In all my 22 years of gaming...

[Kalendraf]

I know I killed a number of 1st level 1e characters back when I was a much younger DM, but those weren't what I would call serious games either.

Since then, I don't remember killing any PCs on the very first night of play, but that's probably because the first session is usually half spent creating characters, introducing them to each other and setting up the first adventure thru roleplay. So any combat at all in the very first session of a new campaign is somewhat uncommon for me. My campaigns tend to last several years, though.

I do recall killing a 1st level PC at the 2nd session of a 2e game. It was an elf fighter who had the misfortune of being on the wrong end of some good DM rolls for the enemy (bandits, I think). He'd put such an incredible amount of work into his backstory that I wound up coming up with an excuse to get him brought back from the dead. Though looking back at it now, it would have probably been better to just let him remain dead.

In the first 3e campaign I ran, I nearly wiped out a 2nd level party with 3 ghouls. They were short a player that night (so 4 instead of 5), but what made it really bad was it was their cleric! As they began to explore the ruined half-buried building that served as the ghouls' lair, they didn't make their spot checks either and they pretty much wandered into an ambush. After just the 1st round of combat, 2 of the characters were paralyzed, and before the end of the battle, another character got paralyzed as well. The last PC that survived, barely did so, but he was able to deal enough damage to defeat the last ghoul. It was my first time running ghouls in 3e, and I was still kind of new to the whole EL/CR thingy. On the bright side, it was a very memorable encounter, and they really started to fear undead in 3e after that.

 

[Rystil Arden]

If we're talking about particular players and characters who always wind up dead now, there's this one guy in my campaign who has died in every majour battle of the campaign. Now granted, he's never been defeated by his enemies. And that's a good thing, because as an azer, he is banished from the Material Plane for 100 years every time he gets defeated unless his vanquisher grants him the right to return. The most amusing series of deaths occurred when we began a series of eight encounters with powerful homebrewed monster guardians that each had to be fought in areas where their was an artifact lending power to their associated element. In the first fight, they fought a water sorceress in a giant spherical room which had walls completely covered in water and knee-deep water on the floors. Anyone familiar with some E&M will be able to recognise such a setup as a Gaussian sphere, which is a hollow conducting sphere wherein any point charge created inside the sphere propoagates equally to fill out the entire sphere. So yeah, the party's nymph archmage cast a lightning-substituted twinned-empowered meteor swarm, and the azer went boom (he went boom because he dies so much that he took the Explosive Death feat). The next Guardian could animate humanoid statues as stone golems, which was convenient because it also could turn people into stone. Wouldn't you know it, the archmage failed her Fort save and her golem killed the azer on a critical hit. The third battle was with a Chaos Phoenix. Noticing the fiery aspect of the Phoenix, the archmage, who won Initiative this time, let loose with some kind of absurdly metamagiced Polar Ray, at which point I said, "Hold on, he has an Entropic Warding up, so there's a 20% chance that the Ray is going to redirect and strike back in a random direction. At this point, the azer's player said "OK, bye. I'm dead." I tried to convince him that the chances of the Entropic Warding misdirecting the attack, combined with shooting in the right direction to hit him, combined with rolling the attack roll against his touch AC, combined with his 50% miss chance Cloak of Displacement were very low, but he insisted that he was dead. The archmage rolled, and sure enough, she killed the azer. And then the next guardian was only defeated thanks to the azer taking a full-round action to Coup de Grace himself, taking out its central eye with his explosive death (it had already killed everyone else but the Frenzied Berserker, who happily finished it once his magic started working again and then died from wounds once his frenzy ended, so the azer plane-shifted back to rez them). Crazy stuff.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Back in 2nd Ed a friend of mine killed two of his characters in the first session of the campaign. Both of them were Wild Mages and both times it was the first spell he cast--Nahal's Reckless Dweomer. What a wonderful spell. If I recall correctly one death was a falling anvil from the sky and the other was a spell reversal.

I've gotta get me an anvil.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Back in 2nd Ed a friend of mine killed two of his characters in the first session of the campaign. Both of them were Wild Mages and both times it was the first spell he cast--Nahal's Reckless Dweomer. What a wonderful spell. If I recall correctly one death was a falling anvil from the sky and the other was a spell reversal.

I've gotta get me an anvil.

My campaign once also had two characters who were effectively wild mages who did strange things to the party, originally arcanists from the past, magic had changed to the point in the present where wizards had to memorise their spells (as normal). Highly arrogant (in character), the wizards utterly refused to memorise their spells, using their previous methods of casting despite the fact that the current Weave was different and didn't work with them properly...so every spell they cast was a Nahal's Reckless Dweamour. One fight ended with one of the PCs and the enemy male guard captain who had been polymorphed into an ice mephit and turned female being encircled in a blazing circle of flames that melted the ice on which the characters were standing, killing the PC from hypothermia-induced unconsciousness before anyone could pull him out. The NPC, now an ice mephit, survived.

 

[Jesus_marley]

I remember one campaign where I killed off the PC of a new player in the group. We were doing a standard dungeon crawl and she was playing a wizard. the only problem was that she had a habit of running ahead of the party and "snooping" for things like traps and secret doors. I tried to warn her, I suggested she play a thief instead, I reminded her that she had the fewest HPs of the group and the front lines were not a good place. She insisted. So when she triggered the encounter with the giant slug, she got to see what frontline combat was like...for the full round it took to get dissolved by its acid spit attack.... I say this completely guilt free. She was warned.

 

[domino]

...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.

That's almost as bad as asking for it by walking off into the creepy woods, in a CoC game, after saying "I'll be right back." Also during the first session.

Yeah, he died too.

 

[National Acrobat]

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.

The first third-edition game I was ever in, half the party was killed in the first battle. Three out of six. Problem was, a few players decided to charge some orcs that had bows and the wonderful Point Blank Shot feat. When they were cut down, the remaining four of us were faced with an equal amount of orcs, armed with the greataxe for 1d12+3 points of damage. Another got killed before we could flee.

We decided that charging people with Archery Feats was a bad idea.

 

[Von Ether]

This was an almost annoying habit for my games for a couple of years, but it wasn't my monster or misunderstanding a game system (I like variety). It was because I'd run games at a local game store and I'd invariablely get a couple of players who hated each others guts and used the game as another form of one-upsmanship or PC revenge ... for things that happened in real life or other games with other PCs. That was my first step into temporary GM retirement.

 

[Voadam]

I think we had three TPKs the first night we played paranoia. I don't hink we made it past going to R&D to get outfitted.