What monster killed your first PC?

[radferth]

1st character death: unnamed 1st level fighter dies in his first round of combat with a displacer beast (1st ed.)

1st player kill as DM: killed party magic-user in the opening hallway of G3, Hall of the Fire Giant King. Mostly thrown boulders from some fire giants, but the ettin may have helped.

 

[LostSoul]

That mad hermit in the wilderness of Keep on the Borderlands. Killed my 1st level Elf, Questor the Mighty. And then he killed Questor II.

Questor III finally got him.

 

[Drkfathr1]

A bottomless pit. Back in the good old days of 1E.

I opened a door and the DM told me I was dead. No saving throw.

"Dead? How? What happened?"

"You got sucked down a bottomless pit."

"What!? How come no one else in the hallway got sucked in?"

"The door got closed by the suction after it sucked you in."

"If the suction was that strong how come I was able to open the door in the first place?"

"You're dead."

Gary Gygax would have been proud. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed with the DM.

 

[Voadam]

A fellow PC.

He got annoyed when my elven thief/MU made a joke at his expense and he started plotting my death. Later that night he was charmed by a very minor demon. He claimed the charm forced him to randomly attack us (even though the charm only made him not attack the demon). Of course all his attacks just happened to go against me as the most vulnerable PC being the only one not designed for combat optimization. The killing blow came after we had killed the demon and broken the charm and he continued to attack me, his cleric MU finishing me off with a no save, no miss magic missile. I was pretty annoyed. And a lot of my characters that followed were then designed to prevent fellow PCs from screwing me over instead of to explore neat character concepts. :\

 

[Voadam]

That mad hermit in the wilderness of Keep on the Borderlands. Killed my 1st level Elf, Questor the Mighty. And then he killed Questor II.

Questor III finally got him.

If at first you don't succeed. . .

 

[sniffles]

I haven't had many PC deaths, so I remember well. My elf ranger was going through the AD&D Time of Troubles/Avatar Trilogy module for Forgotten Realms. One of the other party members touched a trapped door in Castle Krag. Zap! Both PCs dead. Luckily a few minutes later the rest of the party rescued the avatar of Mystra and she raised us.

The same PC lost her dire wolf companion when he jumped in front of her to rescue her from a blast of death magic cast by an amalgam of Bane and Myrkul (Byrkul, as we kept referring to him). That one actually upset me more.

A month or so ago in a current FR game, my elf fighter/tempest nearly lost it to an ogre. I think he would have been a goner but the GM ruled that our party cleric got to him just in time.

 

[Chaldfont]

Another PC.

Early 80s. Third grade. Basic D&D boxed set. My neighbor and I figured out how to make characters, but not really how to play yet. So that summer we made PCs. Dozens of them. We would make PCs for HOURS. We had a huge folder of them.

Once we puzzled out the rules and started to grok the concept of an RPG, we decided to hold a gladiator tournament to figure out which PC would be played. We made brackets and randomly assigned pairs to fight to the death. The PC that survived those bloody games became our real first PC.

So who knows who that nameless first PC was? What was his background? What did he look like? No one will ever know. All we do know is that he fought bravely that day and was slaughtered with about 30 other PCs.

 

[Altalazar]

My first PC, Boris, a fighter, was killed in B2 (1E of course) walking into the first cave where he stepped on a pit trap and fell, taking maximum damage and dying. Note that this was the VERY first thing he did. So he lasted about five seconds. Fortunately, I had made two characters, the second being Altalazar, a wizard, and he survived quite a bit longer. But I didn't play much then - I was in elementary school when I first played 1E, back in 1980 or so. (And those first two PCs were in Basic D&D - B2-Keep on the Borderlands).

I later remade both Boris and Altalazar (starting at 1st level again) when I started a 1E AD&D campaign in college (circa 1989), where Boris finally became a (somewhat dumb, definitely crazy, but wise) King and Altalazar became an Arch-Mage / Ruler of a nation (Boris' really). Ah, the memories...

 

[Kid Socrates]

The only thing that has killed any of my characters is campaign death. I've escaped from numerous deadly situations (good ol' Evasion). I've also never permanently killed a PC in my homebrew games, though one PC has died five times by overestimating his abilities. There are drawbacks to death in my game, so there is a penalty. He's died to... a critical gunshot wound, being right next to an explosion, taking Ifrit's Hellfire ability at point-blank range, diving onto a skeleton's glowing black blade, and once by killing himself to try and free another's soul. It's a weird game.

I've had characters try to die -- in an Eberron game, I had a dwarven paladin ready to give his life for his country, Cyre, do everything up to and including diving off an airship to attack an undead ship, and survive. I believe the cinematic killed him, but no actions in combat did.

 

[Kunimatyu]

My first character, Borr, died to a horde of dretches. He'd been seduced by a succubus, then attacked and in single digit hps. For the next several days of game time, the DM refused to let him encounter a healing potion anywhere, despite traveling through several towns.

Then the succubus comes back, summons dretches that swarm our camp, and one charges and kills the 10-level rogue in one hit. Good times.