I remember I once ran all the way through a six level dungeon, arrived at the final "boss gate" and at that moment realized the old man that sent us on this quest, who had offered us a very specific key for a small side quest, who we had beaten up and left for dead, was the only person who could have opened the door.
What are some moments that you, and/or your party, had to run home with your tail between your legs?
Oh and Saturday's session, where we had no Leader, or Paladin, three of the party members had no magic items and the only reason we lived was because our Dm decided that he didn't want to Tpk us after all.
When I'm running the game (at least once a week, every week for over 12 years) the players never manage a situation in which defeat did not also equal death... so I've never actually seen a retreat in D&D.
Then we got hit by an artificer dual-wielding wands of Sleep, the entire party failed their saves, and our characters failed to stop the plot and all had to go home. Which was amusing in its own right, albeit a little disappointing.
Ya, the players can get cocky and think they can just intimidate everybody for the correct information. What happens when NPC your trying to intimidate is actually a god in disquise?
Suddenly the palidin is on a quest to redeem himself, the land is being over-run by orcs and goblinkin, and the players are too busy trying to save thier you-know-what to actually deal with saving the land. Btw, they never did save the land, it became unruled wilderness filled with tribes of Orcs, goblins, etc). The farmers, who didn't flee were killed or turned into slaves.
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So there the party was deep underground. We had infiltrated the temple and were doing a bang up job against the (I think) kuo-toa. Our resources were dwindling but we choose to press on as we were worried about the enemy completing their plans.
We kick in the door of the main temple chamber and array ourselves for battle. The enemy is spread over several tiers and boy are there a lot of them. A deep humming sound resonates throughout the room.
The battle is on and we are holding our own. Round after round passes by, but slowly we are winning the war of attrition with the enemy. Then disaster strikes. The humming sound reaches a crescendo and the temple's guardian is called forth.
The Erinyes flashes into existence and the remaining enemy regroups. With the support of the guardian, the party is quickly rocked and routed.
One party member tries to buy time by sacrificing themselves and setting off a glyph on the main temple door. Effective but not enough, their sacrifice is in vain.
The warrior stands his ground, hoping to buy a few seconds for his companions to flee. A single fierce strike is all it takes and his broken corpse is cast aside.
One by one the terror of the temple cuts us down. As the rest of the party is mercilessly destroyed, they do manage a small victory. Though the price is high, they have purchased the life of the nimble rogue so that he can return to the city and tell the tale of the party's fall.
In time he will be able to gather new heroes and return for vengeance...
So there the party was deep underground. We had infiltrated the temple and were doing a bang up job against the (I think) kuo-toa. Our resources were dwindling but we choose to press on as we were worried about the enemy completing their plans.
We kick in the door of the main temple chamber and array ourselves for battle. The enemy is spread over several tiers and boy are there a lot of them. A deep humming sound resonates throughout the room.
The battle is on and we are holding our own. Round after round passes by, but slowly we are winning the war of attrition with the enemy. Then disaster strikes. The humming sound reaches a crescendo and the temple's guardian is called forth.
The Erinyes flashes into existence and the remaining enemy regroups. With the support of the guardian, the party is quickly rocked and routed.
One party member tries to buy time by sacrificing themselves and setting off a glyph on the main temple door. Effective but not enough, their sacrifice is in vain.
The warrior stands his ground, hoping to buy a few seconds for his companions to flee. A single fierce strike is all it takes and his broken corpse is cast aside.
One by one the terror of the temple cuts us down. As the rest of the party is mercilessly destroyed, they do manage a small victory. Though the price is high, they have purchased the life of the nimble rogue so that he can return to the city and tell the tale of the party's fall.
In time he will be able to gather new heroes and return for vengeance...
My brother and his friends are running a high-level evil party years ago, a group of fighters, cavaliers and assassins rampaging around the multiverse killing everything in sight. They'd already beat down the Tarrasque and a couple of demigods.
On their way to burn down the capital city of the kingdom they're in, they come up to a huge clearing in the woods with a wood and stone temple where a big burly Norse-looking guy in armor is kneeling in front of a crowd of hundreds of worshippers, leading a sevice.
Being bad guys, the party sets their weapons, lowers their visors, and does a massed charge right into the middle of all the pilgrims.
They were slaughtering people left and right and center by the dozens until the big guy up front stood up, picked up his hammer and yelled something that sounded suspiciously like...
"Aaaaaasssssgaaaaarrrrrd!!!!".
It was at that point that the High Priest of THOR was possessed by the God's AVATAR.
The party realized this when one of them was stupid enough to try charging the big guy - he simply reached out, caught the point of the lance in one hand, and levered the guy straight up into the air over his head. And then swung his arm down, slamming the guy (now holding onto the butt of the lance for dear life) into the ground and knocking him unconscious.
The rest was... un-pretty.
:D :D :D
On or journey up a mountain to get to a dungeon that had 200+ rooms, no joke, we encountered a couple of dire bears. We subsequently got mauled.
To put it in perspective, our paladin had gotten his arm ripped of, then was subsequently disemboweled and had to make a balance check to finish the charge without tripping on his own entrails. Keep in mind, we loved the grit of using critical hit tables, this was a dreadfully unlucky trip...
The paladin managed to finish off the bear with his teeth, biting out it's eye in the process and dealing the killing blow. We went back down to heal up and re-supply. We came back to cross paths with a Nightwalker.
If you are unfamiliar with the 3e Nightwalker, they had the power to crush ANYTHING in their grip. We lost a ton of items trying to finish this thing off. My mage managed to disintegrate a hole under him and we beat the tar out of him. We went back down to re-supply and heal and finally managed to get into a cave leading to the volcano's lake.
At the "beach" we encountered a couple of Chuuls. The frightened fighter literally threw my gnome mage at this thing. I got caught in the paralyzing tentacles and dragged into the depths. I managed to kill it while holding my breath and casting what nonverbal spells I could while in it's grasp.
Barely surviving I managed to crawl back on land, and turned to the fighter. This was accomplished by calling him out. I then had him "drop the sword" and convinced him to go punch for punch. Long story short, I disintegrated his favorite sword...
We did eventually make it into the dungeon, but sadly my character died, the campaign dissolved because the GM had to move elsewhere.
True story.
Fighter: "I pull the lever."
I remember playing Shackled city and having the whole party get mauled to death by a skeleton t-rex... Not much story to it. Picked a room, opened the door, we were all ready kind of breaking up as a group so we just decided to go blow for blow. The cleric went down early, so it was pretty obvious from that point that we weren't going to win.
Got punked on two occasions by Strahd while going through Castle Ravenloft... Lesson learned, avoid a straight line marching order when facing wizards. Also retreated after having a bunch of running battle with demons back to back...
As far as 4e goes, KoTS waterfall encounter was pretty brutal. The DM also decided try his hand at the replacing monsters for traps, so not only were we fighting in close quarters, but now in trap laden close quarters. The second go wasn't any better. Till then we were using pre-gens, and we all decided to roll up actual characters, not really asking who was what. Ended up with a striker heavy party, we might of made it but we couldn't roll over a 10 that day.
The most recent one was two weeks ago, the party went up against a bunch of Shadar-kai. Once again, the DM's dice were scorching. The elite chain fighter tore into everyone with a dance of death, using an action point to do it again (the DM bumped it to an @ will as part of making it an elite). Multi crits around the board! Even so, we fought and were pulling together when a Mad Wraith appeared from the floor right next to our wizard. Did I mention our paladin and only source of radiant damage was out that day? The auto daze ultimately did us in... that and the Fighter critting the warlord while under the effects of one the Mad Wraith's attacks (Great axe crit to boot!). Rather then TPK everyone, we ended up in the old 'stripped of gear and must escape a dungeon' scenario.
But then...we should have known that would happen when the mage killed himself casting Identify in a normal STICK (remember that back then there was temp con loss from casting Identify...)
Though a weird dose of common sense hit us just this last weekend when my wife was DMing and I was playing. We were trying to get into what we thought was an abandoned city and came up against a Guardian Naga and his Yuan-Ti servants guarding the gate. We fought hard and actually managed to take them down, using up our dailies and many healing surges in the process. Just as we wer about to enter the city, the second wave of Yuan-Ti hit, mostly archers up on the walls. Since our group is largely melee types and we were badly hurt to begin with, we decided to beat feet. My fighter and the Wizard still went down in the hail of poisoned arrows that encouraged our retreat, though. In fact, by the time anyone could make it to my body, I was on my second failed death save. Close call.
I remember another game too, I was Dming this time and it was an Oriental Adventures campaign. The group was assaulting a temple (I forget why, this was some years ago) and things went south. A retreat was called for but the way they came in was blocked. Now, they had come in a side entrance so they made for the main gate which was flanked by a pair of enormous four armed warrior demon looking statues. Sadly, and while the group could likely have taken them when they were at full health (I.e. at the beginning of the game, when I figured the encounter would happen), they managed to carve the badly wounded barabrian (who was the first out the gate) like they were doing a demo for a Ginsu commercial. The rest of the group managed to run the gauntlet and make it out, though. Everyone was badly hurt though. That incident is still talked about at our table to this day.