Last night’s D&D session contained one of the most wonderfully cinematic moments in RPG history. No, seriously.

We were tromping around in the woods outside of Manifest, trying to find the tree of an elf who had just been murdered. (Yeah.) Anyway, what should swoop out of the sky than a big-ass red dragon. This was a not-entirely-unrandom random encounter. This dragon’s name was Jaynog, and we had killed his brother while mucking about in the astral plane. (Come to think of it, there should be a pissed off githyanki dragonrider somewhere.) So he had a personal grudge against us. Anyway, he very smartly stayed far away from Cooper and Mynnyd’s ability to hit him with melee weapons. So, we were reduced to using arrows- good for Sagittarius (because that’s pretty much all he uses), not quite as good for the rest of us. And then Jaynog cast spells of repel arrows and shield, which meant we were doing very, very little damage. Thankfully, someone cast a targeted dispell and got rid of those just in time for Jaynog to swoop down and pick up the only person who had been doing damage to him- Sagittarius.

So, Sagittarius is hanging about 55 feet in the air from the claws of this dragon. The dragon decides to drop him, because falling? HURTS. However, Sag has a plan. He has readied an action to shoot the dragon with an arrow while falling if he’s dropped. (His bow was already out, and at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared starting from a zero velocity, he’d have… over one second but less than two? Physics is not my strong field.) He lets fly an arrow while falling! The arrow strikes a critical blow! The arrow does 52 points of damage! If you deal a single attack that does over 50 points of damage, the creature has to make a fortitude save vs. immediate death. The save isn’t tough to make, especially for this dragon, whose fortitude save is already higher than the DC. The only way to fail it would be to roll a 1 on a d20. And it rolls that 5%. Sagittarius takes 24 (5d6) points of damage from hitting the ground! The dragon dies! And falls! Onto Sagittarius! He takes another 26 points of damage, is at 0 hit points (not dead, but “staggered,” and about to start dying), and pinned under a dragon that weighs 18,000 pounds! The rest of the party panics, Merreck casts reduce on the dragon (getting it down to 2,000 pounds), and Cooper and Mynnyd drag the carcass off of Sagittarius, who Cooper hit with the wand of cure light wounds so we could get back to town and find a cleric.

Good. Times.

And later we fought a human necromancer, a flesh golem, and an abyssal ghoul.