After spending the first third of the Season as The Chew Toy who's plans always fail, Rinaldo ends up proving himself surprisingly badass when Jayne tries to sell him to a brothel. He quickly dodges the goons, makes the crowd carry one of them away, kicks Jayne off a balcony, swings on a chandelier, and reduces Jayne's head to a bloody smear all with nearly perfect die rolls.
Season 2
In Season 2, Episode 2: After being held hostage by the Blackhearts almost all episode, Alias recognizes the spell cast by Ziggy as Featherfall, gives his polite goodbye to the Blackhearts, and throws himself off the ship pulling Vinnie along with him.
Alias: Well, that's enough pleasantries. I think it's time for us to take our leave.
Season 2, Episode 15: All of it. After the previous episode had Drop flip a switch and sandbag the party in an albeit spectacular way, everyone was very aware of the possibility of a total party kill. However, Vinnie manages to crit their way into a compromise that would allow them to leave and Guy to keep his honor as chief: a duel between himself and one of the crew, where they would throw the battle to endure the others safety. A crit leads to Alias absolutely owning him, leading to a riot. Drop unleashes the Mossheart on the orc squadron, causing them to start butchering each other, all the while the team makes a swift exit, everyone alive and having taken out over a hundred orcs. One couldn't really imagine a more drastic change in fortune.
Season 2, Episode 23: Violet comes to blows with her friend Swift Justice, and with one clean swipe, he cuts off her horn, leaving her vulnerable to her earlier crystal poisoning. In her dying moments, Zavala visits her, proposing to grant her heart's greatest wish in exchange for her saying the words "I'll give you anything." Violet at first seems to consider this. Then, to the collective relief of the listeners, at the last minute she gives Zavala this speech:
Violet: Well, I've considered my options, and what I've decided is you can suck my butt, and I'm just gonna have to deal with what I'm dealing with right now. Because you are obviously evil, and I have a problem with that, because I am a unicorn. [...] Fuck you, Billy. Fuck you right in your non corporeal butthole. I hope you die in a fire.
Zavala: Okay. Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you, Violet Skittles Unicorn. I don't think we'll be seeing each other again. I don't think you'll be seeing anybody again. Because you're dead.
Season 2, Episodes 27 and 28: Skitch and Lauren just uproot Austin's plans completely and chuck 'em to the winds, in Alias' case by solo defeating Gwendolin immediately, in spite of her having been a pivotal part of Austin's outline, and in Lavinia's case having an almost impossible string of excellent charisma rolls, culminating with her persuading the young Kuo-Toa Hunter to let them go free, thus forfeiting his life and never getting to see his family again. Doubles as kind of a tear jerker.
Austin: Lavinia persuades the devil to kill himself, end of campaign!
The quote above comes dangerously close to coming true in episode 31. Lavinia is such a persuasive dryad that she has Welch the Blue consider taking her to Faewild with her before their conversation is interrupted, which is even funnier when one considers that Johnny and Skitch made fun of Lavinia for her Make Friends With It strategy just before the conversation. And by the end, after a rather dramatic sprint and some clever negotiating on Drop's part, Lavinia manages to appease the inhabitants of Hole-in-the-earth during the Drow army's search, thereby bypassing a massacre which seemed locked in stone ever since Alias killed Gwendolin.
Austin: And with that critical success, Lavinia averts the wholesale slaughter of the bullywug village, and you guys have brought peace to the Cascades.
Leon: Damn... That's a hell of a roll.
Drop absolutely kicks the ass of Jem, a half-orc werewyvern, in one-to-one unarmed combat, within two turns brings a dismayed silence over the orc camp, who believed their leader to be undefeatable. What's more, with Lavinia's Remove Curse spell, the team manages what Austin calls the greatest pacifist route challenge yet, and gets Jem to accept having her life spared.
Austin: This was supposed to be a deadly boss fight? If you could tone down the whooping her ass, that'd be really cool.
The entire scene of the Zavala harpooning the Violet One in order to give the NPC crew a rope up to escape both the Kuo-Toa and Mother, with each of the crew using their abilities to facilitate the climb, and then sailing on into the Feywild.
Austin: For Violet, Alias, and Cyldiel at least, it could be said that you set your sails, fly, the wind it will take you back to your home sweet home.
Johnny: You're gross.
In the penultimate episode of season 2, as the party takes on a newly risen Welch, Vinnie persuades her father to throw her across the room at the hag in what is in effect a suicide mission given the threat of immediate death from Welch's sisters. When she miraculously lands, she uses Remove Curse, effectively ending the battle at once. All the players are impressed by this display, and Skitch suggests that as K throws Vinnie, he remembers twirling her around as a little girl and pushing her on a swing under the Spiral of Lorelei.
Johnny: This is fucking hardcore for the let's-hug-everybody girl!
Season 3
Season 3, Episode 19: The team needs to transport a holy item bound to the spirit of a hydra hell-bent on flaying the team alive. Rolen just volunteers to carry it and is butchered down to 8 HP during the walk. Then he declines to be healed.
Season 3, episode 21: The team, through spamming her true name, KILL LADY NIM, a super powerful Demon, who is quite possibly one of the two stronger characters in the setting.
Veltari not only coming up with the Memory Gambit deal so Warden Light will let the team go, but also using Magic Mouth to get around her side of the bargain and retain the knowledge he does not want her to have.
After Zoey Legrande rejects Ghaunadaur at last, an unidentified god rains down radiant holy light from the sky, burning away the essence of Ghaunadaur and Lady Nim from her sword, essentially rewarding her for taking her life back into her own hands. And all that, thanks to Wild Magic.
Season 3 Episode 31: In an amazing display of irony, Dora throws Warden Light into one of his own mirrors. Made even better as Austin began the fight by explaining how she doesn't stand a chance.
In episode 32, Mardis and Robin confess to Dora that they've killed Asriel and she laughs in their faces, renouncing the last shreds of her interest in saving Ilium in the most carefree way possible.
After getting a variety of magical buffs from Zoey and Veltari, Rolen essentially curbstomps Dora.
Laura realizes that Planar Binding will work on Dora, as she's from the Feywild. As such, Veltari commands Dora to "kill what you love", forcing her to kill Ghaunadaur with her Staff of Bahamut. While Dora manages to warn him that she's being controlled and convinces him to kill her, it's too late to stop a Mutual Kill.
Similar to how Dora defeated Warden Light in the previous season, another character pulls off the statistically impossible in a Hopeless Boss Fight. In this case, Catarina survives being slashed by the virtual Victory Itself thanks to the Barbarian class' inherent damage reduction, an attack that Austin fully intended to be unavoidably lethal.
Ed defusing a hostage situation involving Ashe on the upper floors of a skyscraper by creating an illusion of himself jumping out a window, causing Ashe to follow suit.
Season 4, Episode 18:
After getting what are essentially superpowers by becoming conduits of the Forms, the party (minus Catarina, who ditched the rest of the party earlier in the episode) are ambushed by the two Dragonborn from the wrestling arc on a train ride back into Valentine. When one of the Dragonborn (under the effect of magical Fear) holds the train conductor hostage, Frank uses a spell to switch places with the hostage, and gets shot in the face out of reflex. Instead of being instantly killed via Clunky Salsa Rule, however, this moment of pure self-sacrifice triggers his new powers as a conduit of the Form of Protection Itself for the first time, triggering a passive Sanctuary effect that forces the bullet to veer off and hit nothing.
Later in the fight, Frank puts the Sanctuary effect to use again, this time as part of a combo with Lenora and Eddi. When Lenora (who had been helping Frank neutralize one of the Dragonborn in a separate traincar while Eddy tried to disarm the other) determines that Frank had their Dragonborn fight under control and went to help Eddy, she ends up becoming the target instead of Eddi. Unable to make the shot miss everyone entirely, Frank uses his Sanctuary reflex to redirect the shot at Eddy, who uses a reflex action of his own to cast Shield, which catches the bullet, robs it off all of its momentum, and causes it to fall harmlessly to the ground, like something out of a Black Panther comic.
Even later in the fight, Frank performs the teleportation trick again to save Eddi, who had been pinned against a wall and shot twice in the gut. Even though his Sanctuary effect couldn't stop the bullet this time, and he gets shot before making an exit with Misty Step, for the third time in a single encounter he manages to save a life with powers that he's only just begun to figure out.
The fight ends with Lenora using her newfound powers (in her case, having become a conduit of Magnetism Itself) to blow open the back of the train car, sucking the remaining Dragonborn out of the train (non-lethally), putting an instant end to the encounter.
The party wins the entire fight without drawing an obvious weapon, despite fighting against two Dragonborn wrestlers who were armed with pistols. Austin notes that, despite the party being highly wanted fugitives following the events of the military base heist, successfully defusing the situation in a non-lethal fashion, without weapons, will greatly improve their standing in the public eye and their chances of clearing their names.
Season 4, Episode 21:
The courtroom scene quickly goes through a series of Shocking Moments when Catarina attempts to force Frank's hand by handing him a loaded gun, directing the barrel at her head. She goads him into shooting her by making it perfectly clear that she plans on assassinating the Judge, a member of the Crown Corporation's Board of Directors, which will ensure that Frank will never get to see his kids again. This plays directly into her hands, however, when she uses her Conduit of Victory Itself power alongside her Monk power to deflect projectiles to try to redirect the shot into the Judge's head with the intention of instantly killing her.
Frank then immediately uses his Conduit of Protection Itself powers to deflect the bullet and direct it away from everyone... only for Lenora to use her powers as the Conduit of Magnetism Itself to direct the bullet back at Catarina, blowing her arm clean off and, as a result of Catarina using her HP-to-Zero Victory Itself powers, nearly killing her outright.
Thanks to his high Perception abilities, Eddi casts Haste and Mage Hand alongside his Conduit of Synergy Itself powers, and Mardis grabs the grenade and attempts to carry it as far away from the other people in the courtroom as possible before it explodes. Later episodes reveal that he successfully minimized casualties.
Season 4, Episode 35:
The party manages to kill the last surviving god of the Dice Funk universe. Unlike the final battle against Ghaunadaur, this isn't even the Final Boss of the season.
Lenora, having exhausted all of her spell slots, lands the killing blow by jamming a church pew through the god's eye. For bonus points, this is yet another god that one of Lauren's characters has directly killed.
Season 4, Episode 38 (Finale):
The Final Boss is a rematch against Aeron, who utterly demolished the party in their previous spar, and Aeron is much stronger this time around. This time around, they end up victorious.
Aeron manages to catch one of Lenora's rockets with his bare hands.
Bloodmaw proves to be a force of nature in the buildup to the finale, but the final battle proves that he can take just as much damage as he can give out. While the rest of the party chips away at Aeron from a distance with guns and spells, Bloodmaw is the only one to fight at melee range, using a makeshift maul made from a stop sign and the concrete that was holding it in place. Bloodmaw lasts nearly the entire fight despite getting repeatedly savagely punched and ki-blasted by Aeron (and taking a RPG blast from Lenora after she didn't realize that he was within the blast radius before it was too late), and getting minimal healing from Frank and Mardis, whose healing is repeatedly shut down by various means. Near the end of the fight, Austin becomes flabbergasted with how much damage he's survived taking, and at one point survives attacks with single-digit HP remaining on two separate turns (thanks to a tiny bit of healing from Frank). Even when it becomes obvious that Aeron is about to "kill" him (insofar as a demon can be killed in the Material Plane— rather, he's banished back to the Abyss upon death and can eventually return), he tries a Death or Glory Attack that, while failing to do much damage due to bad dice rolls (including a critical failure), is an impressive Last Stand, and while Aeron literally punches his heart out of his body, he makes a big show of his death by doing his trademark blood vomiting as he perishes.
Lenora buys precious time for Bloodmaw by quipping at Aeron enough that Aeron decides to attack her to shut her up. Austin notes that this this wasn't an actual D&D Taunt effect— rather, Lenora managed to push his Berserk Button hard enough that he felt that making her stop talking was more important than killing the demon that was fighting him at point-blank range.
Mardis largely plays a support role in the final battle, but his use of Holy Weapon (as well as his ability to maintain Concentration for the entire fight to keep it active) is one of the biggest reason that Bloodmaw is capable of dishing out the massive amount of damage that he causes.
When Aeron lands a critical hit on Eddi, the Warforged is able to evade half of the damage with an Uncanny Dodge, which takes the form of a bullet-time backflip.
Frank's contributions to the fight aren't as flashy as many of his previous battles, but he manages to do considerable damage to Aeron with damage-over-time attacks. At one point, he also manages to melt off the flesh of Aeron's face with a Vitriolic Sphere.
Dregg sets a trap for a crime boss and manages to eviscerate him verbally before regaining the full power of his paladin oath, receiving a Theme Music Power-Up, and cracking the skull of the man who killed his biological parents.
Season 5, Episode 20:
Liamoira rolls INSIGHT ON THE UNIVERSE, achieving enlightenment after only one day in a cult.
Season 5, Episode 21:
Sasha saves everyone on the second floor of the Purist compound by using her conduit to plug the hole in the elevator with an inflatable raft.
Season 5, Episode 26:
The crew faces off against Kajita, a sun dragon capable of causing planet-level extinction events, after Big Star and Dregg say too much about the project to revive the Maxwells. They emerge victorious with no serious injuries or losses.
Sasha comes up with an unorthodox strategy at the start of the fight, which ends up being Crazy Enough to Work. Knowing that they have no chance of winning the encounter in a conventional way as Kajita is way out of their league, she tells the party to throw everything they have at causing status effects. Kajita burns through his three Legendary Resistance reactions countering them... only for Sasha to activate her Conduit powers to give her a mech a gun capable of shooting Objectivus into his brain, killing him instantly and finally fulfilling her promise to give the Illithid tadpole a body to take over— a body far beyond Objectivus' or Subjectivus' wildest dreams and permanently securing their Undying Loyalty.
After nearly botching their first assassination, Blake and Cordelia manage to pull of their second one incredibly well, with Cordelia busting into a funeral and turning giant to distract the guests while Blake strangles the target. Both show some quick thinking, Cordelia starts destroying the church to drown out the noise Blake is making and when the target resists all of Blake's spells, he shoves him into the coffin and freezes it shut. To cap it off, Blake casts a spell to make everyone present look like Slaads, distracting everyone while he and a still giant Cordelia fly out through the roof.
When the party finally reach the body of Chronos where Pope is keeping Princess Lime, King runs in a full 20 minutes ahead of the rest of the Furies despite the danger, leaving Lynette, Cordelia, and Blake to follow later. The three fly above Chronos, dodging the various enemies around, then use Locate Creature to find where Lime is. When they find that lime is hiding under the zombified Typhon (which has snake legs) Cordelia distracts it with her ability to speak to snakes, allowing Blake to grab Lime with a critical success. All of this completely circumvents Austin's planned encounter to his amusement and exasperation.
Season 7
Vindrass battles a salt golem of Wolfram and single-handedly wipes the floor with it without being hit once.
The Wolf Pack's second fight with the empowered Halflings is a complete Curb-Stomp Battle, with Khorton blowing up Egotism, the second most dangerous of the group, in the first turn, followed Bramwell knocking all but one of the Halflings down and allowing Lola to get a solid hit on Hope. Khorton then no sells Regret's attempt to cast Slow on him then puts him to sleep despite him being at full health. Lola then bypasses Vanity's powers and kills him in one round. Bramwell then kills Hope by decapitating him and scoring a strike on the bowling lanes and Khorton finishes the fight by putting the remaining two Halflings to sleep.
