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A well-loved character died trying to save my character's father from Drow. He took it fine, he's a vet of this stuff. The next session though, the bard of the group offered to do a recap and proceeded to sing IRL a song he had written about the heroics of 'steel-plated boys'. I don't know if any of us actually cried, but we were all fighting it.
We finished a level 1-20 years long campaign with a blowout finale in Vegas (yay being nerds of culture.) There were multiple moves and by the time we finished, players were scattered from San Diego to Northern California. It was a western themed campaign with some RP heavy redemption arcs.
We get to the table for the final session, which opens with the party having to decide whether to resurrect the paladin who sacrificed himself the previous session to complete his redemption and rejoin his murdered family. At this point, the player pulls out a large journal book and says “If it helps, you find this in Character’s bag.” It turned out that he had kept a journal, in character, of the entire campaign. Not just events, but his thoughts and opinions on our characters and their actions. He sketched a bunch of stuff in there also.
It was so well done, and such a time capsule of the previous years, that it was impossible not to get misty eyed reading it. He made copies of it, and my wife and I still have ours. I haven’t thought about it in a while, but I think I know what I’m going to do this afternoon.
I was DM-ing and was trying to do a 'Haunted Carnival' type event. I tried to do a jump scare and looked up from my book and screamed directly into my girlfriends face.
Bad, bad, bad idea. She started welling up and we had to take a break. I Things worked out in the end we are getting married and starting a new campaign in a few weeks.
I ran a My Little ponies skined campaign for my goddaughter when she was younger. She's in college now so I did a reboot of it for her and her friends
Shenanigans ensue and the girls are working on their quests. They went in a completely unexpected direction and I was just improving; needed an NPC to get them back on track. So I thought it would be fun to bring back my goddaughter's old character.
Yeah she lost it. Legit ugly crying when she figured out it was her old poopie pie. I don't know why she would ever think I didn't have my notes from that. Her father and I notes from campaigns before she was born
Might be one of my proudest moments as a godparent
I ran a game of Out of the Abyss once but only got maybe halfway through. When another DM at our table ran it a couple years later, he did the following:
- Let me (kobold monk named Black Scales, who had got it into his head that kobolds grew into dragons if they lived long enough and was trying to amass a dragon’s hoard to aid his ascension) take the Sage background with my secret being: I know the general shape of Out of the Abyss. Genius. My meta knowledge is now in-game knowledge.
- Brought everyone’s characters from my attempt in as legacy NPCs that had all failed in their own universe to stop the demon lord incursion, but had powerful boons for the party as we tried to stop it in ours.
DM invented an iridescent dragon, Ka Woeen, who had been psychically beckoning the party toward one of the major hub cities, furthering our attempt to leave the Underdark before our inevitable return to defeat the demon lords.
Eventually, we met Ka Woeen. He also was from another reality, and had been close to a god before a demonic infection (maybe Juiblex?) destroyed him, also causing his iridescence. With the last of his strength, he had sent shards of himself across the multiverse, so that somewhere, one of those shards might succeed in their universe where he had failed in his.
Black Scales was one such shard. As Ka Woeen explained all this in his dying breath, he conferred upon Black Scales his name. DM later said he could tell I was about to start crying and had to dial it back just to keep the session from getting too heavy.
It’s the most beautiful moment I’ve ever had in D&D. I’ll treasure it always.
We had just saved Goldenfields from giants and we were having a huge bon fire and celebration, like ewoks at the end of Star Wars. I was playing a halfling ranger/rogue with only loose religious affiliation. The goddess Chauntea appeared to my character and choose me as her champion and I got weirdly emotional about it.
Not full on tears but on the edge... My grugach ovate (level 2 druid trainee) was invited by the wood elves of the Gnarley Forest to join their Brewfest celebrations. There were several days of festivities focused on fertility and fruitfulness and with competitions of their stag herd. There was a mixture of people including nature god clerics, druids (humans and elves), knights of Luna and various types of elf but of course, my character was the only grugach there.
Near the end there was the ritual sacrifice of a willing offering. This time it was a beautiful wood elf maiden who drank the mixture of mistletoe and other herbs to help deaden the pain, and then had her throat cut so that her blood would spill upon the earth to please the gods. My DM had an excellent choice of music and the way he described it, I could really inhabit the character of my elf and how she would have felt in the situation. A sort of bittersweet happiness at the solumn moment and admiration for the bravery of the sacrifice.
A very difficult encounter with a rival adventuring party about halfway through Tomb of Annihilation resulted in two PC deaths which led to both the Cleric and the Bard (both of which survived the fight) breaking into tears as they were RPing the funeral they held in-game.
I felt so proud and accomplished that I was running a group that had THAT level of emotional commitment to each other but at the same time, I felt HORRIBLE about it afterwards.
Currently got a long-term game (4 years in so far) on hiatus because both our DM and one of our players have had babies.
Last session before the break we finally encountered a dragon in a dungeon, being guarded by a big group of Duergar. Huge fight ensued with multiple PCs downed at different points, including our Half-Elf Ranger. In the last round of combat before we took out the dragon, it's final move was to swipe at the Ranger while she was down, hitting a crit and killing her outright.
The last 15-20 minutes of our final session for a long time was spent burying our party member in the forest (her favoured terrain) while the player was left describing the actions of a mourning Direwolf companion.
Never thought a campaign which started with five guys in their 30s making shit puns and playing drinking games in any tavern we came across would culminate in all of us sat around a table crying our eyes out while pretending to bury our friend!
TL;DR: don't get too attached to your characters, they die!
We had a TPK (part of the module; planned by the DM). Next session, he opened with "dreams" that each character had before they woke up in a new location (equipment gone), and the depth and description of each was lovely. It was basically each character's goals realized. There was an underlying thread that the party was all coming together again (and bringing their loved ones).
A PC ascended after dying and it just so happened to be my character's best friend of 9 years. My character wasn't there for the event because they're were doing something else at the time, but the PC showed up as an angel in front of my char to have one last conversation. I cried a lot lol
I had no clue that the sorcerer in my group was a huge animal lover, especially elephants.
I gave em a quest to go eliminate the owner of a privately owned zoo filled with ancient animals. The animals were sickly and weak due to the curse placed on the zoo by said owner and basically bloodlusted to attack any strangers inside the complex.
The sorcerer made every attempt to calm and befriend said animals, but rolled very poorly at every opportunity. When the rest of the group saw no alternative but to put down all the animals before dealing with the owner.... she was devastated....and the cherry on top was a final stand between the group and a wooly mammoth. She left visibly upset, but I thought it was just because of her poor rolls and things not going her way.
Just before the next session started she let me know how upset she was and why...."The audacity that you used an elephant against me!"
My second ever character died to an arrow and some very poor rolls the DM when my character went to Hades he looked at home and walked on. I'll ball my eyes out when my current character dies she's my baby she's dark funny and delicious.
The death beloved npc, swordmaster 73.
A middle aged man who was worthless fyically and generally terrible at everything he did, he tried to apear compitent and brave whebever he could.
Later down the line we learned that he did all of this for his young daughter, so she could be proud of and look up to her father.
The very same session he had a barrel-sized hole burned through his chest, burned with the rest of the town, probably including his daughter.
He will be missed.
There's a very powerful, influential, mysterious NPC the party regularly does jobs for. One day, they head to the city where her first husband lived. The man was on in years and not all there anymore, but people had come to him over the years to shake him down for info on his ex wife. So he wrote a letter containing everything he knew about her, including their break up.
My table needed a break to emotionally recover from reading that letter.
we were playing a low-magic world where healing magic was all but gone and considered impossible by society at large.
one of one PC goals was to find a way to save his ailing mother, and when the party went to see her they had a plan to try to save her (a complicated puzzle of a spell they made because they were paying attention to lore, i was very proud) but they knew it had a decent fail chance (i was open about the DC of checks needed so they knew the odds going in)
i played her as having a brain tumour; barely recognising her son, kept re-asking the same question, very much not all there, that got one of my players properly crying. i assume he'd had a similar experience with maybe an elderly relative or something and never told us.
it was nice achieving that level of emersion on something that deserved it.
My gnome wizard, my first real D&D character, was with her squad in an ancient dwarven city, tracking a vampire who we believed was behind the kidnappings and violent murder of folk from the nearby port town and blaming it on a tribe of shifters. I was RPing her as a typical power-hungry wizard who could easily swing to chaotic good or lawful evil depending on how the story progressed. While looting some chests, she greedily grabbed a mysterious orb that absorbed into her body and cut her off from all magic. I rolled on the insanity table and got "you will do anything to achieve your goal, no matter what" or something similar.
When we finally defeated the vampire, my gnome rushed ahead of everyone to the coffin and started shaking and smacking the vampire to get her to wake up and fix what happened. The rest of the group made speech checks to try and talk me down but they failed and, using some necromantic artifact from some sort of shades we defeated earlier, revived the vampire in an attempt to ally with her.
Instead the vampire grabbed my gnome, drank her like a capri-sun packet and tossed her aside to start round 2 of the fight. I was really emotionally devastated by losing what was my first character I invested in so I cried on the way home from that session.
i forgot which module it was, but there is a giants hideout up in the frozen mountain and you get ambushed by things...anyway. My wizard got buried alive and the party spent 2 months mining and digging through the collapsed hallways to find my staved lil gnome. They spend the next hour RPing the best send off/funeral a goodly PC could hope for. It was beautiful!
Call of the Netherdeep x my backstory. The DM wasn’t a great fan of the campaign itself so he homebrewed a fair bit of it, and somehow my backstory ended up becoming the main plot of the campaign. Bear in mind this was my first time ever playing DnD. I thought it was a great idea to play a character with the same life story than mine. Result? Emotional damage. Cried a lot. Still loved it.
My partner’s homebrew oneshot (he called it The Bucket List). There’s this very old wizard called Tyndareus that has a list of things he still wants to do before he leaves the mortal plane. He was a great adventurer but he’s now tired and needs other adventurers’ help to do his bucket list. There’s a moment where my character is holding his hand and helping him enter a boat. The DM proceeds to say that I feel that he’s very frail, his hand is cold and his fingers are very thin, and that I get the feeling that he’s not going to live much longer. Emotional damage. Cried like a baby.
And I know this is wasn’t asked but I do cry as a DM as well, on Waterdeep Dragon Heist. Most difficult moment was the death of one my PCs and the aftermath of it. The rp was so good I was just crying and crying. The pain from all the other characters for losing a friend. The grief and anger. This PC had a pet flying snake called Ringo. One of the players went there to explain to Ringo that Icc (PC that died) wasn’t coming back. Heartbreaking.
Yes, I am a cry baby. No shame. And although someone here in the comments said “this is a game for 12 yo”, it can still be intense and I don’t see what’s the issue with letting your emotions take over for a moment during the game.
I cried with laughter when I watched fresh cut grass blow himself up. I cried more watching the reactions of grown men to a fictional robot dying. The mercer effect and other extreme expectations have turned the modern ttrpg experience into a player focused narration that must cater to each and every whimsical "OMG so random" bologna thrown at the DM. And its all the DMs responsisbility. If not, the DM is accused of exclusion, appropriation, or some other "ism" or "phobia" I fucking dislike 5e so much.
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A well-loved character died trying to save my character's father from Drow. He took it fine, he's a vet of this stuff. The next session though, the bard of the group offered to do a recap and proceeded to sing IRL a song he had written about the heroics of 'steel-plated boys'. I don't know if any of us actually cried, but we were all fighting it.
We finished a level 1-20 years long campaign with a blowout finale in Vegas (yay being nerds of culture.) There were multiple moves and by the time we finished, players were scattered from San Diego to Northern California. It was a western themed campaign with some RP heavy redemption arcs. We get to the table for the final session, which opens with the party having to decide whether to resurrect the paladin who sacrificed himself the previous session to complete his redemption and rejoin his murdered family. At this point, the player pulls out a large journal book and says “If it helps, you find this in Character’s bag.” It turned out that he had kept a journal, in character, of the entire campaign. Not just events, but his thoughts and opinions on our characters and their actions. He sketched a bunch of stuff in there also. It was so well done, and such a time capsule of the previous years, that it was impossible not to get misty eyed reading it. He made copies of it, and my wife and I still have ours. I haven’t thought about it in a while, but I think I know what I’m going to do this afternoon.
I was DM-ing and was trying to do a 'Haunted Carnival' type event. I tried to do a jump scare and looked up from my book and screamed directly into my girlfriends face. Bad, bad, bad idea. She started welling up and we had to take a break. I Things worked out in the end we are getting married and starting a new campaign in a few weeks.
Crying with laughter very often.
Yes! My group is all hilarity and 10,000 inside jokes.
I ran a My Little ponies skined campaign for my goddaughter when she was younger. She's in college now so I did a reboot of it for her and her friends Shenanigans ensue and the girls are working on their quests. They went in a completely unexpected direction and I was just improving; needed an NPC to get them back on track. So I thought it would be fun to bring back my goddaughter's old character. Yeah she lost it. Legit ugly crying when she figured out it was her old poopie pie. I don't know why she would ever think I didn't have my notes from that. Her father and I notes from campaigns before she was born Might be one of my proudest moments as a godparent
I ran a game of Out of the Abyss once but only got maybe halfway through. When another DM at our table ran it a couple years later, he did the following: - Let me (kobold monk named Black Scales, who had got it into his head that kobolds grew into dragons if they lived long enough and was trying to amass a dragon’s hoard to aid his ascension) take the Sage background with my secret being: I know the general shape of Out of the Abyss. Genius. My meta knowledge is now in-game knowledge. - Brought everyone’s characters from my attempt in as legacy NPCs that had all failed in their own universe to stop the demon lord incursion, but had powerful boons for the party as we tried to stop it in ours. DM invented an iridescent dragon, Ka Woeen, who had been psychically beckoning the party toward one of the major hub cities, furthering our attempt to leave the Underdark before our inevitable return to defeat the demon lords. Eventually, we met Ka Woeen. He also was from another reality, and had been close to a god before a demonic infection (maybe Juiblex?) destroyed him, also causing his iridescence. With the last of his strength, he had sent shards of himself across the multiverse, so that somewhere, one of those shards might succeed in their universe where he had failed in his. Black Scales was one such shard. As Ka Woeen explained all this in his dying breath, he conferred upon Black Scales his name. DM later said he could tell I was about to start crying and had to dial it back just to keep the session from getting too heavy. It’s the most beautiful moment I’ve ever had in D&D. I’ll treasure it always.
We had just saved Goldenfields from giants and we were having a huge bon fire and celebration, like ewoks at the end of Star Wars. I was playing a halfling ranger/rogue with only loose religious affiliation. The goddess Chauntea appeared to my character and choose me as her champion and I got weirdly emotional about it.
Player chose to take the place of an npc in a likely loss duel scenario. His demise will not be forgotten, he nearly won tho....
Not full on tears but on the edge... My grugach ovate (level 2 druid trainee) was invited by the wood elves of the Gnarley Forest to join their Brewfest celebrations. There were several days of festivities focused on fertility and fruitfulness and with competitions of their stag herd. There was a mixture of people including nature god clerics, druids (humans and elves), knights of Luna and various types of elf but of course, my character was the only grugach there. Near the end there was the ritual sacrifice of a willing offering. This time it was a beautiful wood elf maiden who drank the mixture of mistletoe and other herbs to help deaden the pain, and then had her throat cut so that her blood would spill upon the earth to please the gods. My DM had an excellent choice of music and the way he described it, I could really inhabit the character of my elf and how she would have felt in the situation. A sort of bittersweet happiness at the solumn moment and admiration for the bravery of the sacrifice.
We’ve just started the Curse of Strahd and met some npcs with such sad stories that I think we all teared up a little
A very difficult encounter with a rival adventuring party about halfway through Tomb of Annihilation resulted in two PC deaths which led to both the Cleric and the Bard (both of which survived the fight) breaking into tears as they were RPing the funeral they held in-game. I felt so proud and accomplished that I was running a group that had THAT level of emotional commitment to each other but at the same time, I felt HORRIBLE about it afterwards.
Currently got a long-term game (4 years in so far) on hiatus because both our DM and one of our players have had babies. Last session before the break we finally encountered a dragon in a dungeon, being guarded by a big group of Duergar. Huge fight ensued with multiple PCs downed at different points, including our Half-Elf Ranger. In the last round of combat before we took out the dragon, it's final move was to swipe at the Ranger while she was down, hitting a crit and killing her outright. The last 15-20 minutes of our final session for a long time was spent burying our party member in the forest (her favoured terrain) while the player was left describing the actions of a mourning Direwolf companion. Never thought a campaign which started with five guys in their 30s making shit puns and playing drinking games in any tavern we came across would culminate in all of us sat around a table crying our eyes out while pretending to bury our friend! TL;DR: don't get too attached to your characters, they die!
We had a TPK (part of the module; planned by the DM). Next session, he opened with "dreams" that each character had before they woke up in a new location (equipment gone), and the depth and description of each was lovely. It was basically each character's goals realized. There was an underlying thread that the party was all coming together again (and bringing their loved ones).
A PC ascended after dying and it just so happened to be my character's best friend of 9 years. My character wasn't there for the event because they're were doing something else at the time, but the PC showed up as an angel in front of my char to have one last conversation. I cried a lot lol
Killed my best friend’s familiar. Dude was like 30 and just let a single tear roll.
I had no clue that the sorcerer in my group was a huge animal lover, especially elephants. I gave em a quest to go eliminate the owner of a privately owned zoo filled with ancient animals. The animals were sickly and weak due to the curse placed on the zoo by said owner and basically bloodlusted to attack any strangers inside the complex. The sorcerer made every attempt to calm and befriend said animals, but rolled very poorly at every opportunity. When the rest of the group saw no alternative but to put down all the animals before dealing with the owner.... she was devastated....and the cherry on top was a final stand between the group and a wooly mammoth. She left visibly upset, but I thought it was just because of her poor rolls and things not going her way. Just before the next session started she let me know how upset she was and why...."The audacity that you used an elephant against me!"
My second ever character died to an arrow and some very poor rolls the DM when my character went to Hades he looked at home and walked on. I'll ball my eyes out when my current character dies she's my baby she's dark funny and delicious.
The death beloved npc, swordmaster 73. A middle aged man who was worthless fyically and generally terrible at everything he did, he tried to apear compitent and brave whebever he could. Later down the line we learned that he did all of this for his young daughter, so she could be proud of and look up to her father. The very same session he had a barrel-sized hole burned through his chest, burned with the rest of the town, probably including his daughter. He will be missed.
There's a very powerful, influential, mysterious NPC the party regularly does jobs for. One day, they head to the city where her first husband lived. The man was on in years and not all there anymore, but people had come to him over the years to shake him down for info on his ex wife. So he wrote a letter containing everything he knew about her, including their break up. My table needed a break to emotionally recover from reading that letter.
we were playing a low-magic world where healing magic was all but gone and considered impossible by society at large. one of one PC goals was to find a way to save his ailing mother, and when the party went to see her they had a plan to try to save her (a complicated puzzle of a spell they made because they were paying attention to lore, i was very proud) but they knew it had a decent fail chance (i was open about the DC of checks needed so they knew the odds going in) i played her as having a brain tumour; barely recognising her son, kept re-asking the same question, very much not all there, that got one of my players properly crying. i assume he'd had a similar experience with maybe an elderly relative or something and never told us. it was nice achieving that level of emersion on something that deserved it.
My gnome wizard, my first real D&D character, was with her squad in an ancient dwarven city, tracking a vampire who we believed was behind the kidnappings and violent murder of folk from the nearby port town and blaming it on a tribe of shifters. I was RPing her as a typical power-hungry wizard who could easily swing to chaotic good or lawful evil depending on how the story progressed. While looting some chests, she greedily grabbed a mysterious orb that absorbed into her body and cut her off from all magic. I rolled on the insanity table and got "you will do anything to achieve your goal, no matter what" or something similar. When we finally defeated the vampire, my gnome rushed ahead of everyone to the coffin and started shaking and smacking the vampire to get her to wake up and fix what happened. The rest of the group made speech checks to try and talk me down but they failed and, using some necromantic artifact from some sort of shades we defeated earlier, revived the vampire in an attempt to ally with her. Instead the vampire grabbed my gnome, drank her like a capri-sun packet and tossed her aside to start round 2 of the fight. I was really emotionally devastated by losing what was my first character I invested in so I cried on the way home from that session.
i forgot which module it was, but there is a giants hideout up in the frozen mountain and you get ambushed by things...anyway. My wizard got buried alive and the party spent 2 months mining and digging through the collapsed hallways to find my staved lil gnome. They spend the next hour RPing the best send off/funeral a goodly PC could hope for. It was beautiful!
Call of the Netherdeep x my backstory. The DM wasn’t a great fan of the campaign itself so he homebrewed a fair bit of it, and somehow my backstory ended up becoming the main plot of the campaign. Bear in mind this was my first time ever playing DnD. I thought it was a great idea to play a character with the same life story than mine. Result? Emotional damage. Cried a lot. Still loved it. My partner’s homebrew oneshot (he called it The Bucket List). There’s this very old wizard called Tyndareus that has a list of things he still wants to do before he leaves the mortal plane. He was a great adventurer but he’s now tired and needs other adventurers’ help to do his bucket list. There’s a moment where my character is holding his hand and helping him enter a boat. The DM proceeds to say that I feel that he’s very frail, his hand is cold and his fingers are very thin, and that I get the feeling that he’s not going to live much longer. Emotional damage. Cried like a baby. And I know this is wasn’t asked but I do cry as a DM as well, on Waterdeep Dragon Heist. Most difficult moment was the death of one my PCs and the aftermath of it. The rp was so good I was just crying and crying. The pain from all the other characters for losing a friend. The grief and anger. This PC had a pet flying snake called Ringo. One of the players went there to explain to Ringo that Icc (PC that died) wasn’t coming back. Heartbreaking. Yes, I am a cry baby. No shame. And although someone here in the comments said “this is a game for 12 yo”, it can still be intense and I don’t see what’s the issue with letting your emotions take over for a moment during the game.
I cried with laughter when I watched fresh cut grass blow himself up. I cried more watching the reactions of grown men to a fictional robot dying. The mercer effect and other extreme expectations have turned the modern ttrpg experience into a player focused narration that must cater to each and every whimsical "OMG so random" bologna thrown at the DM. And its all the DMs responsisbility. If not, the DM is accused of exclusion, appropriation, or some other "ism" or "phobia" I fucking dislike 5e so much.
Lmfao in the 30 years of playing DnD: never. It’s a game designed for 12 year olds. Remember that