first attack roll from the first monster to act was invariably a natural 20. Odds of that are 1-in-3,200,000 if I’ve done my math right. (Wish I’d won the lottery instead.) Naturally by the fourth session my players were pleading with me to “crit someone else! No, crit him!”
I have others but I can’t recall them at the moment. I’ll return once I do. 😛
.-= Saragon´s last blog ..Music at the table =-.
My favorite was from a Runequest game I was GMing. My brother’s barbarian had been captured by the Duke they were opposing. The other PCs were teamed up with a resistance group and planning an assault, where some (the PCs and a couple of NPCs) would break off and rescue the barbarian. Well, he wasn’t content to sit on his well sculpted laurels so (short version) he pulled the old “where did the prisoner go” trick by handing from the ceiling above the door. A guard passing dinners saw the empty cell and charged inside, only to be quickly overcome by the barbarian, who now had a broadsword. He entered the hallway and the guard at the bolted door at the end saw him, opened the door and shouted “escaped prisoner” then charged. The barbarian ducked a blow and then struck a critical, hitting the guard in his left leg with enough damage to lop it off (had to do twice area HP, iirc), dropping the guard to the ground screaming in agony. Several more guards entered the hallway and charged the barbarian. He went after each one, and kept rolling left leg hits with enough damage to lop off the leg. One swing, one incapacitation. In the end, he lopped off six left legs, one right (to change it up, I guess) and decapitated another guard.
Covered in gore as the last guard fell and the hall rang with screams, the PCs burst through a door at the other end of the hallway. He turned to them and said “I’ve come to save you.”
I have two memorable critical hit stories. One is mine the other was performed by another player in our group. These were both from our 2nd Edition days. We were young and a little liberal with both the rules and the amount of treasure that was doled out.
I was playing a fighter who had a standard operating procedure of “I kick in the door and throw my Great Axe at the first creature I see” Most of the time it wasn’t very effective, but it was amusing and that’s really what the character was all about. So we are around 8th level and have just finished fighting our way to the BBEG of the campaign in his throne room in the top of his tower. We are low on HP, have already lost one PC on the way here, the magic user is down to hitting things with his staff. The DM has written a good long monologue for the villain to spout as he mocks us before the big fight. Then BAM, kick in the door, throw the axe. Natural 20! I rolled max damage for the attack and exceeded the evil wizards HP by 1 point!
We were around 12th level. Our party sneaks into the lair of the Red Dragon which had been behind all of the recent trouble we had been dealing with. We enter combat with the Dragon and our Fighter with the Belt of Giant Str and Gauntlets of Ogre power wins initiative. Unable to reach the beast on his round he decides to throw his +1 war hammer and a few insults to get things started. The player roles a 20. Great opening right? Well at the time we played with an exploding 20 rule, so as long as you kept rolling 20’s, you kept doubling the damage. Six 20’s in a row later the Dragon is dead from a single thrown War Hammer.
I have 2 favorites, one as a player, the other as a GM.
We were playing WFRP, and I was playing my petite, blonde dwarven warrior-maid, Ahlice. She was cute, with blonde braids and a button nose, and she wielded some sort of smashing 2-handed cudgel which let me do a horrendously damaging attack once every day.
We were on our ship, crossing a lake to an island reputed to be the lair of a dragon, when my character encountered a strange man on deck. After some conversation, she began to suspect that he was a demon or spirit or something, so when he threatened the ship, she whipped out her Boomstick and laid into him with a Smashing Strike.
In WFRP you could go on a “6 express” when rolling damage – I got 3 extra damage dice on top of my regular one, and rolled several 6’s, following up those with a couple more 6’s. I think she did 40 wounds to the guy. Most humans have about 5 or 6 wounds, if I recall.
Imagine my surprise when the shape-changed dragon DIDN’T DIE. Imagine his surprise when a tiny blond dwarf slammed him INTO NEXT WEEK. He fled, looking for his teeth. We killed him later, but he always seemed leery of us after that, for some reason.
As a GM, my favorite critical hit was performed by my friend Dwayne’s dwarf, Dobynor. Dwayne had been reading too many RA Salvatore books, and Dob wore dwarven plate with a 2-foot spike coming out of the top of the helmet.
The party was attacking a keep full of evil cultists, and the chief cleric had given some of the party a pasting and was making his escape… down the railless staircase that ran around the outside of the keep tower.
He was about 2 stories down, and about 3 stories above the ground, when Dob got to the landing at the top. “I’m going to tackle him off the stairwell” announced Dwayne. In top DM form, I said “sure… roll”. 20, naturally. The flying dwarf came from out of nowhere, plucked the cleric off of the stairwell with his headspike, and continued the long, gravity assisted tackle all the way down to the courtyard below.
I didn’t even know how to calculate damage for something like that. I rolled a massive fistful of dice and announced something about “chunky salsa” – Dobynor barely survived, but a 20 con dwarf fighter can take quite a beating.
.-= wickedmurph´s last blog ..4e Sandboxing =-.
I remember back running the 3rd Edition Return to Temple of Elemental Evil, our party got into a scuffle with the Blue Dragon up at the Mote House. As our warmage got ready to unload a nasty spell, a sadistic grin spread across our DM’s face as the assassin rolled a critical on a death attack against the warmage. My dragon shaman then turned his attentions to said assassin and ended him, but it was enough to kill the warmage dead. I would say this was a bad thing, but the warmage was our old DM, and we had suffered our share of crits at his hands, so I won’t lie when I say there was a little bit of schadenfreude on our parts as his character was absolutely destroyed.
.-= agentofn0thing´s last blog ..Protected: Thoughts =-.
I have one story about my friend’s AD&D 2e character’s critical hit, and a further story about a critical failure that started off the campaign.
First, the hit. We were playing a Planescape campaign, and my friend was playing a dual wielding ranger who also had a longbow. We were invading the lair of an adult black dragon who was in possession of an artifact that we needed. We started the fight, and it was not going well. My psionicist was almost out of tricks, and the minotaur fighter was almost falling over. The ranger pulls out his longbow and does a called shot to the eye, and rolls a 20 on his attack. The DM tried to rationalize that it wouldn’t hit, but we wouldn’t let him squirm out of this one. He looked at his papers and just says, “You shoot the arrow at the dragon, and it enters the center of its eye. It buries itself up to the fletching and more; it disappears within the beast’s head and it chokes for a moment while the arrow enters its brain and kills the dragon.
Needless to say, not only did we raid the dragon’s hoard, but we also skinned it and made leather and scale armor as well as shields in addition to collecting dragon’s blood for spell components.
Back when those characters were brand new, and the ink on the character sheet not yet dry, we had an instance of critical failure that still makes me cringe when someone tells me to make a Dex check. Our party consisted of a half-elf ranger, a human psionicist (me), a minotaur fighter, a Svirfneblin (deep gnome) fighter/thief, and an elven mage. We were in Planescape, and trying to escape a manor that was overrun with zombies. The ranger had a psionic wild talent (rolled a 00 on his talent check) of Detonate. The zombies were everywhere, and he used his talent to detonate the stone lintel above a doorway, effectively trapping them in the great hall. More were swarming from the other wings, and we had to get out of the castle, down a spiral staircase in a tower toward the portal that would take us back to Sigil. So, we tell the DM that we were running down the stairs.
“Running, you say? Okay, give me the marching order and a Dex check, each.”
The ranger, psionicist, mage, fighter, and fighter/thief ran down the stairs, in that order. The first three pass with ease. We all held our breath as the minotaur — with a 10 in Dex — rolled, and passed. However, the gnomish fighter/thief with an 18 in Dex rolled a natural 1. He said that he tripped and fell into the minotaur, who had to make another check. Rolled a 3. He falls, and we all fell.
60 feet, we fell down the stairs. Rolling damage for everybody (we were level 1, remember), everybody except for the psionicist died (I had 1hp left). This was the start of our campaign, and we had a 3 day weekend in front of us to game. The DM took pity on us and let me “find” a Rod of Resurrection that had enough charges for everybody. Everybody lost a point of Constitution, except for the elf, who in 2e cannot be resurrected. Luckily, we “happened” to find his (identical) brother back in Sigil. Gaming continued, but we were much more careful with staircases.
.-= D_Gibb´s last blog ..Ultimate Geek Paradox =-.
I have a story about a Crit I made during my first ever D&D session.
I was DMing, It was the first time any of us had played an RPG, and we were playing 3.5 ed D&D.
The party had started in a dungeon and after clearing the first room, which contained a few bats, the elf ranger opened the door into the next room.
There were two kobolds inside, and as I didn’t want to roleplay them, one of them through a slingstone at the ranger as soon as he poked his head in.
I rolled a 20, and confirmed the hit. Doubling the damage, sent the lvl1 ranger instantly to -12 HP crushing his skull and spilling his brains onto the floor.
We were all shcoked by the outcome