In all my 22 years of gaming...

[diaglo]

...characters were almost wiped out by a conspiracy of ravens.

i prefer a murder of crows myself.

 

[JoeBlank]

My first time GMing 3rd edition (and the first time our group played it), I killed a PC...For some reason in all the previous editions, Ghouls never posed such a dangerous threat to a party of 6 1st level characters before.
Well that night they sure did...Then I decided to start learning the Challenge Rating System.

We learned the same thing thanks to ghouls on our second adventure in 3.0. The characters were 2d level, but a ghoul and 3' of water do not go well together, as paralyzed PCs tend to drown. TPK. Lost my gnome bard, my first 3.0 character.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I remember when we first started 3.0, another guy was GMing some adventure and we lost two characters to Giant Catfish. We still bug them about that. I remember one of them was a half-orc monk and the player was very happy with it. "Yeah man, I'm not a standard monk!" But he sure tasted standard!

 

[Yalius]

I once DM'd a party of 7 characters that encountered a TPK in the first encounter of the campaign. They were absolutely slaughtered by a pack of 6 kobolds. It wasn't even close. 5 kobolds survived. The mage in the party decided to, instead of actually, you know, CASTING A SPELL (he had sleep prepared), shout at the kobolds "Surrender or die! This is your last chance!" A javelin in the belly killed him in one shot, the rest of the party (2 fighters, 2 clerics, a ranger, and a thief) went down so hard and so fast it was like watching a cult commit ritual suicide. I'd never seen such a combination of 1's, 2's and 3's rolled by the party followed by 20's by the kobolds. And I couldn't fudge anything since we always rolled in the open.

Has anyone else ever managed a TPK on the first wandering monster encounter of an entire campaign?

 

[francisca]

...I have never seen what I did tonight.

And the law of averages rears it's ugly head. ...

 

[ForceUser]

...I have never seen what I did tonight.

I have never seen PC die--I don't mean "drop below 0 hp," I mean honest to goodness dead, no coming back--in the first game of a new campaign.

Not that there was a lot the rest of us could do, since he left us behind and went off on his own, but still. It was surreal, to say the least.

Two years ago I had a guy die in the first round of the first combat of the first game of a new campaign.

 

[A'koss]

Never had a TPK in the first encounter of a new campaign... but I've come close. I seem to recall a group blundering into the wrong cave in Keep on the Borderlands and nearly getting slaughtered. That said, losing a character on the first encounter is quite rare indeed. We did lose a Paladin to a random poisonous snake in DL1 once... on the first random encounter at 1st level. Someone was not a happy camper.

 

[JimAde]

A friend of mine and I played halfling thieves (1st edition) very briefly. We were eaten by a giant frog first day out. First encounter, first round of combat, I got swallowed. He followed soon thereafter.

*sigh*

 

[Henry]

In my VERY first game of DM'ing 3rd edition, I had an almost TOTAL party kill; in the end, the halfling sorcerer in the party escaped by narrowly dodging THREE attacks of opportunity and running out of the crypt full of ghouls.

It was a combination of me underestimating ghouls and zombies (glad to see I wasn't the only one), and the players not being familiar with the rules (the sorcerer's most combative spell was I think true strike).

The halfling sorcerer hired a new party of adventurers, they came back to the tomb, and actually fought the undead characters that were killed the first time.

 

[Mouseferatu]

wow Ari,

you need to get out more.

as a player and a referee i have seen it many times. in all the editions of the game.

of course, that doesn't even include convention play.

Well, I've certainly seen (and in a few cases, caused or suffered) more than enough PC deaths in later games of various campaigns to make up for it...