PDA

View Full Version : Gamer Tales Your First Campaign



IllogicalBlox
2014-07-11, 04:06 PM
Here we can relate tales of our very first campaign.

I'm still on my first campaign. Its on Roll20, 4e, with me & my brother controlling two characters. We were shipwrecked, and encountered a necromancer on the beach, with two zombies & two skeleton minions. First turn, the necromancer hit my gnome rogue with some power that took him to a quarter health, and prevented him from healing. He only managed to shake it off after the campaign. The dwarven warlord & dragonborn fighter were grabbed by the zombies. The one holding the dragonborn was steadily weakened until the warlord used Lead The Assault, got 19 damage and killed it exactly (it only had 19 hit points remaining!) The fighter smashed the other zombie, as he got a critical hit, insta-killing it. To our embarrassment, the goliath warden used Thunder Ram Assault on a MINION, not realizing that it was one.

Before this, the fighter had grabbed a barrel of citrus fruit, which he still has, & the warlord & warden tied themselves to a mast, as it was stormy. The mast then broke off UNDERNEATH them. The strongest & third strongest characters (the warden had 20 strength) then consistantly completely failed to break the rope, & had to drift to shore.

In the end, the rogue ended up doing the least damage, and the fighter took 0 points of damage.

Amaril
2014-07-11, 05:35 PM
Well, I'd played a few scattered one-shot games before, but my first real campaign was in junior high--4e with some buddies of mine from school, run by my dad. I was a wizard, still my favorite class. It was mostly my friends being hyperactive teenagers and doing random stupid stuff (as one would expect), while I acted like a total whiny jerk and tried to force them to "take things seriously". Fun times :smalltongue:

My first campaign that I enjoyed was started up by one of the guys from another 4e group (all adults except me that time) after he decided to drop out because he and one of the other players didn't get along. My dad and I didn't like the problem player either, and the other guy invited us to join him, so we did. He brought in a couple of other players he knew, and we've been playing Pathfinder for the past four or so years, currently up to 8th level. We're on hiatus for the summer, but hopefully we'll be back at it before long.

Kalmageddon
2014-07-11, 05:59 PM
The first campaign I've ever played in was DM'd by a friend of mine, who actually introduced me and a few of my friends to D&D 3.5, some 12 years ago now.
It was just a big dungeon without any rhyme or reason. The DM wasn't very good either, big fan of power fantasies and unfair challenges. The campaign ended when we finally got out of the dungeon and got to a city, where we found out that the most mundane, commonplace objects (like lanterns or bags) all had ridicolous prices for no other reason than the fact that our DM didn't want us to have them.

It was at that point that I said "I can do better than this", bought the manuals and asked my friends if they would want to play in another campaign with me as the DM.
I apparently did really good, because it lasted for some 2-3 years, with lots of memorable events and NPCs. Looking back at it, it wasn't anything special. Just a generic fantasy stetting, although I did have a somewhat original cosmology where the deities were more or less all jerks trying to get a piece of the world from its original creator, with their alignments basically reflecting only if they used demons or angels to further their goals. The campaing also had far too much fanservice and other things you would expect from a teenager on his first roleplaying experiece, but it was fun for everyone involved.

IllogicalBlox
2014-07-12, 08:43 AM
Wow, everyone so far has had a rubbish first campaign.

FidgetySquirrel
2014-07-12, 12:22 PM
I joined a group that my brother had been in for a couple of months. It was a campaign in progress (LV 5, at the time). I made an elf rogue named Korvan. The DM sicked an epic level fighter on us, for teh evulz. We were supposed to figure out that if we didn't attack, he couldn't attack us, as per a curse of some sort, but that didn't stop me from dying. I got pity rez, via deus ex machina, and we continued on.

Later, we found a beautiful young woman(warning: red flag for experienced players! We were not, however) who traveled with us for a bit. We camped in a cave, and the fighter took second watch. He, my RL brother, thought it'd be lulsy to fall asleep on watch. I am stirred from my elven trance and see the woman, naked, trying to remove my pants. I thought it'd be lulsy to scream like a girl, coincidentally saving me from almost guaranteed succubus death.

We got back to town, and the DM tried to railroad us back onto the main plot. I wanted to buy some nice magic gear, but the army had confiscated everything useful to fight the dragon threat(it makes sense in context). An NPC homebrew red mage of sorts offered to get us somewhere where such things could be bought, heavily implying a black market. We went on our way, and were attacked by an overwhelming black dragon. The NPC wizard, the only character with more than 15 INT, got killed. This will matter later! The NPC called us over, and busted out a scroll of teleport...

So we end up in a strange underground cave system with no discernible way out. It was a puzzle, and one that we couldn't figure out. I asked to make an INT check to get some kind of clue. The DM said that the DC to get a clue would be 30, meaning we needed someone with a whopping 30 INT just to receive a clue to help us solve the puzzle! TPK, starved to death.

tl;dr
Killer DM tried to railroad us and we ignored it, on the grounds that we wanted to spend our gold. Rocks fall, everyone dies.

LokiRagnarok
2014-07-12, 01:01 PM
Wow, everyone so far has had a rubbish first campaign.

Well, the first time is often slightly awkward, almost always memorable, and leaves you wanting for more :smallbiggrin:

BWR
2014-07-12, 01:09 PM
Started off with the adventure Escape from Zanzer's Dungeon that came with the '91 version of the Basic boxed set for beginners. The adventure itself is straightforward but the dungeon is terribly designed. Once we got out we tried talking to the first people we met and were attacked. We defeated them and procede to kill every living creature we came across until we were loaded down with something like a score each of suits of armor, various weapons etc. (encumbrance?), then we got to a town and sobered up and sold our stuff and did some more traditional heroic adventuring. I can't actually remember most of the game except that I enjoyed it. There was the disasterous time we let one of the players run his own homemade dungeon.

We came to a dungeon which was filled to the brim with nearly every magic item and nearly every monster in the RC, especially stuff for magi-users (because the temp DM had a man-crush on the player of the magic-user). Then we came to a room the size of a small house that was filled to the brim with a single mithril copmuter. The PCs didn't know it was but the description was clear to the players. Of course we had no way of breaking the mithril out so it was basically just there because the DM thought it was cool. Then the DM decided he had been a bit generous with the magic items and the next room we entered destroyed all our magic, even the stuff we had gotten before the dungeon. No explanation given.
Then we wandered on a bit rather miffed until we came to this one room filled with a giant monster that would easily have TPKed us. I can't even remember what it was but it's very likely it was something homebrew (as an aside he had tried to come up with his own playable race, which was the result of just about every sentient race in the world getting together and having a big orgy until the offspring could breed true. It had d20 HD and some other stuff. Fortunately they were never introduced). So, since the idea of giving up on the dungeon never occurred to us we tried to paly it smart. The monster couldn't open the door so we decided to open it, have the MU cast his single Fireball at it and quickly close the door. Rest, repeat. Thoughts of breaking down the door never occurred to the DM but he got really pissed and claimed a bullet came out of the empty hallway and killed the MU. At this point we said 'nuh uh'. After a few minutes of adamantly claiming that a bullet with not visible or audible source killed the MU he relented and we spent a few more days killing the beastie.
Then we got to the Boss. It was another homebrew thingy that I seem to recall as a double-sized human with some odd abilities. He just sat on a throne in an empty room at the very bottom of a dungeon, deep underground.
The fight was long and epic and just as we were about to strike the finishing blow he cst Heal on himself. Again we struggled to bring him down and just as he was about to go down: Heal.
At this point we were out of spells, out of consumable magic items and nearly out of hp. A TPK was certain but then the guy just collapsed on the throne for no apparant reason, which then rose up to the ceiling and vanished. Then the room started to fill with acid. Desperately we tried to open the door, but the door had disappeared. We searched all around the room for secret doors - nothing. We searched for buttons, pressure plates, levers, anything that would open an escape route - nothing. We specified we paid extra attention to the area around the throne - nothing.
We died and in irrirtation asked if there was any way we could have escaped.
DM "There was a button"
Us "A button"
DM "Yeah. On the floor near the throne"
Us: "We said we looked there. We said we pressed every surface in the area."
DM "well, you didn't find it"

After this disaster the regular DM took over, said that whole silly thing was just a bad dream (best use of 'it was only a dream' ever) except we kept our xp gains and quickly got our own domain in Karameikos. Some more fun adventures including taking out a lich and some epic combat when he came back, we ended up in Ravenloft, which was done very well. Creepy, unpleasant and everyone ended up dead (if they were lucky) or cursed by the Mists.

iceman10058
2014-07-12, 01:55 PM
A friend of mine got me to play a paladin my first time. one time we were raiding this keep deep in the woods ruled by a blackguard, my character decided that his tyrannical rule needed to come to an end and we raided the keep. obviously, at the level we were at, the group was very outmatched and the blackguard was there to meet us during our escape. i told the party to keep going and that i would keep him held back for as long as i could. so here i am, first day playing and im going one on one against a bbeg almost 2x my level, so naturally i power attack as much as i can and use a smite evil as well. the dice gods muct have been smiling at my courage because i got a crit weilding a scythe and after all the math was done, killed him in one blow. my friend, our dm, calmly got up, left the room, and yelled and cursed as loud as he could, cause i ended the entire campaign in about an hour and i didnt know it

JusticeZero
2014-07-12, 07:06 PM
@Iceman - that's full of ridiculous amounts of win. I approve.

Silus
2014-07-12, 09:15 PM
Oh man, I remember the first campaign I ran <3

It was a short (two session) horror game for 3.5 that was a blend of the movie 1408 and H.P. Lovecraft. We played with the lights dimmed and I had creepy music playing on a loop on my laptop. Heavy use of Shadows and Shadow-based creatures, though the first half had little to no enemies and was all about the players finding themselves trapped in the house that seemed to have a mind of its own.

By the end of the first session in the house I hadn't thrown anything stronger than some animated objects at the PCs and they were already objecting to making Spot and Listen checks.

Somensjev
2014-07-13, 12:30 AM
my first campaign was DM'd by someone who hated me, the party consisted of me, the DM's sister, and my brother (we technically did a one shot before that, but we got TPK'd by one of those dwarves with a flaming head, i forgot their name)
the characters were a changeling rogue, a raptoran druid, and myself, i believe i was a shadowswyft fighter 3/ rogue 2. i was the only character with anything resembling a background and personality, even if that personality was stereotypical chaotic stupid :smallredface:
we ended up in a magical school, loosely based off of the one in discworld, since the DM was obsessed with the books

to make a long story short, the DM loved to jerk me around, and the other two never did anything except stereotypical things. i mean, the party consisted of a kleptomaniac rogue, a druid who spent more time sleeping in trees than contributing, and myself

a few brief highlights include, losing my 100gp or so mercurial broadsword (yeah, the exotic one, that you need a feat to use), within the first 5 minutes of the game, before we even encountered combat. getting assaulted by the archmage. getting assaulted by a podium. getting assaulted by trees. spending most of the time in the sunlight, which doesn't exactly bode well with a shadowswyft :smallsigh:

FidgetySquirrel
2014-07-13, 12:37 AM
getting assaulted by a podium.Wha...? I don't even...

Somensjev
2014-07-13, 01:50 AM
Wha...? I don't even...


so basically, there was a garden in the middle of the wizards colllege, and in the middle of the garden was a marble (or something, i just always pictured it as marble) room, and in the center of the room was a podium, or something. now, apparently because of all the magic around it, the podium became magically charged, and gained a mind of its own, or something.

now, being the stereotypical chaotic stupid character, i decided to go off on a tangent while my allies were getting a talk from the archmage. i noticed that the room was spotless, and i thought 'that can't be possible, you have to walk through a garden with no paths to get here, there must be some dirt or something'

so, being the genius that i was (no, seriously, i had pretty good intelligence (as in, the highest of my party. i think i was rocking about 16 int, or some such) i walked outside, scooped up some dirt, and dropped it on the floor in the marble room. nothing happened

so, i tried something a little different, i walked out side, got some dirt, and dropped it onto the podium itself. Now, apparently it didnt like that, so it heated up the dirt and shot it at me, i took 1d6 fire damage, and was blinded for the next few minutes, (the archmage actually had to give me a potion to cure the blindness, which is what caused him to attack me, but that's an entirely different story)

i then stumbled around until i found the podium that had just blinded me, and i put my hands on it. apparently it electrocuted me, so i took 1d8 damage

i thought to myself 'well, better test again, to make sure it's conclusive' so i walked outside, and picked up more dirt, and took 1d6 damage because my hands were burnt. then walked back inside and dropped more dirt on the podium, taking another 2d6 superheated dirt damage

i came to the conclusion that podiums dislike dirt :smallcool:

Kol Korran
2014-07-13, 11:16 AM
I consider having two "first" campaigns. One when I was a kid, and I was introduced to the game, and one after a loooong hiatus in my late twenties, where I DMed a campaign in Eberron.

The first one started in the Red box D&D rules, I played a rogue (Race and class were one). The big story was that once every thousand years, the dragon king rises from the hells to raid the world, drawing dragons of all kinds to him, unless he's satiated with powerful magic items. Our group was supposed to go and fetch... the golden fleece. It was down an 8 levels mega dungeon our DM built, which was supposed to take most of the campaign.

Only the dungeon was bloody lethal! about half the party died every other session or so, and we were making slow progress. We were half way through level 3 when the time sort of ran out .we were at about level 5 I think? but the DM, somewhat frustrated said the time is up, (He had a calender) .The Dragon king will arrive in a few days.

So out 4 level 5 characters were about to protect the city from random raiding dragosn of all colors and sizes... We each got a unit of 500 archers, and had a tower. We also got LOADED with all kind of potions, magic items and such. The idea was not to kill the dragons, but to drive them away somehow? :smalleek:

That final session was so tense! I still remember the adrenaline rush! The DM would randomly roll for dragon type and age to coem and raid, and we tried whatever we could- archers, magic items and so on to try and drive them away. I think we got attacked by 5-8 dragons? Only the wizard survived, with his tower crushed, in 2 hp, facing an old red dragon. He drank a potion of control red dragons, and the DM rolled (in front of us) a 1... The panicked mage said "Please take all the treasure left and leave us in peace in order to raise mroe treause for you?" (The DM played it a sort of like a suggestion ratherthan control I guess). And the dragon agreed, and left the city alone, with the rest of the dragon horde.

One of the best games of my life!

I decided to try and DM. (I only DMed a bit when I was a kid). We had a godo group, and so we ran a high adventure campaign from levels 2-13 in many parts of Ebberon- Aundair, Darguun, Xen'dric, The shadow Marches, The Mournland and more... great campaign, ran quite smoothly, with quite a few high lights. I loved the campaign, and it had a fantastic ending, fighting on top of Thronehold, for the fate of the world kinda stuff.

Quite nice for a first try, and I learned a lot from it.

If you're interested, check my links- It's "many facets of darkness"

rlc
2014-07-13, 11:19 AM
In my first campaign, the orc threw a guy up against a wall and the alchemist's fire in said guy's pocket burst open. The orc became known as the guy who threw somebody up against the wall so hard that he exploded.

FidgetySquirrel
2014-07-13, 11:54 AM
so basically, there was a garden in the middle of the wizards colllege, and in the middle of the garden was a marble (or something, i just always pictured it as marble) room, and in the center of the room was a podium, or something. now, apparently because of all the magic around it, the podium became magically charged, and gained a mind of its own, or something.

now, being the stereotypical chaotic stupid character, i decided to go off on a tangent while my allies were getting a talk from the archmage. i noticed that the room was spotless, and i thought 'that can't be possible, you have to walk through a garden with no paths to get here, there must be some dirt or something'

so, being the genius that i was (no, seriously, i had pretty good intelligence (as in, the highest of my party. i think i was rocking about 16 int, or some such) i walked outside, scooped up some dirt, and dropped it on the floor in the marble room. nothing happened

so, i tried something a little different, i walked out side, got some dirt, and dropped it onto the podium itself. Now, apparently it didnt like that, so it heated up the dirt and shot it at me, i took 1d6 fire damage, and was blinded for the next few minutes, (the archmage actually had to give me a potion to cure the blindness, which is what caused him to attack me, but that's an entirely different story)

i then stumbled around until i found the podium that had just blinded me, and i put my hands on it. apparently it electrocuted me, so i took 1d8 damage

i thought to myself 'well, better test again, to make sure it's conclusive' so i walked outside, and picked up more dirt, and took 1d6 damage because my hands were burnt. then walked back inside and dropped more dirt on the podium, taking another 2d6 superheated dirt damage

i came to the conclusion that podiums dislike dirt :smallcool:Duly noted. I'll just be staying away from dirt and wizard podiums from now on.

MrBright01
2014-07-13, 12:34 PM
My first game as a player was a Star Wars West End game. I was young and foolish, so I played a Jedi and had horrible, horrible skills. Only thing I ever managed to do was flub a jump check to get on a table during a bar fight and was out for the short round of combat. The game ended (for me) when we took off on the ship. We spent a full gaming session trying to shoot ONE TIE Fighter, because the new characters took the gunners seat, while the established and rather OP established players were piloting, as well as player bloat and unceasing OOC conversations slowing every activity to a crawl. I bowed out, as did half the players, to lighten the load on the DM. Amusingly, they told me years later my Jedi turned to the dark side and became the primary antagonist. Nice to know it did SOMETHING.

As DM, I ran a Shadowrun game. I was 12ish. It was bloody awful.

IllogicalBlox
2014-07-13, 04:39 PM
so basically, there was a garden in the middle of the wizards colllege, and in the middle of the garden was a marble (or something, i just always pictured it as marble) room, and in the center of the room was a podium, or something. now, apparently because of all the magic around it, the podium became magically charged, and gained a mind of its own, or something.

now, being the stereotypical chaotic stupid character, i decided to go off on a tangent while my allies were getting a talk from the archmage. i noticed that the room was spotless, and i thought 'that can't be possible, you have to walk through a garden with no paths to get here, there must be some dirt or something'

so, being the genius that i was (no, seriously, i had pretty good intelligence (as in, the highest of my party. i think i was rocking about 16 int, or some such) i walked outside, scooped up some dirt, and dropped it on the floor in the marble room. nothing happened

so, i tried something a little different, i walked out side, got some dirt, and dropped it onto the podium itself. Now, apparently it didnt like that, so it heated up the dirt and shot it at me, i took 1d6 fire damage, and was blinded for the next few minutes, (the archmage actually had to give me a potion to cure the blindness, which is what caused him to attack me, but that's an entirely different story)

i then stumbled around until i found the podium that had just blinded me, and i put my hands on it. apparently it electrocuted me, so i took 1d8 damage

i thought to myself 'well, better test again, to make sure it's conclusive' so i walked outside, and picked up more dirt, and took 1d6 damage because my hands were burnt. then walked back inside and dropped more dirt on the podium, taking another 2d6 superheated dirt damage

i came to the conclusion that podiums dislike dirt :smallcool:
DUDE, that is the hallmark of either an idiot or someone with very low wisdom.

Somensjev
2014-07-13, 09:08 PM
DUDE, that is the hallmark of either an idiot or someone with very low wisdom.

i believe i had 5 or 6 wisdom

veti
2014-07-13, 10:19 PM
I DMd in school, but it was more a string of modules not-even-loosely tied together than a "campaign". I can't remember if I ever even bothered to explain how the PCs came to be in whichever adventure I wanted to run next.

My first proper D&D campaign would have been when I got to university.
It involved a large (there must have been 10-12 players) group of hobos wandering a strangely depopulated countryside, periodically dying for no reason that I could fathom at the time. (It wasn't until afterwards I discovered, two or three PCs were murdering the others.) Everyone kept their character sheets closely guarded secrets, and the DM communicated mostly by passing notes.

By the time I'd lost my first character, I'd realised that practically everyone was lying to everyone else about their own class, stats and alignment (and very likely more), so I introduced a cleric/illusionist (not permitted by RAW but what the hell) who only admitted to being a cleric (and could cast Cure Light Wounds to prove it), but had fun with illusions when nobody was looking his way.

I'm pretty sure nobody in that campaign ever made it to level 2.

Before that, my first proper "campaign" was probably of Champions.I was obsessed with speed, and built the fastest character I could with a 200 point base. He had a Speed of 8 (that's "fast", for you non-players) and could run (up vertical buildings, if need be) at stupid speed, but his attacks were kinda weak, so to make a significant impact on the enemey he had to literally hurl himself into them. And of course he had no points left over for toughness/defences or endurance, which meant that "this'll hurt me more than it hurts you" was, as often as not, literally the case. In an average fight, he'd have to spend at least 2 of his 8 actions per turn just recovering from his own attacks, meaning he was no better (often worse) than someone with speed 6. That was my introduction to the joys of character build optimisation.

Dawgmoah
2014-07-14, 03:25 PM
Here we can relate tales of our very first campaign.

My first campaign started with the party, all friends from the same city who decided to form an adventuring group, coming across an elderly man dressed in really flashy armor, a nice sword, and some cool and expensive jewelry, working his way up a trail that ended with a 60 foot fall into the sea below. When he saw all of the young eager faces he asked them politely if they would assist him in reaching the cliff. Why they asked? He wanted to throw himself into the sea and take with him all of these items with him that had caused so many problems for him and the Kingdom as a whole. These items are cursed evil artifiacts and created as traps to ensnare good people into doing evil. Please help me to the cliff so I can end my life and at least do one bit of good for all of the evil I have caused.....

The party of good aligned people (well, that was what was on their sheets) clubbed him, stole everything off of him, and threw his body over the cliff into the raging waters. That started a five year campaign based around the players all wanting to gain complete control over all of the magic items found on the poor guy. Much unnecessary bloodshed, cruel acts and betrayals later, one emerged with everything and crowed he won. The entire game was PvP and the players would plot long into the night on how to get the items from each other. It was aptly named the "War of the Ring, and Things."

SiuiS
2014-07-15, 02:22 AM
Wait, how do you mean? The first campaign we ever played in? Or the first campaign that was ours that we ran?

Lord Raziere
2014-07-15, 03:07 AM
hm. that depends on your definition of campaign. I was roleplaying freeform in a player-vs-player free-for-all style online roleplay years before I ever picked up dice.

Think something like the Nexus in freeform roleplay. except remove the kindness and the rules, and the agreements over who to lose to further the story and such. replace it with everyone wanting to be godly, everyone but me in some way powergaming their characters as much as they can until they were basically as powerful as old planeswalkers and each and everyone of them only had one. single. weakness. different for each one.

it occurred on accident really. it was called Gleemax, started because this guy's account called Gleemax getting taken, and it just evolved into this weird freeform rpg from there of eternal war and apocalypses, of gods and demons and nano-tech machines and so on and so forth, the status quo changing but the nature of it never really becoming different, just a bunch of fights where no side refused to give ground in character which led to a lot of arguments out of character.

it was a place that became toxic and full of stubborn arguments about what was godmodding and what was an acceptable weakness and so on and so forth. the world in character became a wasteland of terraformed kingdoms ruled by one evil overlord or another, while out of character it became a place of politics and rhetoric and votes about what rule will be implemented this time, what was fair and it was just stupid and draining, the roleplay slowly dying over years.

you'd think a bad roleplay like Gleemax wouldn't last years, wouldn't be full of so much toxicity and arguments if it lasted as long as it did...but somehow hateful passion fueled it. I remember my own character there, a 10,000 year old dragonfolk wizard inventor (I was like thirteen when I came up with that) dying like 18 times over the course of the roleplay, with me constantly reinventing his powers. nowadays he is more like magical doctor who.

the roleplay effected me to this day. I still roleplay freeform, but with more reasonable people. I still desire high-powered play and such, but without unreasonable defenses and weaknesses. I found my best online roleplaying friends from it, whom I roleplay with to this day. it showed me the great freedom of freeform....but also the darkest aspects of it. it was my first real roleplay. and even then I hated the optimization mindset, even when it was completely freeform. oh and, in case your wondering, my character was one of the less powerful characters on there. yeah your RPG has problems when you can honestly say that about a guy who might as well be a level 20 Wizard/Artificer Gestalt Dragon.

Thankfully it has died.

As for my first tabletop game in real life, I technically started it, but I didn't DM it. I play an elf rogue named Lelk. He became obsessed with having an electric dagger, did daring feats of courage, had no points in stealth and basically charged at everything, became completely egomaniacal about his Strategical Genius, composed songs like Oh My Paladin Buddy, Explosive Hallelujah, and something about a waterfall, and built a zeppelin in a medieval setting on two VERY LUCKY d100 rolls, which he dropped two bombs on purpose and the party's fighter on accident upon the enemy army, got insanely lucky roles, from walking up to a god and cheerfully saying "Hi! I'm LELK what is your name!?" and surviving because he got a ridiculously high roll, and like to jump over things. he was AWESOME!

unfortunately I can't remember how it exactly went down, but I do remember the general gist of the campaign....basically it was set on a world where gods all dwelt on the material plane and ruled like kings directly. his companions were an elf paladin, human fighter, a human or was it elf ranger, the elf paladin was his own brand of crazy awesome, the elf ranger was the only sane woman amid the parties antics. it was all a senior project for my high school kind of thing, supposed to give back to the community, so I arranged a program to play DnD at my high school's....something center. and the last I heard of it, people were thankful to me for starting it. so yeah, cool. Unfortunately the campaign was cut off after only a year of play for DM reasons that couldn't be helped.

so yeah....those are my two first campaigns of real roleplaying. one lasted far longer than it should've, and the other cutting off just as it was finding its pace. whaddya gonna do?

SiuiS
2014-07-15, 03:35 AM
hm. that depends on your definition of campaign. I was roleplaying freeform in a player-vs-player free-for-all style online roleplay years before I ever picked up dice.

Think something like the Nexus in freeform roleplay. except remove the kindness and the rules, and the agreements over who to lose to further the story and such. replace it with everyone wanting to be godly, everyone but me in some way powergaming their characters as much as they can until they were basically as powerful as old planeswalkers and each and everyone of them only had one. single. weakness. different for each one.

it occurred on accident really. it was called Gleemax, started because this guy's account called Gleemax getting taken, and it just evolved into this weird freeform rpg from there of eternal war and apocalypses, of gods and demons and nano-tech machines and so on and so forth, the status quo changing but the nature of it never really becoming different, just a bunch of fights where no side refused to give ground in character which led to a lot of arguments out of character.

it was a place that became toxic and full of stubborn arguments about what was godmodding and what was an acceptable weakness and so on and so forth. the world in character became a wasteland of terraformed kingdoms ruled by one evil overlord or another, while out of character it became a place of politics and rhetoric and votes about what rule will be implemented this time, what was fair and it was just stupid and draining, the roleplay slowly dying over years.

you'd think a bad roleplay like Gleemax wouldn't last years, wouldn't be full of so much toxicity and arguments if it lasted as long as it did...but somehow hateful passion fueled it. I remember my own character there, a 10,000 year old dragonfolk wizard inventor (I was like thirteen when I came up with that) dying like 18 times over the course of the roleplay, with me constantly reinventing his powers. nowadays he is more like magical doctor who.

That's standard online freeform Roleplaying, yeah. In fact, I have never found a freeform Roleplay that didn't do this. Even people wanting to play games of freeform slice of life My little Pony sort of insisted on having exaltations, being mystically powerful gods, and being able to outperform established top tier magicians at a whim. It takes actual effort to learn what's important in a game, and distill that knowledge from all the chaff, to see through the competition.

It's like I said elsewhere, what makes a game work is intimacy, not power. All the powers in the world are wasted, all cosmic force and deific contortions fall away and pale beside something that means something to your character happening in a genuine fashion. Took me about twenty years to suss that out. I'm glad you got it early. :smallsmile:

IllogicalBlox
2014-07-15, 02:33 PM
hm. that depends on your definition of campaign. I was roleplaying freeform in a player-vs-player free-for-all style online roleplay years before I ever picked up dice.

Think something like the Nexus in freeform roleplay. except remove the kindness and the rules, and the agreements over who to lose to further the story and such. replace it with everyone wanting to be godly, everyone but me in some way powergaming their characters as much as they can until they were basically as powerful as old planeswalkers and each and everyone of them only had one. single. weakness. different for each one.

it occurred on accident really. it was called Gleemax, started because this guy's account called Gleemax getting taken, and it just evolved into this weird freeform rpg from there of eternal war and apocalypses, of gods and demons and nano-tech machines and so on and so forth, the status quo changing but the nature of it never really becoming different, just a bunch of fights where no side refused to give ground in character which led to a lot of arguments out of character.

it was a place that became toxic and full of stubborn arguments about what was godmodding and what was an acceptable weakness and so on and so forth. the world in character became a wasteland of terraformed kingdoms ruled by one evil overlord or another, while out of character it became a place of politics and rhetoric and votes about what rule will be implemented this time, what was fair and it was just stupid and draining, the roleplay slowly dying over years.

you'd think a bad roleplay like Gleemax wouldn't last years, wouldn't be full of so much toxicity and arguments if it lasted as long as it did...but somehow hateful passion fueled it. I remember my own character there, a 10,000 year old dragonfolk wizard inventor (I was like thirteen when I came up with that) dying like 18 times over the course of the roleplay, with me constantly reinventing his powers. nowadays he is more like magical doctor who.

the roleplay effected me to this day. I still roleplay freeform, but with more reasonable people. I still desire high-powered play and such, but without unreasonable defenses and weaknesses. I found my best online roleplaying friends from it, whom I roleplay with to this day. it showed me the great freedom of freeform....but also the darkest aspects of it. it was my first real roleplay. and even then I hated the optimization mindset, even when it was completely freeform. oh and, in case your wondering, my character was one of the less powerful characters on there. yeah your RPG has problems when you can honestly say that about a guy who might as well be a level 20 Wizard/Artificer Gestalt Dragon.

Thankfully it has died.

As for my first tabletop game in real life, I technically started it, but I didn't DM it. I play an elf rogue named Lelk. He became obsessed with having an electric dagger, did daring feats of courage, had no points in stealth and basically charged at everything, became completely egomaniacal about his Strategical Genius, composed songs like Oh My Paladin Buddy, Explosive Hallelujah, and something about a waterfall, and built a zeppelin in a medieval setting on two VERY LUCKY d100 rolls, which he dropped two bombs on purpose and the party's fighter on accident upon the enemy army, got insanely lucky roles, from walking up to a god and cheerfully saying "Hi! I'm LELK what is your name!?" and surviving because he got a ridiculously high roll, and like to jump over things. he was AWESOME!

unfortunately I can't remember how it exactly went down, but I do remember the general gist of the campaign....basically it was set on a world where gods all dwelt on the material plane and ruled like kings directly. his companions were an elf paladin, human fighter, a human or was it elf ranger, the elf paladin was his own brand of crazy awesome, the elf ranger was the only sane woman amid the parties antics. it was all a senior project for my high school kind of thing, supposed to give back to the community, so I arranged a program to play DnD at my high school's....something center. and the last I heard of it, people were thankful to me for starting it. so yeah, cool. Unfortunately the campaign was cut off after only a year of play for DM reasons that couldn't be helped.

so yeah....those are my two first campaigns of real roleplaying. one lasted far longer than it should've, and the other cutting off just as it was finding its pace. whaddya gonna do?

I think I remember that guy from a thread about funniest RP stories...

@SiuiS - Either!

Lord Raziere
2014-07-15, 03:07 PM
That's standard online freeform Roleplaying, yeah. In fact, I have never found a freeform Roleplay that didn't do this. Even people wanting to play games of freeform slice of life My little Pony sort of insisted on having exaltations, being mystically powerful gods, and being able to outperform established top tier magicians at a whim. It takes actual effort to learn what's important in a game, and distill that knowledge from all the chaff, to see through the competition.

It's like I said elsewhere, what makes a game work is intimacy, not power. All the powers in the world are wasted, all cosmic force and deific contortions fall away and pale beside something that means something to your character happening in a genuine fashion. Took me about twenty years to suss that out. I'm glad you got it early. :smallsmile:

yea well, when your constantly harassed by an shapeshifting evil jerk who can only be killed by a rare indestructible metal who makes all the wacky inventions and spells you come up with useless and constantly destroys your laboratory, you learn to appreciate the people that don't be constant jerks like that, and actually play out roleplays as they're supposed to.

honestly I kind've had to power up my character in response to all the insanity around me. the original conception of him was that he was just a catfolk inventor, maybe some kind of wizard on top of that, and people assumed he was a dragon because the avatar I had at the time of Niv-Mizzet. boy do I love Mt:G red/blue. I speaks to me so much. I tried correcting them, but they just kept referring to it as a dragon and eventually just went along with it just so I could have a chance of keeping up.

like I would say, conjure a sword made of icefire and attack them, and they'd be like "well my defense which I meticulously prepared well in advance to defend against a vast majority of all attacks you can conceive of, blocks that, then I counterattack" and I'd like take a hit because I honestly didn't think of any defense for what they dished out. battles were less about actually making anything interesting and more about seeing who could justify their defenses as defending against whatever attacked them better. it was the worst of DnD's "prepare for everything" wizard mindset and Exalted's "paranoia combat perfect defense" mindset combined into a desire to do nothing but powergame. and to this day, I'm not really interested in either one.

I just want to play y'know? I don't care if my character is not prepared or optimized, or is taking reckless actions that cause chaos and makes a great big mess of everything and screwing up everyone's plans. I'm having fun, that is what matters.

speaking of which, the elf paladin once stopped by his mothers home, you see? and is like supposed to be fixing it up for some reason, but comes across a dire rat of all things. what does he do? does he draw his sword and fight it? does he try handle animal to shoo it away? does he set a trap to kill it instantly and without fuss?

No.

He pulls out his wand of fireballs, and proceeds to blast the dire rat at point blank range, thus destroying half of his mothers house, injuring half the party and himself in the process and basically proving that he isn't fit to wield a wand of fireballs. but he did kill the dire rat though. lawful good he was, intelligent he was not, that paladin.

SiuiS
2014-07-16, 02:19 PM
yea well, when your constantly harassed by an shapeshifting evil jerk who can only be killed by a rare indestructible metal who makes all the wacky inventions and spells you come up with useless and constantly destroys your laboratory, you learn to appreciate the people that don't be constant jerks like that, and actually play out roleplays as they're supposed to.

honestly I kind've had to power up my character in response to all the insanity around me. the original conception of him was that he was just a catfolk inventor, maybe some kind of wizard on top of that, and people assumed he was a dragon because the avatar I had at the time of Niv-Mizzet. boy do I love Mt:G red/blue. I speaks to me so much. I tried correcting them, but they just kept referring to it as a dragon and eventually just went along with it just so I could have a chance of keeping up.

Aye. Nowadays, I just do the opposite and de-power. Or leave; it's not worth having bad experiences, anymore.

I feel for you though. I understand.


*



My first campaign, the first I ran that was a campaign, was actually an oriental adventures one. I went all out, and rewrote by hand everything the players needed. I told them the background for the game, what classes were available, what feats, what equipment, including minor homebrew. I had everything neatly prepared, I even had a small flowchart for how the campaign would work. I was excited, not just for the game but for the little touches of the story and the story telling. Things that I knew people in that scenario would be interested in, like a flowering plant that was succulent but hadn't been seen in generations. Everything worked out, everyone was impressed.

There were several in city social encounters, and some getting used to the system. We had onesamurai duel with wooden swords that ended in a massive one hit KO. We had some minor politickingn. We had characters establishing themselves and the world around them. Then, once the meetings were done, the adventure got underway.

It was an apocalyptic survival setting. The basic idea was of a distant, past catastrophe (a thick, silver mist) that brought with it monsters, but just generally killed anyone in it but for some reason left civil clusters like towns and cities alone (usually). People were trapped for centuries, and only now did the fog lift for days at a time, and the player's town had recieved a message from vassals a day or two away. The plot stuff was finally going down! I described the scenery as they went, creating that first hill, seeing for the first time in their lives the wild tall grass growing succulent, waving in the breeze.

It evoked an interesting dichotomy. One player, who chose to be a samurai and had no idea that nobility didn't work like petty European feudal nobility (ie every peasant was his slave), cut in. "Man, get to the good part, this is boring!". This was my first time DMing in years, really. My first large group. My first 3.0 game. My first time with these people. My first time in public. I was, quite understandably, rather embarrassed. Luckily, another player straightened up, furrowed his brow and turned, saying "shut up, this is the good part!", which saved my ego enough to continue!

The game died after a few sessions. We didn't get much farther, due to scheduling, conflicts, people losing their sheets. But I remember the game clear, and still have all the paperwork. I haven't been able to organize a campaign flowchart that clean again since. I should write it all up and run it again, now I'm older and wiser.

DigoDragon
2014-07-16, 03:05 PM
The first true campaign I partook in as a PC was based on a continuation of "Final Fantasy 6" using the GURPS system (I forget if it was 2e or 3e). The premise was that it was six years since the defeat of Kefka and the world was recovering well. However, some of Kefka's more devoted fanatics have stayed in the shadows, looking to make a comeback. The heroes reassembled to find the new leader of the fanatics and stop him before damage could be done. This led the party underground to the land of the dwarves, and eventually back to the Esper world.

We put some fun spins on playing the cast. Most of us were washed-up heroes that the world started to forget, some pining for the glory days while others just wanted to stay retired but couldn't for one reason or another. It was a lot of fun playing "has-been adventurers" :smallbiggrin:



The first campaign that I ran as a DM was an AD&D 2e set in a homebrew world. The PCs were inexperienced heroes that stumbled upon a green dragon's lair. Instead of vaporizing the PCs, the dragon gave them a quest to locate and recover a magic item that was stolen from him by a powerful lawful cleric. The PCs traveled around following the clues, learning that the chime was a 'key' to unlock an ancient ruin where a sealed evil lay sleeping. Eventually the PCs caught up with the cleric and defeated him before the evil could be released (the cleric wanted to slay it for glory, but the legend was revealed that whoever defeated it, gets possessed by it instead).

Darkpaladin109
2014-07-16, 06:05 PM
The first campaign I played in started a year or so ago. Specifically, it was a game of DnD 3,5, played over on Roll20, and I believe most of the players were rather new to it too. The GM was a first time GM as well.
But to the gist of it; I played a Half-Elven Rogue, who I just called Aerdalys the Nimble, which was somewhat fitting, as his dexterity was more or less the only stat I got good rolls on :P. The other two starting players were a Dwarven Warrior and a Human, I think, Sorcerer. Their names I can't quite recall at the moment. We started out in a basic swamp town, and Grumpy, the town's bartender told us that a woman came through the town before and said that goblins hiding in a nearby cave stole a necklace of hers. We went to the cave to find the treasure, and we faced various enemies, from a group of goblins, a troglodyte, to rats, whic Aerdalys hilariously failed to stab all the time. Anyways, we found the treasure room and the necklace, and decided to contine exploring the dungeon, eventually coming to a stop when we found a hallway patroled by a were rat. After debating it for at least half an hour, the group decided that we'll get some silver weapons and come back to kill the rat and continue exploring.
The GM gave us two choices then; We could go to the town's blacksmith and get silver from some mines so he could craft the weapons of choice for us, or a magician, who would instruct us to go to a old castle used as a base by lycanthrope hunters, but now abandoned, the magician wanting us to do this so we could bring some of the weapons to him so he could experiment on what effects silver would have on various types of creatures.
Naturally, we chose the magician. At this point, we were joined by our fourth member, a female dwarven warrior, played by someone who was close to the GM, I believe. Aerdalys also bought his essentially signature weapons from that point on, a longbow. Anyways, the castle was full of various types of undead, and at the end of it, we encountered a halfling necromancer, whom our new party member attacked and defeated on her first attack. He shielded himself with his spellbook and leaving his two undead minions to distract us while he fled.
After this, we took on the job of rescuing a noble's daughter or a princess or something (my memory is a bit foggy on the exact details) from a abandoned keep. Aerdalys ran out of arrows while we were fighting a group of kobolds, who nearly defeated us. We encountered more undead and near the end, the male dwarf and pretty much comedian of the group triggered a trap and got transported into a different part of the dungeon, though not very far from us.
Inside the final room, we found the necromancer from before, surrounded with a circle of his undead skeletons and the girl we were sent to rescue lying on some sort of table. Seeing the number of undead, we talked to the necromancer, and he explained that the girl came from a family distantly related to some demon, and he wanted to kill her or something and transform into a demon (again, my memory is a bit foggy about this, though I remember that he wanted to become a demon). We struck a deal with him, our sorcerer helping him in his ritual in exchange for him freeing the girl. At the climax of the ritual, the sorcerer attempted to headbutt and knock away the necromancer, presumably to use the ritual for his own ends, however he failed, and the necromancer knocked him away, transformed into a demon, and flew up through the roof, presumably going to ravage the countryside.
Sorry for going on about this too much. The GM specifically said that he prepared various endings for this scenario. Anyways, the game went on for a few more sessions that I could make summaries of, but that'd be way too long. It's a shame the game ended, really, but I still value it because it was my first game, and the group was pretty friendly. I still have most of them on Skype, in fact.

arcane_asp
2014-07-18, 08:51 AM
At the tender age of 10, I found a D&D 1E rulebook in a jumble sale for pennies. I bought it, liking the cover, then read it. It was a brand new concept for me, but I quickly got into it. There was enough rules in there for me to get started, and I made a very small dungeon for my brother and two friends. I began DM'ing my way there and then.

It was short, the die rolls went against them, and the dungeon I made had no way out. The traps were kinda lame, and very easy to predict (think dart traps, rolling boulder and anything else ripped from Raiders). They eventually hacked their way through a handful of orcs and got to the boss room, where I had placed a dragon thinking it would be a fun battle.

It killed everyone (they were all 1st level still!) We were all around 10 years old, and this quite upset everyone, to the extent physical violence, tears and insults were used.

To try and salvage the situation, I told them they were eaten by the dragon but regained consciousness in its stomach. Cue the greatest comeback in history as the three PC's hacked their way out of the inside of the dragon and into bloody legend.

That was my first experience - since then I've been a player many times, and a DM again several times. Learned a lot about basic rules, balance and group dynamics since then however :smallsmile:

Kid Jake
2014-07-19, 03:33 PM
My first campaign playing or dming, word for word:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y207/UnLegend/FirstTime_zps739e0a5e.png

The whole thing literally lasted as long as it takes to read it.

IllogicalBlox
2014-07-23, 02:34 PM
Were you the player or dm?

Inevitability
2014-07-24, 07:09 AM
My first campaign playing or dming, word for word:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y207/UnLegend/FirstTime_zps739e0a5e.png

The whole thing literally lasted as long as it takes to read it.

This is HILARIOUS. Thanks for sharing! :smallsmile:

Kid Jake
2014-07-24, 02:10 PM
Were you the player or dm?

I was the DM. We tried several other campaigns but the guy always found ways to get himself killed with almost no help from me or my NPCs. A decade later he plays Roger McCrow in my M&M campaign (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?322592-quot-Let-s-get-this-straight-YOU-RE-the-sidekick!-quot-A-Mutants-amp-Masterminds-Camp-Journal).



This is HILARIOUS. Thanks for sharing! :smallsmile:

Glad you enjoyed it. :smalltongue:

It seems like the majority of my most popular comics are just straight lifted from RL conversations.

inexorabletruth
2014-07-25, 10:13 AM
Highlight Points:

1/2 Orc escapes abusive tribe.
Wanders the earth naked as a baby, accidentally terrifying locals.
Finds a cow and kills it for food, drags it to a campsite he sees on the main path.
Scares the bajeezus out of a Gnome Bard, who befriends him and helps him make a suit out of the cow... complete with skull codpiece.
Goes to town, finds a dwarf getting picked on in a fight.
Goes bananas and punches the first thing he sees.
DM decides that's a barmaid.
Get swarmed by guards.
Wake up in jail next to the dwarf.



That was session 1... our meet-up.

The game went on to be one of the greatest and most memorable campaigns I have ever played. It ended at a funeral with an NPC who was actually kind of our first BBEG. The DM wasn't overly knowledgeable about the rules, but had an incredible talent for building rich, immersive worlds with colorful and unforgettable NPCs. I'd tell you more, because the story should be told, but I imagine this post would get way too long.

MystikalFrank
2014-07-25, 01:20 PM
I hardly remember anything about my first experience. There was 1 DM and about 7 or 8 players. 2nd Edition. I know I played a halfling assassin named Tweet Fiddlebender. We were in a forest and got attacked by gibberlings. A gibberling ate his hand. Then we stopped played because the DM was sick and we proceeded to build a firepit in the backyard and had s'mores. High School was redonkulous.

Dasgovernator
2014-07-25, 02:31 PM
My true first game was in high school, and I don't remember much about it other than that it fell apart after a few weeks and I stayed out of RPGs until after college.

The first game I played after getting back into D&D was completely insane. It was a Gestalt game where the DM allowed us to take a savage species class progression along with a regular class, so we had things like a 40 STR Half-Ogre Monk and a Nymph Sorceress, on top of ability scores that were all rolled d20+5, AND we each got a special "Boon" (for example, my Druid/Monk got much better animal companions for his level, which included a 9 HD cougar at level 2 and eventually a magically fast-aging Gold Dragon).

As for the story, it started out as a standard "Stop the invasion" style thing, eventually leading to a hilariously lucky crit where we incapacitated a goblin necromancer before she could teleport away, and using our amazing Diplomacy (Nymph Sorceress) we got her to flip sides and eventually establish a Goblin Free State in open revolt against their Frost Giant Masters. After that we eventually got thrown far into the future after entering a divine-touched area where time traveled thousands of times faster than usual, and eventually faced off against invading armies of clockwork horrors (including super ones with hundreds of hit points and at-will Mage's Disjunction, because we were killing the Adamantine ones too fast). We eventually began losing ground, so we had to build a spaceship to escape the planet, which we filled with oil stolen from a Mind Flayer underwater well after we "adjusted" the mind of the one in charge, and then had to blast off to the moon to enter the elemental plane of time and unlock the prison of the God of Time so he would help us fight the God of Insanity that was behind everything.

I left out the crazier parts of that story.

Yora
2014-07-25, 02:38 PM
I ran Sword of the Dales when I was 17, with five players of which two played a bard and another one a thief. I am quite sure we got a good deal into the second adventure and I believe even into the third. But not the slightest clue if we ever finished it.

SiuiS
2014-07-25, 09:54 PM
Highlight Points:

1/2 Orc escapes abusive tribe.
Wanders the earth naked as a baby, accidentally terrifying locals.
Finds a cow and kills it for food, drags it to a campsite he sees on the main path.
Scares the bajeezus out of a Gnome Bard, who befriends him and helps him make a suit out of the cow... complete with skull codpiece.
Goes to town, finds a dwarf getting picked on in a fight.
Goes bananas and punches the first thing he sees.
DM decides that's a barmaid.
Get swarmed by guards.
Wake up in jail next to the dwarf.



That was session 1... our meet-up.

The game went on to be one of the greatest and most memorable campaigns I have ever played. It ended at a funeral with an NPC who was actually kind of our first BBEG. The DM wasn't overly knowledgeable about the rules, but had an incredible talent for building rich, immersive worlds with colorful and unforgettable NPCs. I'd tell you more, because the story should be told, but I imagine this post would get way too long.

None of that! Share!

IllogicalBlox
2014-07-30, 02:22 PM
Anyone else?

Fumble Jack
2014-07-30, 03:14 PM
My very first game that I ran was a diablo 2 d&d. It was one of my first times running. It did not go well with the group I had at the time, which consisted of a number of people from an anime club. At best it was a module up to level 5 I think. It's been so long I don't remember and sadly due to some events since then I no longer have it anymore.
To sum up, we had a kill happy Paladin, granted it was a Diablo game so every monster felt like evil incarnate, so looking back I can't fault him there. A way too obsessed with the look of their armor, Amazon and a Necromancer, who for obvious reasons didn't see eye to eye with the Paladin. They boiled down to a PvP after defeating some evil porcupine looking thing. I'm sorry details are still kind of fuzzy but I just dropped it after that.

DawnQuixotic
2014-07-30, 03:18 PM
My first "campaign" is... rather embarrassing for me.

But I shall relate it to you.

I was fifteen, big fan of Baldur's Gate, got involved with some peeps on the Bioware forums and one of them started a D&D campaign. This was my first experience with actual D&D, particularly third edition. He sent me pdfs of the core and complete books, and I looked through them for character ideas.

My first character was a Warlock taking Acolyte of the Skin, the flavor being somewhat ripped off by Venom, in that he was a religious man believing his god was punishing him by placing a demon on him. Actually a pretty interesting character.

And then at SOME point during the character creation stage I decided that nahh, I didn't want to be a warlock, I wanted to be a ninja! That was raised by renegade duergar. Who escaped to the surface and were living as traveling circus performers.
We started and he later asked me about my background and said I'd have to change it, and I left the game in a huff ranting about how my characters were "too imaginative" for him.

Not my proudest moment.

rs2excelsior
2014-08-01, 02:45 AM
It started off as a one-off session, D&D 3.5E. Some friends convinced me to give it a go, so I made a LN Dwarf Fighter with PTSD--sole survivor of his army unit and all that. I built him as a tank. The only other melee combatant we had was a CE (yep, Chaotic Evil) ranger. There was also a warlock, a bard, and a druid. We're going into a dungeon to wipe out whatever was there (I think there were kobold attacks coming from it, and we were supposed to stop them). Starts off with me being somewhat ineffective in our first fight (before we went into the dungeon) and the druid wandering off alone at night into a forest where kobolds have been out hunting and almost getting eaten by a wolf. We fight through the dungeon and the ranger is getting constricted by a boa constrictor, so while I'm carefully trying to stab the thing in the head with my dagger the druid just swings indiscriminately, hitting both the (Chaotic Evil) ranger and the snake. We eventually kill it, though the ranger is mad that he got hit by a fellow party member.

A bit later (I think in that same room) we find an altar. It turns out to be an altar to Moradin, which when my character touches it gives me a battleaxe that deals +6 damage against evil creatures. What possessed him to give it to me, I have no idea. Still, it let me get a one-hit kill or two on some monsters. In the meantime, a troglodyte grappled our druid, so the ranger just swung at him (like the druid had) and killed the druid. Moving on from there, we get to the boss battle.

The ranger and I move up in the front line, the others in support. We didn't look up. There was a powerful Yuan-Ti spellcaster in the shadows on the roof. It hit our ranger, putting him down, and dropped down from the ceiling. I tried to protect the ranger's unconscious body (it was an area effect spell with a fort save I passed and he didn't), but before I could the Yuan-Ti kills our ranger while looking me dead in the eye.

At that point, the dwarf goes into badass mode. I'm hitting her pretty much every round, +6 damage every time, while the rest of the party chucked spells/arrows at it. I think I did about half the damage that finally brought her down.

After that, the person playing the warlock convinced me to bring my character into his campaign, where he's gotten some more development (and lost the axe, though he got one that was both Keen and Thundering). By now we've converted to Pathfinder and he's a level 10 Fighter/4 Cleric gestalt in a party of gestalts who will eventually hit epic level and kill gods. So Bjarne has some big things ahead of him still :smallbiggrin:

IllogicalBlox
2014-08-03, 02:45 PM
The second part of my first campaign has taken place! It ended half-way through an encounter. The warden was been replaced by a Goliath Barbarian, as my brother preferred a barbarian. He's quite dumb (he was a scholar, but was attacked by Mind Flayers, and lost his intelligence.)

Now, we found a town a little way away (aparrently it was having real trouble with undead.) We had to surrender our weaponry, but my Gnome Rogue didn't want to give up his hand crossbow. He rolled bluff. Natural 20, plus his 10 Bluff bonus. 30. On a regular city guard. He then turned to the Dragonborn Fighter, and asked. Well, he had a +2 Bluff bonus, so I wasn't too worried. HE. GOT. A. NATURAL. FOUR.

The barbarian refused to leave his greataxe, so the rest of us were escorted to the Friar of Pelor who was the Duke of the town's right hand man. Some of his plants were definitely useful, but the barbarian was, ironically, the only one trained in Nature. My Dwarven Warlord made a Religion check to figure out what religion he was, and got a terrible roll. He... sigh... thought that he worshiped Vecna and nearly attacked.

We were given four options: find a magic well, clear out a mine, send out help feelers to a Elven king or escape the valley to talk to the king of the land. We chose to assault the mine in secret, by getting across a canyon. We set off, and ran into a necromancer (death guard) and a skeleton minion. We all went first with our huge intitiative.

We blasted him with Dragon Breath (our only burst/blast attack; we have no controller (and we failed to hit the minion)), and moved the fighter and barbarian close, while the rogue and warlord hung back. I thought that we should use his Stone's Endurance, but we didn't. Both of these were very bad ideas.

On his turn, the Death Guard revealed his master plan; SIX skeleton minions appeared out the undergrowth and attacked. They severely damaged the barbarian and slightly damaged my warlord. They did 3 damage, so the barbarian would not be in so much of a pickle if he had had resist 5 from Stone's Endurance.

Then 2 evil clerics of some kind appeared, and used the curse from the first battle on the barbarian (the one that prevents healing surges being spent.) The barbarian is now at FOUR hp, having not even hit once. Its not looking good at the moment.

Velaryon
2014-08-04, 05:57 PM
If I were to get technical, the first game I ever had was Vampire: the Masquerade:

I used to buy InQuest magazines now and then when I was in high school because of the Magic: the Gathering price guides in the back. Also I was foolish enough to believe the people who wrote the articles and rated the cards actually understood the game. But anyway, one issue came with a little booklet insert that had some extremely abbreviated rules for Vampire: the Masquerade. It wasn't the real rules - you used d6's instead of d10's, and it really only explained the seven Camarilla clans. But at age 13 or 14 I thought vampires were super cool, so I talked a friend into trying with me anyway.

Since it was just the two of us we made two characters each, I'm not sure what they were except that one of mine was a Tremere. We turned off the lights and played by candlelight, and the whole session mostly consisted of our characters roaming some sewers and beating the snot out of a bunch of Nosferatu thugs. I think we had fun, but apparently not enough to try it again. I ended up buying the full rulebook but never played it.

That hardly counts though, so here's the first real game I played in:

A week or two after I started college, I got invited to join a 3.0 D&D game. This seemed the height of cool to me so I enthusiastically signed up. Plus the one friend I'd made so far was also joining. We were the only two players new to the hobby - the others were all AD&D players giving the new edition a try (maybe one or two of them had a little bit of 3e experience, but not much.

The first night, they brought us to the game not having made our characters yet, and the players graciously took the time to help my friend and I make characters. I was advised that I could play whatever I want, but spellcasters might be too complicated to learn the game with, so I decided to be a half-elf Fighter. My friend was a dwarf Monk. The rest of the party was a half-orc barbarian, a halfling rogue, and a human multiclass ranger/druid. I was given no explanation of the rules beforehand, and asked to develop my character concept first and fill in the rules from there. I favored an agile, swashbuckler-type character instead of a big armored brute (especially since we already had one of those), so I ended up with a rapier and the Spring Attack feat chain. We were level 3 so I had a couple other feats that I don't remember. I also had a halberd for another combat option.

The DM didn't like to give characters normal WBL, but instead to give each character one really awesome item or trait or whatever. Like, truly crazy stuff. The barbarian was a werebear, for example, even though he was the same level as the rest of us (level 3, remember). My item was a Ring of Regeneration, which worked like normal until the first time I got incapacitated in combat. Then all of a sudden it provided regeneration 5, with fire and acid inflicting normal damage. I'm fairly certain the change is because the DM hadn't read the item's description in the DMG and realized how mediocre and overpriced it is.

In spite of my character being terribly outclassed by pretty much everyone in the party, I had fun. The barbarian's player quickly tired of the character after a few sessions and had him randomly drown in the first river we crossed before rolling up a human cleric.

The next day I wrote up a background for my character, and then after I read up on the Forgotten Realms a little bit I fit my background into that. I decided he was the offspring of a minor Cormyrian noble, who had received most of his weapon training from his father's guardsmen. He had left home after a disagreement with his father, which saved his life because that night his entire family was murdered. My character was blamed for the murders, so he fled west to the Silver Marches and lived under an assumed name. Pretty good plot hook for a total newbie player, right? Unfortunately, the DM never did a damn thing with this backstory. The rest of the party never learned that I wasn't traveling under my real name, I never learned the true identity of my family's killers, and the authorities never caught up with me. Complete waste of a pretty good background.

Here's what actually happened: we started in Longsaddle and traveled to Nesme because we had heard there were monsters to fight and money to be made there. Along the way, our party heard some noises while we were camping and the entire party was roused to investigate it. This happened while I was in the bathroom, but they decided my character had gone with even though I wasn't there to say so. When we were a couple hundred feet from the campsite, the campfire was extinguished and when we got back our horses were gone (again, I had not been present to say that I went along or that I left my horse behind). It turned out to be the first of several encounters with an ogre mage who was using a special homebrew longbow, which made his arrows disappear when he fired them, and the damage they caused would be inflicted in the form of random "bad luck" events happening, such as falling branches landing on you, or twisting your ankle, or something like that. Our only hint that the incidents were not mundane is that the target would get a strong whiff of roses as the event happened to him. We eventually caught the ogre mage, killed him, and gave his bow to the rogue... who failed out of school that semester and didn't come back.

We made it to Nesme and ended up helping to defend the town against a horde of monsters (including lots of trolls). Somewhere in here the dwarf Monk character was dropped and his player was instead a fire genasi half-fire elemental evoker, aiming for Elemental Savant (go ahead, try to guess which element). The ranger/druid left the campaign for reasons I don't remember anymore - he might have graduated but I'm not sure. So eventually the party was down to my fighter, the wizard, and the cleric.

The monsters eventually overran Nesme, so we helped to escort the survivors toward Silverymoon and acted as a rear guard. We were attacked from behind as we were fording a river, and we held the monsters back long enough for the civilians to get away, but our own boat washed downriver into a forest. We washed ashore and started to make camp, but we had the feeling we were being watched so the wizard cast a rope trick spell. I was the last one to climb the rope, and as I was climbing it a weretiger pounced from the shadows, knocked me off the rope, and hit me with all five attacks (bite, 2 claws, 2 rakes), and also pinned me.

As the weretiger's lycanthrope buddies came out to join him, they called up to the rope trick that they would kill me if the others didn't come down so they did. The weretiger tore me to shreds anyway, although I was stupid enough to sit back up when my regeneration brought me back to positive HP and got captured. All our gear was confiscated, but the cleric refused to hand over his holy symbol so he was murdered on the spot (we found his new character already imprisoned when we got to the lycanthropes' lair.

It turned out they were going to hunt us for sport - I was the first one set free to run away. Fortunately I still had my ring because it had some sort of magical ability to hide itself (whatever), and I didn't know this but I had failed the save vs. infection when the weretiger bit me. While I was hiding in the woods preparing to make a stand, I changed into a tiger and ended up taking down the one who had infected me. I then made it back to the lair and rescued the others somehow, and we continued on.

Eventually we were captured by some cold-based sorceress who was supposed to be a nemesis for the wizard, and the campaign ended because the DM's classes got too hard for him to have any time to DM. Overall it was a fun game but I had some problems with it - the DM and rules lawyer (cleric player) both got a lot of rules wrong because they were used to 2e, and had a few arbitrary house rules as well. Also my character was pretty terrible and that bothered me, but I was attached enough that I didn't just change him out. I do wish my backstory had come into play at some point, though.

If I get a chance later, I'll also write about my first campaign as a DM, the summer after this game.

IllogicalBlox
2014-08-10, 05:55 PM
We've managed to defeat the Death Guard and his minions, but the evil clerics (actually student necromancers) only just got away. The Rageblood Barbarian used his charging to great effect, charging skeleton after skeleton.

We got 4 healing potions, 100 gp and 2 daggers. We've knocked the Death Guard unconscious, and will be interrogating him.

IllogicalBlox
2014-08-23, 05:17 PM
Anyone else?

Silus
2014-08-23, 06:07 PM
*Sigh* Well while my officially first campaign went well (It was a sort of horror mashup of 1408 and the Cthulhu mythos), the first game I ran with my current group was...bad. Really bad. Like they still bring up stuff that happened in it (Much to my great annoyance).

The plot (The heavily abridged version): The world's been cut off from the rest of reality for about 1000 years now, the gods are either dead or retired, and it's generally not your traditional fantasy setting. Anyway, something eventually broke through the...whatever it was that removed the world from reality and is trying to shunt it back for their own purposes (A Denizen of Leng staking slaving rights). The objective is to try to stop the world from popping back over to proper reality.

What went wrong: Oh God where to begin?

1) The party went more or less all evil or morally corrupt when I had tried to make the campaign for good/neutral characters.
2) The PCs continued to ask a bunch of questions about the setting that I didn't have answers to, then more or less berate me for not having answers.
3) Adamantine doors (It was a good idea at the time)
4) Chemical weapons that I tended to forget the stats for (Hammered out now, but the players still complain about it)
5) Crashed space ships made of a material that Adamantine can't hack through ("Bulls***ium" as the players call it)
6) Allowing the PCs to pick up templates.
7) Skippy Rotten, a PC's backup character. A coked out Quickling speed metal bard that had a habit of crapping in people's shoes.

I have since learned from my mistakes (and fleshed out the world by ~300-400%), but I reserve the right to throw (or shoot via slingshot) things at the PCs if they continue to bring up that campaign when I run again.

Thrudd
2014-08-23, 06:29 PM
At the age of 10, I discovered a Basic D&D box set that my parents owned but had never got around to playing (I now know this was the '79 Holmes edition). I taught myself and my friends how to play (I think our main group was five people, me and four friends). We started with the included module B2, Keep on the Borderlands. After they were done with the Caves of Chaos, they kept going down the road off the map, and the campaign really began. My world grew gradually, I drew new maps, created dungeons. We got 1e AD&D books from yard sales and older relatives.

It was a continuous, open ended game that really had no overarching story, just a bunch of adventurers traveling about looking for quests and treasure. The game probably lasted three or four years, and in that time the players started new characters a few times, once when we got AD&D and wanted to upgrade, and a couple more times either due to death or just because they wanted to try something new.

Later on, after I had read a lot more epic fantasy like Shannara and Dragonlance Chronicles, I tried to shift the game to have more of a story, putting more thought into my setting's history and politics. But by this point most of this group was losing interest, we were splitting up and going to different schools, and our D&D games petered out. I started over with a new group when I got to high school, and redesigned my world in a more logical and cohesive manner.

This was 24 or so years ago.

troqdor1316
2014-08-25, 03:54 AM
First time I ever played a PnPRPG, I was a level 1 NE Half-elf Sorceror. The party found me taken prisoner in a gnoll-infested mine, released me from my bindings, then promptly decided to shove me in a barrel, set the barrel on fire, and roll me down the hill towards some gnolls.

The DM later allowed me to use a Ray of Frost cantrip to counter a Fireball cast by a gnoll shaman, which resulted in the Fireball exploding into a huge ice wall filling the cavern. No memories of what happened next, but looking back on it, I have no idea why we came up against something that could cast Fireball at level 1. That seems harsh and unnecessary