1st Campaign?

[Empedocles]

Just wondering...what was your first few campaigns like? What'd you play? What'd you do? How old were you?

When I was 8, I played a level 3 human rogue (totally broken, right?) alongside a party that was mostly clerics and wizards. Surprisingly, I wasn't overshadowed much since no one ever saw me and I sneak attacked absolutely everyone. We fought a bandit king (I have vague memories of hell hounds) who was also a rogue. I distinctly remember the encounter: we busted into a room with tons of little puny warriors scampering around hay bails. Everything eventually turned into a chaotic hell, and then the bandit king appeared (potion of invisibility) and took down our fighter (actually a good fighter build...) with a sneak attack. Then I got run over by minions and we somehow beat him.

That party continued to turn away a hill giant invasion. I was worthless there. Once I came out of the invisibility a wizard so kindly gave me I missed my sneak attack and got knocked out in one hit. Our party didn't believe in mid combat heals so.........

We tracked the hill giant's to a wizard's fortress, and I was the hero of that fight since (due to, if I do say so myself, sexy tactics) I took down the wizard pretty much single handedly while the rest of the party protected or drew fire. We went into the basement and fought a green dragon, which I was average against (there wasn't room for sneaking so I really just drew attacks from wizards). The plan was to find out who had sold them the dragon buuuuuuuuuuutttttt the campaign ended.

So what's your first campaign story? :smallsmile:

[Loki_42]

Wow, you're first campaign was way better than mine. My first real campaign was me DMing for a bunch of other noobs, of which I had the most play-experience, having participated in a single introductory session that didn't pan out into a whole campaign. One guy was the always-a-smart-build Half-elf Barbarian with a longsword(seriously, I don't even think he had a shield), another guy played a Gnome Wizard, who focused on Illusion and Necromancy, and a third guy, I don't remember what he played, but it was probably a ranger or a rogue. Together, they traveled through an entirely cliche and stereotypical standard fantasy setting with the bare minimum of plot. The whole thing ended when I tried to run an adventure I found in a book that through a combination of me blindly trusting CR and the players not really understanding tactics, ended with the barbarian and I think eventually the third player being dominated by an Aboleth and proceeding to kill the wizard.

We were about 12/13 then. I still play with the wizard and the third guy, but I fell out of touch with the barbarian. We had fun, but after our first campaign we stopped playing for several years, when the Barbarian moved to a new school.

[Roncorps]

I was 7, playing in Advanced Dungeons and Dragon a Cleric with my brother, the DM. Don't remember anything, but I know that I killed Orcus, lord of the undead ! I was killing like crazy anything that was appearing before me.

That was like 20+ years ago ... t'whas the good time !

[OracleofSilence]

When i was about 12, me and a few friends ran a very very short eberron campaign. I played a Einhander fighter in a party with a well built druid, cleric, and sorcerer, and had the most fun i ever have had in the game. The session ended after we managed to burn all our bridges in a dungeon and were buried under a slowly advancing wave of warforged (it was the only time i have actually died in a campaign, but felt incredibly epic).

[Kol Korran]

my first campaign? it was over 20 years ago, when i was but a kid. it was first edition, and the main plot was that once every 1000 years the dragon king rises from hell, and makes a tour at all the prominent places and cities of the world. all kind of dragons flock to him, and any of the dragons (the kind included) may start on a rampage and pillage of any place on the way.

the only way to avert the wrath was to give some tribute, some artifact in return of sparing the city's life.

we were sent to retrieve such a tribute.
i joined half way through the campaign, a 4th level rogue (always human, it was the first edition, where you roleld percentiles for rogue "skills"). the first room held gargoyles. i was a kid and misunderstood the descriptions (i dodn't know what gargoyles were) and imagined them as big stony skinned worms with fangs and horns. :smallwink:)

i died later, and rolled up a halfling (no class, first edition) and got half blinded and one paralized leg (crazy poison house rules! :smallamused:) before we reached the final chamber...

where we failed. :smallsigh: but that turned out awesome since then we returned to the city, and tried to defend it from several marauding dragons from their flock using many kind of expendables, archery units and so on. (we were like level 6:smalleek:) as a kid, that was a terrifying end to the campaign (only one of us survived, the city was mostly in ruins, but most of it's people alive.

i remember it as a fabulous experience. :smallbiggrin:

[Fyermind]

You guys make me feel like such a noob. Six years ago a group of homeschoolers had an introduction to D&D session I took part in. I wanted to be that guy from LotR with the massive morningstar and sword which I was told were a bastard sword and a heavy flail. Since I wanted two weapon fighting I got set up with a ranger. Which was totally not what I had in mind. I would have killed to have monkey grip back then just so I could play the character I wanted.

Anyway I think there may have been a plot line, but I doubt even the DM (poor DM) remembers it. We killed some goblins. The DM had this bard NPC who ran around with us and got on our nerves. We killed some more goblins. The bard tried to take a share of the loot so we killed the bard. We killed some more goblins.

I think it was around at this point that the DM took all the books (We'd been borrowing his books) and dice (We'd also been borrowing his dice) and pencils (yeah them too) and said he quit and we could DM ourselves.

We then set upon each other with rolled up character sheets.
What times they were being twelve.

[Alaris]

The first campaign I ever played in was about 6 years ago, almost 7. A friend of mine knew a friend who had almost given up on DMing, and convinced him to give it one more shot.

And from there, I'm still playing that "campaign." It's gone through 3 chapters (we're in the third), but it's still the same world.

Started my first campaign as a Male, Half-Elf Cleric. Did Central Casting, and ended up with Hot Pink hair... really, it made for funny throughout the entire adventure. The Dwarf in the group called him "Emergency Trail Rations."

So yeah, we're going on this adventure to investigate this location that could bring about the end of another race ('Dem ebil hoomanz). We come across a group of Hoomanz, and I proceed to immediately SURRENDER to them. (I mean, the dwarf wanted me for rations, yeesh!)

The dwarf is incapacitated, and the other Elf (a Ranger) runs off. I pointed out which direction he was in, and he was hunted down. So I ended my first session being taken away by the hoomanz, and promptly started up a new adventure in their nation, with the other PCs rolling up new characters.

So yeah... that was my first adventure... and I'm still playing the same world... and it's quite awesome. Props to Trinoya for creating it.

[APersonAmI]

My first campaign was about a year ago, a single-session deal, meant to introduce me and a friend to the way a pen-paper RPG was played: We have been roleplaying basically rules-free with me as GM for, I don't know, 9 years? And my friend hinted he wanted to try out something traditional. So we bought some Pathfinder books, sat down and tried it out with him as GM for a change of pace.

Not being yet very informed about the Golarion campaign setting, he crafted a city built by Dwarfs, tall bugger set against a mountain, on top of massive tunnels full of buried horrors. Basically, the plot was that an evil Human faction had taken it over and enslaved the Dwarf's, to be used as miners, who were planning a bloody revolution, cleaning away all the races the Humans had accepted into the city when making it into a trade outpost. There were also hints of corruption within the city guard, extremely chaste based hierarchy, and several secret factions with different interests.

From there, my LE Human Telepath Psion treated the city as my sandbox, playing factions and interests against each other to gather information and gain leverage for personal gain, and hopefully, devoted followers.

As I said, this was only for one session, so nothing has time to be resolved, but it was a fun deal, and a good way to get used to having rules lording over you.

Haven't played with him since, he's had a lot going on, but it'd be fun to play some noobish campaigns with him again sometime.

*Edit*
Oh, right, the rules-free roleplaying is probably also roleplaying, huh. kinda embarrassing, but since we never referred to them as campaigns...

Yeah, I don't remember much. I was 12, friend GM'd, I was a 8 foot, Halberd swinging, fire breathing lion, whose main personality trait was absolute loyalty to his allies. Fought against a villain with the old DBZ plot-hole of basically being able to destroy the world with a flick of his finger.
That's... about all i remember. Only campaign I had which wasn't limited to just me and my friend, so it was quite a bit sillier than the ones we had in the following years, because our friends weren't that mature, nor were we, in their company.

[Empedocles]

...sounds like people got taken advantage of the 1st time they played

[CGforever!]

I was about 13 when my friends (all close to my age) and I decided to start playing. None of us had ever played before and had never seen anyone else play before. We didn't understand the rules, so there was plenty of mistakes made. We also didn't have a real campaign, since we went back and forth between DMs, and our party was haphazard. Sometimes it was just one player and one DM. It was fun though.

I played pretty much the least-optimized character possible, but the whole group thought I was the most powerful. We had ridiculously high stats as well, since we didn't really understand what was what with ability scores.

Vincent Casimar: CG Human Fighter x/Weapon Master x
Str 18, Dex 17, Con 17, Int 16, Wis 16, Cha 16
Bastard Sword Proficiency/Focus/Specialization/Greater Focus, Whirlwind Attack

No power attack, used a shield, use spring attack a lot, also used a bow. Oh, and since this was 3.0, I took intimidate cross-classed to qualify for Weapon Master.

Yup.

Our adventures were pretty simple, and our D&D was heavily based off video games, since that was all we knew. We typically wandered around villages, getting hired by leaders to go somewhere and do something. We usually fought humanoids, giants, animals, and a couple of dragons. Our enemies rarely used spells or spell-like-abilities, since it was like, complicated, you know? Hardly used skills, and never correctly. Never touched saves or grappling/bull rush/overrun/etc. Rarely used a grid. Our adventures were usually just hack'n'slash.

My friend, the other main DM, played Kanok, a half-orc barbarian whose build changed between greatsword and double-axe. He didn't play often since he DMed so much. Out mutual friend played a Dwarf Fighter, who went into defender. My cousin played an elf Fighter/Wizard/Arcane Archer who was played about as unintelligently as possible, just straight attacking, never using feats or skills or spells. We had another friend who played a blaster half-elf sorcerer, but he wasn't usually around.

[SimonMoon6]

Well, my first real campaign was in 1st edition (the only edition that there was at the time... the 1st edition Unearthed Arcana was pretty new) when I was starting college.

The PCs in this campaign were:

(1) A barbarian named Conan played by someone who just threw a character together, assuming the campaign wouldn't last long. After this character was eaten by dragons, he made a paladin named Arthur (as in "King", but he was still just "Prince Arthur" at the moment). And then he had a variety of other more unusual characters (a mind flayer monk, a teenaged kid with a variant spellcasting class, etc).

(2) A dark elf who was multiclassed: cavalier/magic-user/thief. Yeah, yeah, cavaliers can't multi-class like this. But the player hoodwinked me, showing the multi-classing possibilities table, where CMT was shown as a definite allowed possibility (but CMT was *supposed* to mean CLERIC/M-U/Thief). Anyway, he was way overpowered but it was kind of funny regardless. The third player imagined him jousting with someone (as a cavalier would) and then picking their pockets as he rode past.

(3) A human cleric. The funniest thing was that this player had a favorite "lucky" die that he would use for rolling his hit points. I swear that it always rolled a 1 or a 2 for hit points. Maybe once or twice (out of 13 or 14 levels), he got something better.

This was a long, epic five-year long campaign, which back in 1st edition, meant getting up to the low teens in levels. There were so many epic things in the game that I can't even begin to describe them all. Their first adventure was against an insane lich named Bill (who would memorize and cast his spells rather inefficiently) that they "defeated" (and who kept coming back to be a recurring enemy). Then, there was the army of beholders. Oh, and the time, the players were squabbling, so the cleric went on the adventure all by himself and, thanks to a lucky "save or die" spell against the BBEG, he won by himself. And those were just the low level adventures.

One of the big deals in this game was that everybody had some NPC followers (not using any official rule for followers). For example, I had originally made a gnome cleric/illusionist to help the group out (since the cleric's player hadn't made his character yet, and the group would need a cleric). He had the temperament of a thief (always wanting all the treasure), but not the right abilities to make that work well for him. Then, there was the ogre named Bob that the group met (running away from the army of beholders). Somehow, he ended up getting an ability to cast a "random spell". Roll d4 to determine what class (C/D/M-U/I), then roll to see what level, then roll to see which spell. This pretty much never worked out well. The phrase, "Duh, I think I'll cast a spell," was often followed by "No, Bob!" Some of the NPCs became more attached to certain characters, and this meant that if the PCs screwed up, I could kill an NPC rather than kill a PC and it would mean something. The paladin's NPC helpers just kept dying, while the cleric got some cleric followers that started at 1st level (when everybody else was, I dunno, maybe 10th) and they somehow managed to survive to gain a decent number of levels.

It was crazy, chaotic fun. There were even some adventures where this campaign crossed over with other campaigns, the PCs meeting PCs from other games.

[Dairuga]

ooooh... Memories. So here is another of my tales from Bizarro-land.

My first campaign was around.. Four months ago now, I think? Something akin to those lines.

I played a level 12 Half-dragon Kobold. I wanted to play one of the small buggers, and I wanted to be a dragon. I opted for the dragonwrought, but the party said the dragonwrought sucked, and said I had to go for half-dragon instead, because they got wings and breath weapon and immunities. I said that they had an LA, and they said they didn't play with Level adjustments, so they didn't care.

The other party members was a half dragon ogre magi, A pixie rogue, three wolfborn slayers (Homebrewed Race that gives +12 Dex and Str) and favoured enemy: everything. And A Psion. A psion that could do everything. These players openly said Psions was the hardest classes to play right, and when you knew how to play them, they could do -everything-. That's right. They did not play with PP either. You wanted someone dead? The psion could create a vacuum so hard that everyone inside died, imploded, just like that. And the psion was a pacifist. He claimed he had never killed anyone. If anyone died, it was a lack of air that was the cause. Or interdimensional collapse.

Oh, wait. They did play with PP. Because the psion spent a month in advance, pumping all his daily PP into a single crystal, a flawless ruby. And when we arrived in the closest town, he lifted the gem to the air, let it refract sunlight like a magnifying glass, and he blasted the guard for over 800d6 damage that was the amount of PP he had stored inside the ruby. And the guard was supposedly level 20, so he instantly leveled up to epic levels, so that was kinda sad.

I felt sorta left out, as I didn't grasp the rules fully... So they kindly explained that I had the ability to kill everyone I wanted, too! I was a transmuter wizard, and at level 10, transmuter wizards could change up to a twenty-foot cube of any matter into anything else, two times per day. So I could touch someone's body and transmute skin into crystal. Then they were suddenly unable to move. Or Skeleton / Joints into Pudding. Or Air into rock, trapping people and making them suffocate.

Or air into force, which did the same thing, except no one could escape from that, they said.

The three wolfborn were a slayer, a ranger and a high-priest respectively, I think they were. They were telepathically linked, and mentally hive-minded. They knew everything that happened to eachother, and healing to one was equally spread out over everyone if they wanted to. Damage however, did not translate the same way, and did not interrupt eachother's spellcasting. The high priest had Destruction and Creation as his domain, and could thus destroy anything he wanted with a touch, and create any materials he wanted, free of charge, five times per day. He could create anything he wanted that was not larger than 20 foot cubes.

Oh, and then the last member of the group, whom I had forgotten, was the Quick Gnome? or Dimension gnome.. Or something like that. He looked like a halfling, a human child. And he could run so fast that nothing could hold him. He could even cross time and space with his sheer power of running, and he crossed into the fourth dimension when he started, allowing him to bypass mundane blockages and problems. Or perhaps it was called a Quickling or something like that. I am not too sure, but it was absurd. Whenever we were faced with danger, he just ran up, grabbed their weaponry, ran back in the blink of an eye, and poof, disarmed.

Then the players wanted several characters each, and started to introduce their Rakasha characters, their Mind flayers and one Fire genasi.

Needless to say, the campaign lasted one, whole session.
The next time we got together, I got the message that the "DM was tired of gaming, so another player was going to host a campaign".

This repeated about five-six times.
No campaign lasted for more than a day.

And mind you, these are not twelve-year old people that were throwing together a slapstick roleplay for the hell of it. These were grown up, adult players whom were all very, very insistent that their rules were official. Dirge, the main DM, the one who knew everything, said that "Everything was TSR sanctioned", "Everything is fully legal", "If we can train you guys, we'd be the best at any tournament. We'd mop everyone's faces off the table. Because everything of this is legal. Most people just don't know about it".

Dirge, oh dirge. The player whom had been around since before second edition. One whom had his character, Dirge, "officially" written into an official campaign by Gary Gygax himself, etc ,etc. He had so many books at his home, he claimed, that were never released to the public. They had so many overpowered classes that were never released, etcetera.

Interestingly enough, I was still juvenile enough at that point to be crestfallen when I got the news that "The group was destroyed". "It was utterly and comptely obliderated." People had started to complain, they were not sure what to do, and so the entire group had dissolved when the group was not satisfied wtih the DM's and the DM's friends' efforts. I too, pretending that I knew the rules, had argued a few times with them, over what was official or not. They said that I too, had started to become "corrupted", they called it.

Oh, and as another hilarious note. They said "I had to take Eschew material" as a feat. Because it let you bypass any material cost. Everyone. I said "Erm.. It only lets you bypass material costs on spells that cost less than 1 GP." they said "The rules have been rewritten since that, and I had to understand that. They were right."

And then they asked me why I didn't have combat casting. I said that there was no point in me having it, because it was near-useless (I had found advice in so many handbooks, saying it is a trap). And they almost blew a fuse, with how little I actually knew, how useful it was, and how every spellcaster needed it, or they'd lose their spell if they were attacked while casting a spell. Without it, you'd be just as good as dead meat.

[Ziegander]

ooooh... Memories. So here is another of my tales from Bizarro-land.

Oh my dear god. I am so sorry you had to game with these people.

[Ryulin18]

I feel like taking a gun to my face when I say this...I started on...:smalleek:...4th edition.

First time I played it was with some sweaty fat guy, a guy with special needs and another guy who was okay. We played the DM's home made Final Fantasy 9 campaign that sucked balls. The mentally ill guy wanted to use his space marine figure because his character was a 7 foot tall super human from the future who had a machine gun...the DM allowed it. I was a pretty lame ranger. The other guy was a paladin who layed the smite thick and well.

We played with no map, the DM didn't nudge us in the right direction and we were all new so no one knew the rules.

It was horrible.

I found a decent group of 3.5 since.

[Dairuga]

Oh my dear god. I am so sorry you had to game with these people.

Thank you, thank you. Hah... They were the only group I had to play with for over two months, sadly. It was a tough ordeal, because on one hand, it was D&D, the thing I had wanted to play for so extremely long. On the other hand... Yes.

Infighting, new people joining every other campaign, old people getting kicked out; me having to stay silent and pretend their rules were how the rules were supposed to be or incur the DM wrath, etc, etc.

But in hindsight, it gave me a ton of stories that is enough to make people cringe. So that's something.

Skill trick gained: Collector of horrid stories.

[danzibr]

Oh my dear god. I am so sorry you had to game with these people.
Oh I feel the same way. That sounds so terrible.

As for my first D&D experience, I remember it rather well. I played a good bit of Baldur's Gate and thought I knew about D&D.

So anyways, we're talking like 8 years ago, using 3rd edition. I wanted to make a Kensai, the kit from BGII. Fortunately, the DM had OA and informed me about a prestige class, the Kensai.

I ended up rolling an Elf (with blue hair!) Fighter focused on 2-weapon fighting. I put all my stats (we had a weird system) into Dex, getting it to 20 or 22 (my Str was 10, I think). I used my level 1 feat and Fighter bonus feat on stuff involving TWF. We only played a couple sessions, 2 I believe, and I never even got Weapon Finesse.

Since then I was in one more 2-sessioners, then I DMed for my family (we had like 8 people) for quite a while, actually. Got from level 1 to 12 or so. And that's all the D&D I've played, basically.

[TuggyNE]

I had the chance to visit some friends in another state about a year ago, and play in their recently-started campaign while I was there. We were all pretty atrociously unoptimized (a druid who never cast SNA? a halfling ranger with a crossbow?) but we still had fun :smallwink:

Our DM had us plowing through zombies and skeletons, a cabal of necromancers, intelligent spiders and homebrewed insects called pulpar... it was pretty great. He awarded small amounts of extra XP for things like jokes, good roleplaying, and so forth, and wasn't afraid to handwave the rules sometimes.

[Trinoya]

My first campaign I played in was with some friends of mine. It didn't go many places. We basically shrugged the DMs planned adventure and went and did our own thing only to be thrown onto the adventure and subsequently accidentally shrug it again and end up exactly where the campaign started.

Kinda funny all things considered.

[ThreeDSix]

Had my first session 11 years ago (makes me feel old).
My friend's mom was the DM and we played a second ed campaign. We were all level 1 characters and we were asked to investigate the strange lights coming from a mansion on top of a hill.

One memorable event was as the party was exploring the mansion (overrun by a tribe of orcs) we had to hide from the BBEG and we were currently in the bedroom. So the rogue hides in the four poster under the blankets, the gnome behind the headboard and my character, the cleric, and the monk hid in the closet. Unfortunately we started arguing about a missing scroll and I rightly accused the monk of being a thief, which he denied violently - hence our terrible hide checks. Que BBEG throwing open the cupboard doors, probably wondering why puny humies would be rolling around in her shoe collection. Anyway, the rogue sneak attacks her from behind and the monk and. I make use of the distraction to hightail it out of there.

We eventually managed to defeat her and free the wizard who owned the mansion - much through luck as anything else - I for one had no idea what was going on half the time.
I managed to level for the first time, walk through a door on the top floor of the mansion and promply get killed by a lightning trap (1d6 damage, oh the pain of only having a CON of 10!)

This death is memorable because it started a trend. I have not once managed to keep a character alive from beginning of a campaign to the end of one, which is something of a joke in my circle...

[ThreeDSix]

Had my first session 11 years ago (makes me feel old).
My friend's mom was the DM and we played a second ed campaign. We were all level 1 characters and we were asked to investigate the strange lights coming from a mansion on top of a hill.

One memorable event was as the party was exploring the mansion (overrun by a tribe of orcs) we had to hide from the BBEG and we were currently in the bedroom. So the rogue hides in the four poster under the blankets, the gnome behind the headboard and my character, the cleric, and the monk hid in the closet. Unfortunately we started arguing about a missing scroll and I rightly accused the monk of being a thief, which he denied violently - hence our terrible hide checks. Que BBEG throwing open the cupboard doors, probably wondering why puny humies would be rolling around in her shoe collection. Anyway, the rogue sneak attacks her from behind and the monk and. I make use of the distraction to hightail it out of there.

We eventually managed to defeat her and free the wizard who owned the mansion - much through luck as anything else - I for one had no idea what was going on half the time.
I managed to level for the first time, walk through a door on the top floor of the mansion and promply get killed by a lightning trap (1d6 damage, oh the pain of only having a CON of 10!)

This death is memorable because it started a trend. I have not once managed to keep a character alive from beginning of a campaign to the end of one, which is something of a joke in my circle of friends...