What monster killed your first PC?

[Orius]

Green slime, hidden in a potion bottle with a potion of healing floating on top of it.

No way you can scrape or burn that away after swallowing it....

I got to use this sometime.

 

[Sanackranib]

this was back in the old bays of basic d&d just about the time that the 3 core books first hit the market circa 1979-1980

my first pc was killed by another pc - one who was run by the DM. our DM had put in some sword he didnt want us to get and i figured out a way to get it so in a jelous fit his pc cast burning hands on my 5th level pc and killed him (no save) and took the sword and all the other items I had managed to aquire that he was lusting after.

 

[kolikeos]

my first pc was a mad sorcerer that got killed by a human monk

 

[Squire James]

I'm another one of those "somebody had to be DM at the beginning" people who didn't get to actually play much. I only remember losing one character.

It was 1e with Unearthed Arcana rules. Let's just say we had a decent mixture of powergamers with one bona-fide munchkin. I was a "mere" powergamer. Mindiar, my elf cavalier with 18/72 Strength, was actually one of the weaker party members.

The DM had his own set of home-brewed crit tables. On the first round of the first combat Mindiar encountered, before he got a turn, a mongrelman scored an instant death crit.

(This part veers off-topic, since this guy didn't die, but these events were close enough chronologically that they're linked in my mind.)

My next character, a drow fighter/thief 1/1, with the help of those same tables, managed to score 81 damage to a spider-critter in one round (3 crits for triple damage). If the target had been the 1e version of Lolth, my first level character would have killed her! Unfortunately, the spider was apparently the DM's pet, because it didn't even die.

The force of 250 orcs that our level 2-4 party of ten destroyed in an open field also sticks in my mind! We were supposed to follow them to their lair... but we kept stopping them before they made it there! Our tactics worked so well, those poor orcs never knew what hit them and many were killed and we were barely scratched. Never be dismissive of a level 2 illusionist with a generous DM!

 

[Commonblade]

One Headstrong fighter thinking that the best thing to do is charge and distract the Pyro-Hydra from attacking the rest of the group. I charged, attacked, took a head and cleaved a second. The other nine ripped me apart.

 

[GandhitheBFG]

Various rogues.

My 7th level, half fire-elemental wood elf ranger and a friend's 7th levelsorceror/rogue/ranger (hehehe, we were noobs) had managed to sneak into the Guild Hall of some group of thieves, somewhere. I think it may have been Athkatla, and the Shadow thieves. Anyhoo, due to failed listen checks, we thought the room beyond held only the leader, who we were supposed to be capturing, and taking back to our boss. We were...slightly wrong. He WAS the only one speaking, because he was giving a speech. To half the Guild...

Surrounded, and sneak attacked. To death.

 

[Driddle]

Kobold.
I hate kobolds.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

The death of your first D&D PC was a once in a lifetime moment. For those who remember, what monster killed your first PC? (Or if your first PC never died, what monster caused your first PC death)

It was so long ago... records have not survived the intervening ages so all we have is the oral tradition of long lost tribes... but the first thing I can remember about D&D was a bar fight that spilled into an adjacent alley and the DM repeating over and over, "Fireball CAN'T do that much damage - everyone would DIE!" I'm pretty sure my PC of unknown name died in that fight against an equally unknown NPC - almost certainly human. I'm quite confident that plenty of others followed in a blur of forgotten battles and hard-learned lessons. It was probably at least a year before I rolled up my first truly surviving character, who in failing to die like all the others finally earned a reasonably clear, permanent place in my memory.

 

[Thotas]

Ah, yes. Mangog the Mighty, I named that first level fighter with a Strength of 15 ... that's +0 to hit, +0 damage in 1e. But I called him "the Mighty" anyway. The entrance to the dungeon was a shaft in the ground that we had to lower someone down into with a rope. A secret door in the side of the shaft was the entrance to The Real Dungeon, but Mangog didn't see that, so he ended up suspended over a the floor of a room that seemed to be a dead end ('cause it was, as it turned out). DM said the floor looked damp, like there had been water through there recently. I suspected a trap, but figured we had to go looking for a secret door or something. So Mangog bravely jumped onto the floor. The "dampness" turned out to be a Gray Ooze.

 

[Starman]

I started with 2ed and my first character was a half-elf ranger. He succumbed to an ambush from a vampire in the third (?) session of the campaign. The DM maintains that we shouldn't have been sneaking into the big bad vampire's city in the middle of the night. I maintain that our plan was sound and if our fighter had rolled higher than a 5 now and then, we would have been fine.

Starman