I think I know what Cory's about to do, and if I'm right, I would say yes to it, hands down, if I were the DM

Please tell me he's about to become even more directionless.

Super-Ultra Loyalty? Childhood vow? Allergic to tacos?

Well it's an upgrade so he'd have to go from JUST tacos to all 'Mexican' food.

pretty sure its gonna be the loyalty thing. i WOULD say its a new flaw that triggers on defeat, but cory SAID upgrade and a flaw that triggers on death sounds weird.

Heh, you can upgrade extreme loyalty?

Every Warhammer 40k FFG rpg campaign I've been in, my character winds up getting shot in the face by plasma, or blown up by a bomb (really bad demolitions roll trying to defuse it), etc. Inevitably, after the fate point gets burned and forever lost, the character's next stop is the local admech surgery/vendor. Facial reconstruction, new organs (because that Lascannon blew out all of them...), replacement limbs, you name it, one or more of my characters has been "forced" to upgrade his weak flesh.

I think my favorite was the null who had to have his entire chest cavity augmented and his face entirely replaced by a ceramic mask. Throw in the new legs and arms he got due to some future near-death experiences and he became more machine than man (even more so since he was soulless already due to a quirk of genetics).

I want stories about characters (PC's or NPC's) who return stronger from the brink of death. Or death itself. Kind of like Zoro and Luffy does every time, and the Saiyans from Dragon ball!

My story is relatively simple. I'm in a Pathfinder campaign at the moment, playing an Elven Ranger, name of Lazander.
He's also a Paragon, one of the very examples of Elven superiority. Or so he thinks. While he is good at what he does, he tends to let his self-confidence get the better of him, putting him in difficult spots.

So a few weeks ago, he bit off more than he could chew. We were infiltrating a lizardman village, trying to steal a powerful artifact. And maybe assassinate the Chief Korkagar, if we had time.
Our Alchemist/Archaeologist, Ninja and Ranger (Lazander) would sneak in, leaving the Fighter, Cleric and the GMPC Fighter at a safe distance, ready to storm the village, should we need reinforcement. The artifact was stolen and carried towards the Assisting team by the Alchemist while the Ninja and Lazander climbed huts to snipe at the warriors hunting him.
I had a horrible luck with my dice, botching two attacks and I think three Acrobatics checks. When the battle was over (much thanks to the Clerics superb tanking of the Chief and three or four lizard warriors), Lazander had 1 hp left, the GMPC and Lazander's Animal Companion were dead.
The party leveled up. Lazander is now lvl6, and a good chunk towards 7.

Most recent one off the top of my head was in 4e, i was playing a stealth assassin drow, goes invisible and strikes for massive damage sort of deal, well our first campaign was against a bunch of umberhulks with tremorsense so my entire build was useless, they started to chain combo gaze attacks and we got thrashed, i ended up at -9 hp with one guy before my turn, a fighter, he runs over to make a heal check and gets a natural 1, then i make my last save vs death and get a natural 20, life!

Another character that was interesting was a Con based Mul Druid (also 4e) That was built around swarm form damage reduction and massive healing surges with a large amount of them, + massive bonuses to save vs death stuff. so he'd dash in get pounded by damage and eventually go down only to rise again on his next turn at half hp and rinse and repeat, i had him go down like 6 times in one battle where he got sealed in a corridor with multiple repeating crossbowmen at the other end of it and a few warriors inbetween him and then, fun times.

I... I don't actually have a story for this. Except for Raxon, when he jumped on that frag grenade as a kid, got blown in half. Or Ransu, when that unicorn stabbed him and gave him a nasty case of highlander immortality. Or Baird, who kicked so much ass, and was the only survivor of the ambush that wiped out his clan.

I guess I use it rather a lot, really.

didn't you also have a fairy that turned a near tpk into a tactical advantage?

Well, there was our Ranger. She was a lizard-woman who hated undead, and she dual-wielded a longsword and rapier. And unlike Zoro, she didn't have flaws to help her actually hit with the damn things, so she was more or less useless, especially since any skill she could roll, the rogue could roll better. Then, when she gets sniped by bandit archers and is bleeding out, she starts critting everything in arm's reach before going down. I healed her, but falling down and having your imminent death used as leverage to make your party empty their pockets and run away is still embarrassing.
So the strength was impermanent, and just before rather than after death, but it's the best I've got unless I dip into my writings. Which I will do later, when I've logged back in.

Oh yeah! The pixie rogue! When the barbarian got a greataxe of Khorn and slaughtered everyone else, then died of exhaustion. Yeah. She kicked ass. Chopped a piece of each person off to get them revived. And then flew ten or twenty miles, fighting the wind, with a parachute made of boob dragging her down.

Yeah, that was all kinds of awesome and stuff.

Lucky you... when i get near the brink of death i usually go all the way and end up having a new character... Though that has only happend once with the orcs, now that i think about it (every other time i've had to switch characters was because someone started complaining about me being to powerful, me having way too much 'screen time', me playing a thief in such way that everyone hated me off character because i'd steal everything without them even noticing there was someting to steal or all the above at the same time... And half of the time the complaints were from my GM :/). The only time i really got to recover from a deadly experience (and as i said, one of the only two that weren't ruled out by the GM) i ended up suffering CON drain thanks to a nasty disease wich i got after failing to spot a trap, falling down a pit, breaking both legs and then falling over my face, unconcious, over the murky water that was in the bottom, wich i started breathing and thanks to wich i almost drown... Of course, it didn't matter much, since shortly after that, when riding a ship, i was eaten whole by a sea dragon who was then killed by our barbarian and then fell from the deck to the bottom of the sea with me still inside... The funny part is that i had with me all the clues needed to continue our adventure (since we all agreed that they would be safe with me while i tried to figure out what were thry pointing out to), wich including saving the world, so the whole planet got doomed that day... Maybe the paladin could've continued the adventure after my death, but he drown in the subsequent storm. Tough luck.

Reminds me of the story of Square the Inix. My 4e sorcerer really wanted some kind of animal companion and after perusing the mounts section I decided I wanted an Inix (which doesn't make any sense given that we were in the frozen north but whatever).

After a couple of sessions of Square proving to be a badass and a dear friend to me we fought a rival adventuring party. This party was lead by a cleric of Tiamat who struck Square a fatal blow. As the cleric laughed over his victory I in my rage burned through an action point and two dailies to pump the cleric full of so much lightning that he exploded. The rest of the enemy party decides they don't want to mess with the raging rabbit who was shooting lightning everywhere so they high tailed it out of there.

As I was working out the logistics of getting Square rezzed the DM decided to be nice and said that as I watched Square began to stir, having come back to life. Now I was overjoyed, and as a joke I had the following in character conversation.

Me as the sorcerer: "Square! I thought you were dead! How did you come back?"

Me as Square: (In draconic) "A wizard did it"

Turns out the DM liked that so much my beloved companion gained about 6 points of Int, Draconic as a spoken language (and Common as an understood one), and some nifty new powers that totally weren't caused by us playing too much Skyrim. The official story is that I killed the cleric so badly that a piece of Tiamat's essence got knocked out of him and into Square, turning him into a godling.

The most memorable character of mine fitting the story time description is Max Lowfield.

In the setting, the halfling race were the losers in a war against the humans, and so all halflings are treated as criminals. And i just so happened to have made up a halfling thief for the campaign.
After meeting up with the rest of the PCs in prison and getting shipped out to an island in the outer rim of the kingdom and forced to do searches for illegal magic items (because that's what you do with prisoners apparently), eventually we fucked up good and was killed in a Total Party Wipeout.
Our damned souls were then send to hell where we then traveled the many layers of hell until we got to the innermost core where satan (who turns out to look like a old man instead of a red hellish beast) personally oversees the punishment of the most damned souls in all of hell. Here we made a deal with him, promising to bring him the artifacts we originally were going to give the king. He then gave us new bodies to walk the earth with (we couldn't use the old ones, we died for a reason), which gave us some stats increases, a whole level in a advanced class (which one depended on which body you had chosen), plus some languages and other abilities. The whole thing came at the low-low price of loosing all our previous gear, of which none was magical or enhanced. After which we quested on our merry way to bring the coveted artifact to the Devil, which included, but was not limited to, killing off an entire orc settlement and using to the shaman to tell us where to go next using psychic stuff, and eventually returning to the city where we were killed and burned the place to the ground because we felt like it.
Oh, and of course selling the artifact to the king's knights instead of giving it to satan, because fuck satan.

Fucking Satan often ends poorly... Be it by double-cross or a more literal version.
Right, I was gonna post about a written character, as opposed to a played one. Well, I can edit these comment thingamajigs now, so I'll give this a shot:
An arctic half-orc baby was raised in a Chaotic Evil monastery to be a Paladin of Slaughter. After coming of age, killing the priests, (raising a guy to believe that he should kill everyone weaker than himself because they're unworthy to live if they can't stop him is a bad idea when you're that frail) sacking the temple, and pillaging his way across the land, he figured out that he was only doing chaos because the cult that raised him convinced him it was his duty, and became a Paladin of Tyranny instead (sadly losing his Fiendish Velociraptor unholy mount for a while.) Shortly thereafter, he joined a party, and much later, he died. By the time he was resurrected, he'd made a name for himself in the Outer Planes as a minor warlord, making outsiders of every stripe his bitches and/or willing followers and more-or-less ditching Evil to become Lawful Neutral through apathetic efficiency. This coincided with him prestige classing to keep most of his relevant Paladin goodies and throw alignment restrictions to the wind.
Also... That party tends to screw over outsiders that have the gall to start something, and gain massively in the course of exacting vengeance. Given the nature of outsiders and the afterlives, partial death is involved in the rituals their Sorcerer used to get back at/ eat those who dared to puppeteer them when they were lower level.
tl;dr AntiPaladin becomes a Lawful Neutral incarnation of war after dying, and retains most of the benefits upon resurrection

Called it.

Gotta say, I love how Emily admits the critical difference in their character builds: she's more interested in making the ultimate solo combat beast, while Cory's character supports the party extremely well. Mihawk can defeat hordes of enemies all by himself, but with a competent team on his side, Zoro has the chance to battle gods.

A small, optimistic side of me wants to believe that while Cory is not big on role-playing himself, he secretly enjoys the dramatic narrative, character development and wacky non-combat-related hijinks that the group gets itself into, and that protecting their weak points to ensure the continuation of said things has been a factor in how he's made his build.

And here we observe the birth of Ashura Ichibugin, the first time we really see Zoro break reality.

so I suppose its taken for granted that zoro is going to make mihawk his rival.

do you mean in this comic? because it really isnt. cory and emily are optimization rivals

But then it would make sense, assuming Emily sticks around, for Mihawk to fade into the background and Emily to rewrite Sanji. It also feeds into the rivalry in the anime and manga, so they can argue builds in the middle of fights.

I figure Sanji gets powered down a bit because he's an NPC to start with and the GM has some say as to what he have, since, y'know, established character

First off, as a new reader I am REALLY enjoying this so far!

Second, is it possible to play D&D games that are anything like this comic? Obviously not to such a broken or insane degree, but I want my first full-on D&D adventure to be more relaxed since I've only played one session before and a full-on stereotypical fantasy adventure doesn't sit right with me for some reason. (Not that I don't like the usual fantasy, I enjoy it a lot)

In my experience, all my In-person games have been this way (casual), though i also play with a group of friends who are, or were all at one point devoutly religious so we're all pretty chill. so to answer the question, yes it's possible. It really REALLY depends on who you find to play with though, both the DM and the other players.

Like a module? You might find something similar (pathfinder has a full naval campaign where the party gets shaghaied by pirates), but otherwise its a homebrewed setting because the GM did his own world building

I'm personally running a fantasy Stargate campaign that started as a naval campaign where the party will eventually upgrade their boat for flight and then interstellar travel

That's what I meant (didn't know the term until recently) I have heard good things about homebrewed worlds. I've always wanted to try D&D in my own world or someone else's world.

My experience with the game was only two sessions for seperate games at my local library: the first was a somewhat anime-style zombie apocalypse (think High School of the Dead) campaign as an single-minded android and the second as an enslaved archer in a gladiatorial bout. All I really learned from those sessions with total strangers was to think logically and hope the di(c)e rolled high. Roleplay was almost nonexistent and I felt really tense during the second session. I want to play and learn more but I lack both funds and interested friends, so it's a rather steep slope

I know I've recounted the tale of my alienist Zok but the short version for new readers (or those who don't remember) is that he was battier than a vampire with less common sense than your average frenzied berserker. Furthermore, my friends had no idea how to roleplay him so when I left for a week, they basically resorted to drawing up an approximate percentage table and rolling on it (which was close enough to what I actually did).

When I got back, they had a very serious look on their faces and told me that, in a fit of insanity, Zok had jumped into a volcano on my week off. I was devastated for about five seconds, until my DM told me that it was in fact a site of great magical power and I had not only survived, but I had emerged from the lava with an impressive template and a slew of new powers including immunity to fire.

Not only did I emerge from what should have been a suicidal venture stronger, but I didn't even have to do anything to get this newfound strength, it all happened in my week off. =)

You should take a week off more often. You might come back to find out that you're now laying as the new god of chaos, Zok the Unpredictable!

All hail Zok the Unpredictable. Or not, as He may take offense at such actions.

He only takes offense on the 2nd week of every other month, unless you're wearing a yellow hat. But if you're a half elf you can only worship him after eating 5 dozen black licorice jellybeans through a straw. Also every time you say the word "cumquat" you must sparking the anipan at the convenience store owner. The official meal of Zok is spam bacon eggs sausages spam and spam without the spam. To avoid Zok smiting you wear a hat made from tinfoil and sing the Canadian National Anthem while riding a donkey backwards. Invoke the wrath of Zok and face 100 whacks with a wet noodle. These rules are subject to change without notice.