My First Encounter...

[Vrythas]

Hey everyone,

To start off, i would like to dedicate this thread to the first encounter of mine, and anyone's experience in D&D. anyways, i started playing D&D about a month ago, and as i look back at all the things that have happened since the first encounter, i realize that a whole lot of things have gone horribly wrong. And it all started with our first encounter. Now, most of the people in the party have never played before, or only VERY briefly (as in they bought the D&D minis kit but never really used it), and for our DM it's his first time being in charge of things. The adventure we started with was Kobold Hall. due to time restrictions, as well as people not knowing what to do, we simply started at Kobold hall, assuming that we had already talked to the mayor of the town and everything. So we move into the first room, and we see the pit of sludge and the group of kobolds. so our fighter - who started in the front, rushes out around the sludge pit to engage the kobolds, while we move up as well, only to be halted by a couple of kobolds in front of the sludge pit. then out of a hall on the other side of the room come two kobolds who decide to go tag-team our fighter, who is all alone on the other side of a 20x60 foot sludge pit. oh, and before they get there, the two kobolds sling a pot of immobilizing goo and freeze our fighter. This left my character (an invoker) and our paladin, to guard our cleric, rogue, and wizard. eventually our fighter ALMOST dies, i scare off the kobolds attacking him with my daily power (summon angel of fire), and we end of pushing two kobolds into the sludge pit and having our wizard use mage hand to drop rocks on them. (our wizard REALLY likes mage hand). so yeah, that was my first encounter, but now that i think about it, it deffinitely wasn't our worst encounter - in one our paladin was drained from almost full health to -1 health in one round).

so yeah, feel free to share your first encounter and/or favorite encounter from D&D - any edition.

EDIT: I realized there was not point in hiding the FIRST ENCOUNTER of an adventure...

[BillyBobJoe]

Aah, my first encounter. I remember it fondly.

We were hunting a goblin raiding party, and I was the only frontliner for our group. We eventually came across about 8 goblins, and me, being the only one able to take hits (our team was a rogue, a sorcerer, and me, a fighter) ran up to them to draw their attention. They surrounded me, but all missed. Power Attacking for full, I hit one, criticaled, confirmed, and chopped its head off. Did I mention I have Great Cleave? Anyways, I swung at the next on and... criticaled. Again. And so I kept on going, critting 4 of them, and hitting the rest normally, killing them all in one round. And I did this at level 1. This is still my crowning moment of awesome. Of course, it was made much less awesome by the fact that we were supposed to take them back alive.

[Vrythas]

Aah, my first encounter. I remember it fondly.

We were hunting a goblin raiding party, and I was the only frontliner for our group. We eventually came across about 8 goblins, and me, being the only one able to take hits (our team was a rogue, a sorcerer, and me, a fighter) ran up to them to draw their attention. They surrounded me, but all missed. Power Attacking for full, I hit one, criticaled, confirmed, and chopped its head off. Did I mention I have Great Cleave? Anyways, I swung at the next on and... criticaled. Again. And so I kept on going, critting 4 of them, and hitting the rest normally, killing them all in one round. And I did this at level 1. This is still my crowning moment of awesome. Of course, it was made much less awesome by the fact that we were supposed to take them back alive.

jeez, i i've only ever gotten one crit... although i do have to mention that our party - while first level (we still are) - ran into a bunch of kobolds and a drake, the drake we were able to make fall asleep, and we each took turns trying to coup-de-grace him. after about 4 he finally died .

[Combat Reflexes]

My first encounter: my lvl 1 sorcerer tries to con a farmer and gets a club crit to the head, instantly dropping him to -9, upon which the peasant immediately apologizes, and stabilizes my character with his own healer's kit.

The plucky peasant was promptly nicknamed 'Farmer' (after the movie "In the name of the king") and offered a place in the party as a cohort.

And he critted happily ever after.

[Vrythas]

My first encounter: my lvl 1 sorcerer tries to con a farmer and gets a club crit to the head, instantly dropping him to -9, upon which the peasant immediately apologizes, and stabilizes my character with his own healer's kit.

The plucky peasant was promptly nicknamed 'Farmer' (after the movie "In the name of the king") and offered a place in the party as a cohort.

And he critted happily ever after.

what are the odds.... i guess 1/20 . and if i understand correctly, an NPC became a PC... who took him on as their character? or was he a DM controlled guy?

[Combat Reflexes]

what are the odds.... i guess 1/20 . and if i understand correctly, an NPC became a PC... who took him on as their character? or was he a DM controlled guy?

The chance to roll one 20 is indeed 1/20, but this guy rolled a threat, confirmed it, and manages to knock me to exactly -9. That, and he made the Heal check to stabilize (which is in itself quite an accomplishment to a 1st-level commoner)

'Farmer' was an NPC controlled by the DM. I can't recall what happened to him, though. I believe he was eaten by a griffon or something.

[Jude_H]

My Fighter was on watch. Things were moving in the big rocks outside of camp.
He investigated.
Boulder people carried him away.

[Pink]

My first encounter... Changing a baby giant's diaper. No, really. There was a 3.5 living greyhawk module where the party is taking care of a baby giant after rescuing it from the circus. Fun times. My character turned into it's stuffed animal so that it would finally get to sleep.

[Qwertystop]

I remember my first like it was yesterday...
Then again, it was.

The Party:
Lizardfolk Paladin
Changeling Rogue
Some sort of soulknife variant that can only create daggers, and can trhow them
Me, a heavily nerfed Nimblewright.
Some TWF something

We are level 1.

We go into a tunnel, and see a spider the size of a cat. Goes down quickly. We then find a corpse, somewhat acid-melted, at a fork in the tunnel. We go down the tunnel and see two Medium "Chitinous Humanoids", plus a Large one, "the brute" from now on. We kill the first one quickly, and the other one spits acid at us. The brute screams and stuns the paladin and rogue for a round. The paladin and soulknife bring the acid-spitter to negatives, and the rogue stabilizes it, while I Alter Self into a Hill Giant and grapple the brute. We take turns trying and failing to hit each other, and the others end up hitting me more than him. This is interrupted for a moment as the dead spider zombifies and attacks the soulknife (who was in the back) . He kills it and it explodes, 1 damage to him. By now friendly fire has brought me to 8 health out of my original 30, so I change back to normal and back up. Someone does 2 damage to it, first time its been hurt so far. It screams and stuns the party again, then falls unconscious, landing on the rogue and knocking him unconscious as well. Another lucky Heal check and the rogue is stable. As we begin to drag them out, this exchange occurs:
Paladin: I didn't actually see them spit acid, so I didn't know to tie their mouths shut.
Me: "<Paladin>, they spit acid!"
Pladin: I tie their mouths shut.
<everyone laughs for a bit at this>
As we drag the bodies and unconscious ones out, the dead ones vaporize. We get to the town, and get 500 XP, 3 CLW potions each (Repair Light Damage oils for me), and I spend 50 of my starting 10 gold on getting 10 of my health repaired. I bought no equipment since I have 2 build in rapiers, a high dexterity, and 5 natural armor, plus Alter Self if I need more natural armor.

Right before the combat, incidentally, the Rogue changes into one of the chitinous humanoids and tries to reason with them. This pretty much means he makes random clicking noises. The first time, they just listen dumbfounded at the lunatic ramblings. The second time, he insulted their mothers.

Cant wait for my second session.

[MlleRouge]

Oh, I haven't thought of this in ages!

My first game was a 3.5 game with a DM who was both very story oriented (and tended to make the story up as he went) and who liked to modify the actual rules at random. Most of the players were either brand new or hadn't played in years. So needless to say, no one had any idea what they were doing. The entire game was a total screwfest.

After about 4 hours of uneventful RP, we finally started on our expedition. It was a FR game, something about some crazy wizard trying to unite all of the drow. I hardly remember.

Well, the moment we set foot underground, a demon attacked us. A glabrezu, and I recall. I was playing a druid, and happened to go last in initiative order.

So while the others (paladin, ranger, scout, and rogue) took their actions, I stared at my intimidating spell list and tried to decide what to do. Hmm, lightning sounds good.

So on my turn, I announce that I'm going to cast 'call lightning'. When I start to roll my dice, the DM narrows his eyes at me and announces that I'm not rolling near enough. He recalled that in 3.0, call lightning did 1d6 per level (disclaimer: I do not know if this is true or not, I've never bothered to check). I pointed at the description in the book and he just shook his head and took it from me.

I was confused, of course. But I went with it. Because the 'new rules for call lightning are retarded', I wound up rolling my call lightning as if it were a lighting bolt. I was 10th level and rolled nearly max damage, so I finished off the demon quite handily. It never even got to attack.

Most of the encounters in that game went that way. It was a memorable first monster, though.

[Elyssian]

Our first party:
Elf Ranger
Elf Rogue
Human Fighter
Human Mage

It was not long after our band of adventures had introduced themselves at the tavern we decided to familiarize ourselves with the city we were in when a halfling steals my rangers coin purse! At this time it had all of my characters wealth(20gp). So of course we don't stand by and let this guy get away we give chase into what turns out to be the 'other' side of town where we finally track him down. So after a short fight we loot the body and move on only to find out a little to late that we killed a high ranking member of the local theives guild and were no longer welcome anywhere in the city...
Needless to say we learned to not just kill anyone who offended us(untill we got higher lvls then anyone was fair game).

[dsmiles]

My first encounter...

Level 1 Half-Elven Ranger (Cliched, I know, but at the time, Ranger was one of the few classes that Half-Elves had unlimited progression in.)

Sitting at the campfire, I was attacked by a pack of ravening wolves. I fought valiantly, and slew four of the blighters before being able to grab a burning branch from the fire and drive off the rest.

Ah...those were the days...good times...good times.

[Yukitsu]

First character I really recall was a magical school girl warlock in an evil campaign. Her first encounter was against one of the other party members, a Drow Drizzt clone and a fire elemental. I diplomanced the fire elemental which knocked out the Drizzt clone. I then tossed him over the side of the map into a pit of magma, and denied I knew what happened to him when the rest of the party caught up.

Drizzt clone and I were fighting because the player had a bad habit of using other character's as a tool to smash open doors. That and evil campaign.

[Vrythas]

these are some great stories... i guess it would be suitable to expand this thread to memorable encounters as well - because i have a pretty funny encounter. we walked into a room that was square, with a smaller square room in it formed by a 10 foot high wall. so we walk in and a stone starts rolling around the smaller room - wide enough to almost completely block the routes around the mini-room as it rolls around. so one round it rolls farther than we had counted on, and stops rolling on top of our cleric - who takes double damage from the boulder.... that was interesting .

[BillyBobJoe]

Most memorable encounter?

6 Tarrasques.

Yes, 6 Tarrasques. This is all I will say

God I miss adventuring with that group.

[SilverLeaf167]

As a PC: I was a Paladin 1 and my friend was Ranger 1. We were ambushed by two goblins in the dark. We almost died, but managed to kill the goblins.

As a DM: The PCs were confronted by two tritons who insisted that they should leave their underwater cavern immediately. The PCs disagreed. Quite an easy fight, actually, but I was being sort of careful in my first session.

[dsmiles]

Most memorable encounter?

6 Tarrasques.

Yes, 6 Tarrasques. This is all I will say

God I miss adventuring with that group.

wait...tarrasque...

...unique...

...

...

*head asplode*

As a DM: The PCs were confronted by two tritons who insisted that they should leave their underwater cavern immediately. The PCs disagreed. Quite an easy fight, actually, but I was being sort of careful in my first session.

Is it bad that this is how I read that one:

As a DM: The PCs were confronted by two tritons who insisted that they should leave their underwear immediately.

[CodeRed]

3.5 Paladin and my first try ever at D&D. Our party met a pack of Stirges who promptly dropped me to 1 CON in a few rounds. Those blighters are freaking mean for a CR 1/2 each.