PC Deaths.

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C'mon. Everyone has at least one. Post the most funny/interesting/spectacular ways that your character (or someone else's) has died...Unless of course you're one of those whingers, that when the DM says "You're dead.", you say "Well, I don't do that then." or "Re-roll!"

My favourite one was in the DragonLance setting, where I was playing a Draconian with the 'Spectacular Death Throes' feat. If you don't know, that just means that when the character dies, he blows up.
Anyways, I was down to my last few hit-points, and our party was in a 'Boss-Fight' with some Ogre Magi. Anyways, I was knockdown-ed on my back, and I was about to die...The rogue of our party decided to Sneak Attack me with his crossbow, he hit, I died...Then I blew up and the Ogre took 17 points of Acid damage and died.
Of course, the Rogue was lauded as the party's hero while I was the one who died - how's that for fair? Of course, now the party didn't have a Fighter anymore. So they paid through the nose and resurrected me.

And my other death can be summed up in four words;
Wizard. Fly. Dispel Magic.

There must be better ones than mine.

 

Back in College, I had a string of bad luck, sometimes having death caused directly by other characters screwing around.

For example, a "non-hostile encounter with a vampire" ended for my character when I was about to hand over an item that he wanted only to find out that the Kender in the party had stolen it.

Another time, I had found a Sword that looked fancy, and another player wanted to negotiate over it. He was so persistent that we got seperated from the party as they moved on and left us behind. We ran into a fight ont he way to find the group, and I got killed.

The funniest, I was "murdered" by a fellow PC who wanted to fail a powers check in Ravenloft. Earlier in the night, my misfortune had been the subject of jokes that I die at 9 pm every night. When the murder occured, I looked at the DM, who said that yes, I was dead. Then someone's watch beeped--9 pm on the dot!

 

Well, there was this one time me and my friends were playing AD&D with some altered rules (or a lot, our GM was productive and had much free time. There were, for example, firearms and cannons. And plenty of weird creatures), and my character found a sword. Now, we didn't have anyone to identify it, and the nearest town was pretty far. But still, some of its power was revealed as me and another character began a friendly sword fight, mainly to test the said sword. Turns out, it cleaved trough his own blade with ease.
Of course, such a thing seemed incredibly good, and thus I confidently proceed to hack trough a rock, which was easily done.

Later on, we arrived at a port city, no encounters during the trip. And the very same day it was attacked by some large fleet of pirate ships, some of which had cannons. Of course, being heroes we were, we would stop it.
So, long story short, I'm given the task of silencing cannons of the biggest ship, no problem! So, I swim up to it, my magical blade safely with me, and start climbing the ships side, directly below the cannon (my character at that time was a custom class, acrobatic fighter type. Kinda like Blade, but still a little different). Then, before any of the pirates can react, I have already jumped to the deck and cleaved trough the cannon with my blade.
Even though the pirates seemed to be troubled about the fact that I had that kind of a sword, plenty of them would have wanted it too, and of course there were at least ten of them at the time. Still, I was confident that the blade would save me. And so, I proceed to rush to the first one, simply trying to slash him to pieces. Too bad that the sword simply stopped few inches short of his skin. Try as I might, nothing would make it hurt living things! And now I'm against ten pirates, armed with a blade that cannot kill - which cannot be said about the pirates.
Pincushion, anyone?

Oh those times, our GM never gave us magical weapons without twists. And we liked it that way.

 

My very first game of AD&D (and P&P in general) I played a halfling thief, after several hours of the group fuzzing around without getting anything done we got to our first fight. bandits coming out of a door, i was third in initiative order. the fighter with a bow in initative order 2 critical missed and planted an arrow through my troat before i even got to swing my dagger a single time.

 

In my 4 character group, the DM had noted that we had never once run from a fight, so he decided to deliberately put us against something too hard to teach us a lesson. We didn't learn it. We were stopping in a cave for the night, and a Purple Worm sprang up. We could've run fairly easily, but It would've meant the Fighter taking an AoO as he and the ranger legged it. It'd also have meant us running from a fight, and we're just not that smart.

Long story short, they found how difficult it is to hack your way out of a stomach with a longsword as your smallest weapon. Poor gits.

We (Me (Rogue/Sorcerer) and the Cleric killed the damn thing the next round. I still taunt the players about becoming worm chow

 

Playing a half-elven chaotic good cleric of Corellon.

We were trying to infiltrate a dwarven city. We were unmasked and ended up having to take out the entire outpost. I guess those flamestrikes drew some attention to us as the city general alarm sounded. So, you figure 'their backup'll be there soon.'

Well, it did. From the center of the city, three dark shapes took to flight. They had fricking large sized dragons on guard duty. Uh.... crap I shifted back into dwarven form with my hat of disguise and jumped into a nearby crowd of dwarves. My two partymembers made a run for it. (into the open field, against dragons. Morons ) For some reason my disguise was ineffective, because one dragon picked me right out of the crowd.

Got grappled (by means of its jaws surrounding my torso ) and he arced back up into the sky. Some few hundred feet above ground, he released and breath-weaponed me at point blank range.

I'm not sure how things worked out damage wise, but I like to think my charred remains scattered on the wind before I could hit the ground

 

I've got a few good stories. They involve the creation a real world item called the Player Killer Die.

I've run a total of four campaigns as GM. My first was a Star Wars d20 followed by a short lived D&D 3.5, then another Star Wars d20 (my current) and then another D&D 3.5 (in the works). The Player Killer Die has claimed victims in all my campaigns.

The first death worked like this. Party was to hunt down a group of smugglers in an abandoned warehouse on Nar Shadda. They were to sneak in and hit the leader first, then kill the rest only if they fought back. The leader had four goons with him and a pair of snipers on catwalks 40 meters overhead. The most goodly character playing, his character was a purely good Jedi with only one Dark Side point earned the entire game, was trying to sneak into one of the many doors leading into the warehouse. I rolled the snipers' spot checks. Both natural 20ed the roll. Both took a shot. One critically threatened, but succeeded to hit; the other critically hit. The player was dead one round. This alerted all the goons to the fight and they ended up jumping the good guys and dealing a lot of damage to them all before the fight ended. Oh, and the leader almost got away.

That was four critical rolls in a row for Player Killer Die!

In the D&D campaign, the same player fell victim to Player Killer Die again.

He was then playing a halfling bard. An annoying halfling bard, no less. The ranger caught sight of a dryad while the party was making camp. The bard noticed the ranger looking at something, but did not see what. The ranger told the party to stay put, but the bard (annoying as always) did not listen. The bard got lost in the woods while trying to follow the ranger. He was lost of over an hour. Instead of thinking his way out, or asking of memory checks, he started yelling at the top of his lungs while running in circles! This I would not have minded had the player himself had not ALSO gotten up and started yelling. So I threw a large sized dire wolf at him. It tore out his throat on a critical hit.

Second victim of the Player Killer Die!