Let me tell you a little about a feller named Kinglaaph – King, to his friends. A wingless aarakocra, King has pink feathers on his head and chest, which turn pale, almost white, from the forehead up, and grey feathers elsewhere. He wears a wide-brimmed hat and a poncho over a leather vest with various pockets containing tools and gizmos. And he carries iron on his hip, for he is a gunslinger.
Now let me tell you about how he almost died. Twice. In my first session playing as him.
Our session started with Mercenary, Parvus and Airina leaving Gundren and his brother behind with Droop and Cardigan’s body in order to search the rest of the caves. Pretty quickly, they ran into King, whom, as an inventor, had entered the caves searching for interesting loot. We agreed to team up to finish clearing the caves, and off we went.
The first room we entered contained an old furnace and a floating skull wreathed in green flame. As soon as we tried to delve further in, a bunch of zombies came to life and attacked us. The skull hit us with a fireball, which brought me dangerously low on health, before we were hit by a wave of zombies. We destroyed them all, but not before my hit points were down to single digits and Parvus was down to just 1. The skull was destroyed too, but we knew it would reform. We weren’t sure how long until it did, but our only means of destroying it permanently was with holy water, which we did not have, but could make, given the time. I locked the skull pieces in the furnace to keep it contained once it reformed (spoiler: did not work) and we returned to Droop and the others to take a short rest and make some holy water.
When we got back to the furnace room, we came up with a great plan of flanking and bringing down the skull, then destroying it with the holy water. However, we had not anticipated the skull being intelligent enough not to fall into our trap. On top of that, a bunch of ghouls came out of the staircase I was standing besides and paralysed me. The next moment, the flameskull blasted me with two hits, one of which was a critical, and now I was frozen, unmoving, and very much unconscious.
Thankfully, Mercenary recognised that we were in serious trouble, and led a retreat. She grabbed me and dragged me out of there (otherwise I was one hundred percent dead) and we managed to get out through a side room, Mercenary and Parvus forming a line of defence at the second door. I had been recovered from the paralysis and healed back to consciousness by Airina by this point.
As the ghouls came through the door, two at a time, since that was all that would fit, we cut them down. The flameskull eventually flanked us, but by that time the ghouls were almost all dead and we managed to deal with it and finally destroy it with the holy water. Then we returned to Droop and the others for a much needed long rest, where we finished.
We didn’t get through a lot this session, and on paper it doesn’t sound so bad, but in truth, it was ridiculous. If the dice gods weren’t with me last week, they weren’t with any of us this week.
First of all, Airina’s player wasn’t available this week, so it was just the other three of us, Mercenary and Parvus co-running our dwarf cleric. That’ll put how we were rolling into perspective. Between us, in the second fight alone, we rolled at least ten natural 1’s. Parvus was dropping weapons left, right and centre, and my pistol relentlessly kept misfiring. Even our non-criticals were failures more often than not, and our damage rolls were, in general, appalling. Compare that to our DM, who, over just one short stretch, got something like four natural 20’s in about seven rolls, and overall, got probably twice as many 20’s in this session than any individual player has over the last seven. I’ve seen short instances where the dice have been one-sided, but never such a strong party versus DM swing. This week was something else.
So yeah, two combats and two rests, that’s all we managed. Oh, and we found some gauntlets. We (especially I) came very close to death, and barely clawed through by the skin of our teeth. And we still have a huge chunk of the cave left to explore, having added just one extra room to our current clearance zone. Hopefully next week we won’t have quite as hard a time, but the way the dice have been lately, I’m honestly doubting whether that’s even possible.