Beware, for Gobi the Destroyer comes for thee!

Warning: geekery ahead.

My buddy Byron started some of us on a first-level Dungeons and Dragons adventure. Our group has traditionally been playing characters levels seven through twelve or so, so it was a bit of a treat to go back and start at the bare-bones, a-housecat-can-take-you-in-a-fair-fight, first level beginnings.

Our group is not a serious group, and we like to have fun with it, so we decided that our party would all be "little folk." We have (in descending order of height) a gnome, two halflings, and a kobold in the party. Four shrimpy little dudes out to make their mark on the world, with names like Gobi, Bango, Dudley, and Zook.

That much is fine, but the interesting part comes when our little band met up with our first encounter. (This was taken from a pre-written adventure Byron was using out of a book.) We were attacked by six Bugbears and a Bugbear Captain. The pre-written adventure said that the encounter was set up to force the players to flee in a particular direction (indeed, we had that option). But the smallest among us, the kobold, happened to be an overzealous paladin (don't ask), and he opted to charge.

It all happened so fast that I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but somehow, without any DM cheating-in-our-favor that I could detect, we actually won the battle. The kobold paladin and my halfling barbarian killed the leader in the first two rounds, and the druid gnome successfully entangled half of the remaining bugbears. A couple of well-placed magic missiles from the halfling sorceror killed a fourth bugbear and primed the stage for a very high intimidation roll that scared off the remaining two. We came away wounded pretty bad, but...four bugbears and a captain!

That single encounter raised us to second level. I think I'm more proud of that victory than any of the battles we waged at higher levels.

For a more detailed account of our exploits, you can follow them at Byron's Never pick up a duck in a dungeon... blog.