What's the stupidest, most avoidable way you've ever witnessed a character die?

I did something similar to this when I was a stupid teenager.

Decided to sit out a battle to memorize a spell instead of hiding, because I stupidly assumed that since I wasn't engaging anyone in the fight, the other side would just leave me alone.

Character was such a bad Mary-Sue, too.

>player builds a swashbuckler in Pathfinder with 20 Dex and 18 Con
>has 28 AC and over 60 hit points at level 4
>can buff this to 30s as well as buffing his Fort save from +9 to +13
>Even his will save is like +6 somehow
>characters journey to temple to get item to help stop plague
>orcs camped out nearby
>they camp in the forest
>swashbuckler wakes up, takes off his armor and heads out to spy on the orcs
>decides to set off fireworks after spotting a member of the cult they were fighting against, in the camp
>uses fireworks as distraction to sneak around other side and throw fireworks at the cultist
>cultist fails to be blinded
>orcs give chase
>this guy runs around in the woods for almost half an hour with orcs chasing him
>worg riders catch up and attack but they can't hit his insane AC
>finally he runs to the temple to hide
>climbs into a sarcophagus
>there is a wraith inside
>it is night so the wraith chases him out and drains him to death
>orcs are also killed by wraith because none of them have magic weapons so they can't hurt it
>entire party gets pissed at him because now there are like 20 wraiths since people killed by wraiths turn into lesser ones.

>DnD 5e
>One of our players convinced the DM it would be a good idea to let him have grenades
>DM lets it fly and gives him five of them, because the player is not-so-secretly his favorite tool for keeping the group moving
>A few sessions in, party wizard decides to take one of them to see if he can reverse engineer it
>Tells no one, and does it while the grenade's owner is asleep
>Rolls poorly on his Intelligence(Arcana) check, and makes no progress
>Immediately tries again and fucks up, setting the grenade off
>Fails his Dexterity saving throw
>Gets max damage
>Dies in the ensuing three rounds of chaos

At least he deserved it.

I think its ok for a character. A lot of characters really would charge after the bad guy and die. Real people do stuff like this IRL all the time, and when it does work out in game its an awesome memory!

I legit don't get why you all get so mad about this stuff. So long as your gaming group enjoys one style or the other it is fine. There is no objectively right way to handle this scenario. Stop telling people they can't have fun.

>40k RP
>Dude plays a hardcore ganger with autopistol and muscles on his muscles. Rob Liefeld would have an erection at this dude.
>Held at Enforcer/Arbities station for possession of illegal drugs.
>NPC Inquisitor comes in. Offers him full pardon if he can escort him through the underhive pipes.
>Dude tells him to get fucked.
>Inquisitor produces seal and explains his powers and authority
>Thug PC stands up, spits in his face.
>Inquisitor authorises the thug's release, and goes deeper into the station.
>Thug walks outside.
>20 Arbities with shock mauls waiting for him in the street
>You in the wrong neighbourhood, Biggie McLargehuge.
>Ow fuck ahh uuugh eeeek, arrrr! Muh fate points! Muh fate points!!!!
>Is spared death, turned into a servitor.

>The difference is when you use "it's my character" to justify something self-destructive and completely fucking retarded that you know better than to do. All I'm saying is to not be a complete fucking retard. Being suboptimal is fine, being a scene-chewing retard is not.

>real people never do stupid, suicidal things they know better than to do because its "in character"

forget real people actually, its very common for fictional, larger than life characters to do just that.

Sounds a bit railroady but the way that player handled it just gave him what he deserved.

I was running Tomb of Horrors and the first team of characters died before even finding the opening to the Tomb.

It was the second 'false' entrance, the one which locks the characters behind a descending stone block. They were all clustered together and when I started the count after they triggered the trap they just sat around and watched the stone block descend.

I think the players kind of worked out what sort of game it was after that.

It's DH man. "The player characters are forced to work for an inquisitor" is the basic premise of the game.

Nobody died per say, but I caused a campaign to permanently end because of a simple riddle.

The players had to find some treasure or something for some guy who had kept sending adventurers to collect this treasure for him but nobody ever came back. They were supposed to find out what was going on; had the adventurers kept the treasure for themselves? Had they all died?

So they got to the location where the treasure was and found the entrance to the dungeon blocked by a magical talking door with the word "Children" written in dwarvish above it.

The party consisted of a ludicrously self-assured wizard who frequently meta-gamed, a ninja/ranger kobold, and a magically-uplifted troll barbarian with an INT of like 4.

When they got to the door, the Troll player kind of slipped off onto his phone when he heard there was a riddle. The other two were excited to display their mental prowess.

Basically it boiled down to the two yelling various versions and synonyms of the word "children" across the table at me for 45 fucking minutes.

It was at this point the troll player decided he was bored of sitting around (having figured out the answer to the puzzle but being a decent dude and trying to roleplay his INT score correctly).

>Troll (to the door): "Eh, wotz dat seh?"
>Talking Door says "children" in dwarvish
>Door opens
>Moment of silence while other two players realize that they had to get the door to say the word
>feels like they went out of their way to make sure the door never had a reason to say the word "children"
>Table explodes
>WHAT THE FUCK DUDE
>THATS SHITTY DMING
>YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE

Game ended there and we never gamed as a group again.

Puzzles in general can be obnoxious for that reason, but on the other hand, you would think after 5 minutes of assuming the door worked the same as the one in Lord of the Rings, they would have realized that saying 'children' in a different language was not the answer.

>dming a dragonlance game
>autist plays kender rogue
>party is camped near a raging river that I described as dangerously swollen with snowmelt
>rogue constantly pickpocketing from party, people go with it because kender
>rogue actually gets caught by another PC, who grabs his hand and demands the item back
>rogue pulls dagger and attacks
>pvp ensues
>rogue gets the shit kicked out of him
>decides to flee by jumping into the river
"I stay submerged until I have 2 rounds of air left so the current takes me away and they can't shoot ranged weapons at me"
>str 8 rogue fails a string of DC25 swim checks and drowns

>kender not giving the item back while asked

Why does it sometimes feel like at least half the problems people have with kender come from That Guys playing them incorrectly?

Pathfinder: GM decides to have. A silly episode and throw some pop culture bad guys at us. The party tank does not realise until after she has been disintigrated that she was fighting a Dalek, and Dalek are immune to magic swords.

Rogue Trader: voidmaster character gets insulted by noble. Challenges noble to duel. Gets one-shot by duelling pistol. This was literally the first thing that character did.

Dark Heresy: party is setting up and manoeuvring for an assault on a cultis cabin in the woods. One guy decides "eh, this waiting is boring" so he runs up and does a dive kick through the window, directly into the cultist-filled living room, at which point he gets obliterated by them.

Also Rogue Trader: chasing escape pod from pirate ship that jetissoned with just the pirate captain and his servitor bodyguard inside. Rogue Trader decides "I've got this" and teleports over by himself, directly into the middle of a group of heavily armed servitors who chainaxe him in the face until he burns a fate point.

You know how there are "trap" options in DnD's mechanics, and you can tell someone doesn't know what they're doing when they take something like Toughness past level three?

Well, there are trap options in fluff, too. Races that have things like sticky fingers like the kender or supremely dickish attitudes arguably the dark elves and their evil natures attract the attention of people who could fuck up pouring water out of a boot. Even with instructions written on the heel. And the entire party asking them to just turn it over.

That's not to say that anyone who plays non-human races are prone to being disastrous chucklefucks. It's just that anyone who plays a race for the obnoxious personality quirks is probably going to be like a tiny rock stuck in your shoe that you can't get out because you're being pursued by a really creepy foot fetishist.

>does not realise until after she has been disintigrated that she was fighting a Dalek, and Dalek are immune to magic swords.

She should have found out if the GM was immune to swords OOC for that kind of fuckery.

A player had his character commit suicide because he didn't get a magic item he wanted. The item appeared in the next encounter. I don't know if that was the plan all long or if the DM was just rubbing the butthurt players' nose in it for trying to be coercive like that, but either way I wasn't sorry to see him go.

Superhero campaign I'm in rn. Some of the heroes were escaping from a collapsing building after they killed or drove off the villains inside of it. He managed to survive the fight but on the way out a brick bonked him on the head, instantly killing him

First encounter, trip wire next to a pit with spikes at the bottom and a handful of kobolds we caught in the act of setting it up.

Fighter charges them from far side of pit and attempts to leap over.
Bad roll after bad roll has him trip on wire, fall in and dies on spikes.

>party gets captured by goblins
>Dumped into a makeshift holding cell, because Goblins are shitty builders
>Made out of wood, but some pretty tough wood, and without tools or weapons, can't just easily break out.
>We do have a fire mage in the group.
>Who decides to set the building on fire to try to burn his way out.
>While the party is inside
>It goes about as well as you'd expect.

The phrase "It's what my character would do" has enough historical impact to send most people into a frothing rage.

Yeah, it just baffles me how people miss the point so hard

>race takes stuff it wants because it has no concept of property and will borrow interesting things
>That Guy uses this as an excuse to steal money that the race wouldn't see as valuable or understand the point of, and fights tooth and nail to keep things he 'borrowed'

It's just wrong on so many levels.

Masks of Nyarlathoteheheh for Call of Cthulhu. A player had lost a character and had spent the first three hours of the session allocating skills for their next character. The party is in possession of a mask that might deal 1d100 insanity points if you put it on. The player has his new character walk into the party's room and puts on the mask. Takes 90 something insanity points, immediately exits the campaign.

Tell me about this character; why did he wear the mask?