Inspired by a tangent in the RQ 6 thread, i thought it might be fun to relate stories of the implausible survival of the regular guys and gals of the game world that have survived an encounter or situation against all the odds. Not PCs, just the ordinary NPCs that inhabit the world. The nameless guys who fall prey to Owlbears and the like.

One that comes to mind to me is when the PCs were escorting a few peasants along a ridge as they were being hunted by Orcs. At one point, the chasing pack caught up and despite the PCs best efforts reached one of the peasants and threw him off the ridge - there was a 30 foot drop. In the course of the battle, the PC thief followed him off the ridge.

When the battle was over, the survivors picked their way down and found the unconscious thief splattered on the rocks and the peasant trying to look after him. He had taken 3 damage from the fall, while the thief had taken 13, so the DM ruled that the peasant had landed in a patch of deep moss. From that day onward, whenever a drop turns up we all start looking for patches of moss...

1e Shadowrun,  Our PCs were ambushed at a strip mall in the barrens.  The clerk, who we were pumping for information, was sticking to us hoping to get out alive. We tossed him some armor and cheap holdout from one of the bodies.  We are in this encounter for what seemed like hours.  After the dust settles the 7 PCs who walked in only 2 came out alive with the help of the Clerk.  The Clerk killed/incapacitated the gangers until the others broke off, he never took any serious damage and was surprisingly effective with the weapons.  The GM had us roll for the Clerk so we couldn't bitch about dmnpc or the like.  Which ended up being our PC rolls sucked ass and the clerk was awesomesauce.

*One of the players in the next campaign played the Clerk.

Most of the groups that I play with have lots and lots of interaction with NPCs - and those NPCs carry over and arc through many plotlines in campaigns and one-shots alike.

One in particular that comes to mind is the medic NPC.  He wound up fragging the entire group by tossing a grenade, dropping it at the feet of the PCs (all of whom failed to notice it).  They all took severe damage or died and the medic managed to soak all the damage and come out with scratches and bruises.

Our groups now have a standing rule: The medic cannot have grenades.

Would a minor monster count?

It was a Legend of the Five Rings campaign. Our heroes were chasing a villain in a swamp. Momentarily cornered, the villain summoned forth some pathetic swamp spirits to buy himself some time. The heroes readily dispatched most of the spirits, but just couldn't seem to dent the last one. They flailed futilely at it six times as it scurried around some logs and muddy pits to distract them. When the villain made his getaway the spirit simply swam into waters too thick for pursuit.

Later they cornered the villain once more and I decided he still had that swamp spirit with him. Fight ensues. Spirit swings first. Astonishing one hit kill (L5R uses exploding dice).

Thus began an incredible run of GM "luck"* for me that spanned several campaigns and gave me something of a reputation.

* I'm not adversarial, just randomly lethal.

I'm in the odd position of not being able to think of any examples.  I always have one of these stories, but on this topic I am coming up blank.

Running the players through the Darkness Gathering campaign, they met and impressed a underground dweller with a strange illithid designed gauntlet as a weapon which on a critical hit, pulled out the targets brain.

He ended up following them down to face off against a monsterous neo-illithid worm and somehow survived the whole encounter despite getting blasted with flesh dissolving slime three times. He followed the group through the portal and stuck with them ever since. And about every encounter, at least once he'd get a critical and there would go someones brain.

The NPC in this case didn't make it but is still very worthy of a mention...

I was GMing for an evil group, making their way through the world by main force and villainy. After a lengthy evil quest, still more or less in good shape, they were heading back through the rural countryside to civilisation to dispose of numerous dark artifacts and some satchels of ill gotten gain. This group being who they were, they decided to catch some R&R at a local farmhouse.

The middle aged overweight farmer, who had been out hunting for boar, returned at dusk to find his wife murdered, his son a reanimated zombie, and his livestock smouldering.

As he dispatched his revenant descendant the half elf assassin perched in the upper floors of the barn took careful aim with a fine bison bone crossbow and... missed! The farmer hefted his own crossbow and pegged the assassin in the left eye at sixty paces, the purest of flukes, before proceeding into the kitchen.

Cursing, the vile necromancer of the group overturned the table and drew his glittering blade, crouching low. Once again, a one in five hundred chance delivered by the dice left him hanging with a bolt through both the table and his brainpan. I've never seen anything like it before or since, a 10,10 and 8 on a d10 open ended.

The fat farmer with a crossbow was finally done away with by the dark knight, who staggered off into the night swearing to never again tangle with heavily armed peasants.

Completely unexpected end to that adventure.

Quote from: The Traveller;712007The fat farmer with a crossbow was finally done away with by the dark knight, who staggered off into the night swearing to never again tangle with heavily armed peasants.

My favorite place in the game....That place where roll-playing and roleplaying intersects, and the magic happens.

The incredible stories that come out of the best of this freestyle rpg gaming that rivals even reality in an absurdly impressive manner, which is guaranteed to impress the players as well as cement the game as both an entertaining and realistic depiction of events.

Quote from: The Traveller;712007The NPC in this case didn't make it but is still very worthy of a mention...

I was GMing for an evil group, making their way through the world by main force and villainy. After a lengthy evil quest, still more or less in good shape, they were heading back through the rural countryside to civilisation to dispose of numerous dark artifacts and some satchels of ill gotten gain. This group being who they were, they decided to catch some R&R at a local farmhouse.

The middle aged overweight farmer, who had been out hunting for boar, returned at dusk to find his wife murdered, his son a reanimated zombie, and his livestock smouldering.

As he dispatched his revenant descendant the half elf assassin perched in the upper floors of the barn took careful aim with a fine bison bone crossbow and... missed! The farmer hefted his own crossbow and pegged the assassin in the left eye at sixty paces, the purest of flukes, before proceeding into the kitchen.

Cursing, the vile necromancer of the group overturned the table and drew his glittering blade, crouching low. Once again, a one in five hundred chance delivered by the dice left him hanging with a bolt through both the table and his brainpan. I've never seen anything like it before or since, a 10,10 and 8 on a d10 open ended.

The fat farmer with a crossbow was finally done away with by the dark knight, who staggered off into the night swearing to never again tangle with heavily armed peasants.

Completely unexpected end to that adventure.

We're all twelve once!

Quote from: GameDaddy;712019My favorite place in the game....That place where roll-playing and roleplaying intersects, and the magic happens.

The incredible stories that come out of the best of this freestyle rpg gaming that rivals even reality in an absurdly impressive manner, which is guaranteed to impress the players as well as cement the game as both an entertaining and realistic depiction of events.

Oh yeah and it can work the other way too - the Scourge of Kailynn was to be a major participant in a campaign I was running, a disinherited pirate lord based on Nick Succorso from the Gap series, run through in his first boarding action. Nobody knew the big plans I had for him, so it was time for a quick reshuffle of the notes! Dice are treacherous servants.

It really is one of those things that make RPGs a completely unique experience, unlike anything else.

Quote from: One Horse Town;712021We're all twelve once!

Funnily enough this was grownups who wanted to see how the other half lived.

There've been a few occasions over the years where the mook NPC has survived against staggering odds.  More often than otherwise, once the NPC's passed the unwritten "Holy heck, how's she still standing?" line, the PCs have sought to take the NPC alive, and offer to accept a surrender ... and on a couple occasions, a job offer.

Its become a common joke in my campaigns, whenever the PCs are fighting a group of mooks and one manages to avoid being hit for an inordinate amount of time, I start having the mook mock the PC with this silly "haha"-type laugh (always the same one).

In one campaign, the one where this started, actually, the PCs (who were pretty high-level by then) had fought a group of criminal beggars, and this one old beggar not only managed to avoid being hit, but hit his opponent PC, AND got away! He appeared twice more in the campaign; the second time, to my astonishment, he managed to do it again (being the sole survivor who escaped the fall of his boss, the Beggar King); and the third time (which was actually the final adventure of that campaign), I decided the guy had to be a badass by then; he'd become an enforcer for another gang boss, and acted as a sniper against the PCs.. and wouldn't you know it, he administered a fatal kill shot against the very same PC he'd fought and vexed the previous two times.

It was unforgettable, much moreso than any fight with a huge tough opponent would have been.

RPGPundit

In a Hyborian Age game using DragonQuest, the PCs were in the Border Kingdom, speaking to the survivors of an attack by Picts. One of them grudgingly agreed to help escort the PCs back to the site of the massacre, to see if survivors could be found and/or rescued.

They followed the trail up a river, trailed the Picts back to a makeshift campsite, where a Pict druid was conducting a sacrifice. They charged in, leaving their injured "guide" behind to watch the boats. One Pict got past the PCs and charged the survivor. He panicked and threw his only weapon... a hand-axe. I rolled a critical (02) for him, and it sunk up to the hilt in the Pict's chest, nearly killing him in one blow. (One-shot kills are very, very rare in DQ.)

Momentum from the Pict's charge took him several steps more, and I said "out of panic or instinct, the Borderlander will try to grab his hand-axe back." I rolled and got a 01 (even better!) and said "he blindly reaches out wrenches the hand-axe out of the Picts chest."

There is even a roll to determine damage from pulling a weapon/arrow free from a wound, and I rolled maximum for that hapless, sudden bad-ass. He stepped back, axe magically returned to his hand, having almost instantly dispatched one of the foes who were giving the rest of the group a hard time.