Death Is Cheap. Items are not. Give them a fair chance to fight off the sharks, and don't let the sub completely sink until all the sharks are dead. Then have them make a swimming check, with a hefty penalty if they're wearing armor, and no penalty if they take their armor off. (Of course, this will inconvenience your spellcasters less. I forget—do wizards have to reobtain their spells if their spellbooks are destroyed? Say, through being soaked with water?)
edited 13th Apr '12 2:32:10 AM by feotakahari
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful
I suffered exactly that a few years ago, the party was caught in a whirlpool. We ended up with an armorless paladin, a naked sorcerer (Swimming is under Str, and he wasn't very gifted in that field), a barely wet monk, and a very, very distraught wizard without a spellbook.
And yes, the DM made him play with just his memorized spells until he could start his spellbook from scratch (or steal one from another wizard). He wasn't amused. But I guess it's because he was a dick to the sorcerer all the time, and the DM loved bad karma biting back!
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Nah, those characters have to die or the campaign goes dangerously off rails. Two of them are of the evil alignment after all. In hindsight I should not have allowed them.
Anyhow, horrendous death for one, quick painful death for the other and the third one gets his shit dragged to the bottom of the sea and put in a cage to be fed to THE KRAKEN.
Thinking again, I can make them die AND have some horrible accident happen to the next characters' items. Oh, devious and evil
edited 13th Apr '12 5:00:17 AM by ElRigo
Heh heh, have the smart one check appropriate skill/trait, then tell him it appears that if the boat was relieved of weight... like, one or two passengers... chances are it'll stay afloat. Bonus points: make it a secret skill check, and hand him a note describing this result. You may also hand similar notes to others.

So, I think this deserves its own thread. Just today my gaming group went hilariously off the rails and got themselves (with a very tiny prodding on my side) into an unsurvivable situation.
Long story, so my group was exploring a recently destroyed town where they found a new PC. Anyhow, they got recruited by one of my finer NP Cs to do an underwater ruin thingie. So, while at that P Cs base camp 3/5 players decided to take the big submarine thingie from the NP Cs on a joyride for some poorly thought out reason. So, they got it out of port, into open water and its already sinking, with several of my patented supersharks already swimming towards the three and absolutely no means of flotation. So, after some soul searching I decided that simply killing them would be too good, so how should kill them AND make it worse?
Ah, yeah, two of them are older players, If they manage to surprise me I may let them live, but its a long shot. The third one is a complete newbie that I decided to spare. No word on the other two players but that is their business.
TL,DR Players got themselves into an unwinnable scenario due to jerkassery. What do?