AWKWARD ZOMBIE

DMing for the first time in DnD, and I learned a valuable lesson. Don't start your campaign near the edge of the map, because no matter how much you point the characters in one direction someone will invariably walk off the map you made.

"Alright, you walk into an area that, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist. You have nothing to do because you wouldn't take the quest hook I was dangling in front of you, and you resign yourself to an eternity of boredom because you can't follow simple directions."

The group finally killed enough kobolds to hit the next level.

...Except for me, since my character died and I had to start a new one. Now I have two level 1 PCs with 500 exp (one of them dead) instead of one with 1000.

This is 4e right? How'd you manage to die at level one against trash mobs?

Poor party mechanics or a poorly built character, perhaps.

Also, shit luck with the dice will still kill you, no matter how good you are.

The party healer should be able to keep you up though.

What if

there was no healer?

By poor party mechanics, I meant someone probably wasn't doing their job.

It's 3.5E with a DM who has explicity said that he will take all die rolls very seriously regarding in-game consequences.

He has a special rule for deaths if they're lame. For instance, if you die from tripping in a puddle or something (not sure how, but hey), he'll fudge it and negate it, but your PC now has the "death flag." You WILL die, just at a moment more fitting and more dramatic. For example, in combat, you could take a hit that unexpectedly catches a major artery and you bleed out. I consider it fair, since you basically get to play slightly longer and you get to go out with more of a bang. (Knowing you're already dead frees up your suicidal plan impulses.)

That said, I died by being bitten by a cockatrice and failing the save to resist being turned to stone. The bite took me to negative hit points beyond just the stoning, so he went ahead and let it be my death. The party is working with a tribe of lizardfolk to kill the cockatrice, but even if they find a way to de-statue me, I have maybe seconds to live after that. I will likely stay dead either way.

3.5e with first level characters and your opponents are cockatrices? That's kind of unfair on the DM's part.

Maybe they wanted a challenge?

Seriously, not everyone plays this game the exact same way.

It's less of a challenge and more of a slaughter considering a missed fort save and you're out.

Or is it constitution in 3.5

Well, in all fairness, we tried to be cool and do a daring plan. We weren't trying to fight the cockatrice, just sneak past it to get a rare plant it was guarding.

The rest of the party was distracting it (shooting crossbow bolts into the trees on the other side of its lair) while I tried to sneak in, grab the plant, and sneak away. I got to the plant and had just grabbed it when I rolled a 1 on Move Silently, and the cockatrice rolled a 15+ on its Listen check. It spun around and was on me before anyone could do anything about it.

We are rallying the entire lizardfolk camp to help us take it down, though. We managed to convince them that if we worked together our sheer numbers could kill it. They want it dead since it's been terrorizing their camp for years.

Afterwards, there's talk of maybe reaching out to druids for assistance in reclaiming the many lizardfolk (and me) lost as statues in the beast's lair. So there's still a chance of me living through this.

As for the "unfairness" of the challenge, all of us agreed going into this that we wanted to face encounters where going in fighting wouldn't always work. We wanted encounters where if we didn't stop, think, and plan (and get lucky, sometimes), we would fail. And we got it.

Ah stealth checks, they are both my bane and guilty pleasure. Nothing gets a reaction out of my party members quite like my full-plate paladin announcing, "I make a Stealth check."

Cue twenty seconds of CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK down the stairs.

At the beginning of the particular campaign we ran last night, one of our players had a run-in with Bob, the half-Orc prostitute. After becoming encamped with the aforementioned player character, another player convinced Bob that the only way he could win the heart of this scrawny man was to slay a dragon. Bob promptly ran off, despite being a level one commoner with no combat experience.

Cue last night's events. Our party was under the employ of a dragon (who was also the leader of a gang of pirates) to receive an egg of some sort. Upon returning (the journey to and back took about a week of in game time) we learned that our pirate dragon employer had been slain. Who was this powerful new leader? You guessed it: Bob. Apparently, just as the dragon was to devour poor Bob, he picked up a vorpal sword from the dragon's wealth hoard and split it in two from nape to navel. This also caused Bob to jump about 10 levels in the completely made up on the spot class of Dragonslayer. The man he did this for was suddenly returned to him, and because of that the most beautiful wedding that had ever happened in the land commenced.

Unfortunately out party couldn't make the wedding because during the journey one of our members had forced the suddenly blushing bride into a life of prostitution, and was a rather stern pimp. Also one of our other party members paid said pimp for an hour of the man's time.

One of the people in our party (who DM'd the other campaign I'm involved in) said this was the greatest thing he had had ever experienced in D&D.