Gaming stories - DnD

Gaming Stories
Campaign: Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition
System: D20 system
Character: Human Devoted Evoker (specialist wizard)

It was a Forgotten Realms game that was done in the early days of D&D 3.0, and this one was in our very first session.  We were being sent off to another city to investigate something (don't remember what) and we were about one day into the journey when we had a random encounter roll and something found us.  The DM (Dungeon Master) rolled for the encounter and told us we were being attacked by several hobgoblins, there was a raiding party between 12-16 of them bearing down on us.  At that point the group started to panic a little bit since we were all level 1 with nothing as far as experience to our names and here comes a group that a group with some levels would have a much better chance against.  So everyone starts to scramble to pack up the camp and run away as quick as they can as they start to attack us, and we're doing the best we can with little success, it's easy for them to hit us but us hitting them wasn't nearly as easy.

So it's partway through the fight and our group isn't looking good at all while the attacking force is still pretty pristine.  At one point one of the other guys attacked a party member right in front of me which helped me decide who to fire off my next spell at, so when my turn in the initiative order comes up I announce I'm going to cast on the person that just swung on one of the front line members of the party.  Now this spell is a ranged touch attack so I have to roll to hit (a lot of spells have a saving throw to reduce or eliminate the effects of the spell, but this is one of the ones where the caster has to hit the target).  So I roll and I get a 20 on the die, which we knew at the time was a critical threat with regular weapons (swords, arrows, axes, thrown weapons, etc.).  Now the group had several people in it that wanted to be DMs in the RPGA (the big overarching organization that runs "official campaigns" where you can have a character hop from game to game and have it be officially recognized) at the time so the group was talking it over.  Now keep in mind this is early in the life of 3.0/3.5 before it was confirmed that yes you can generate critical threats with spells.  So the group talks it over and decides that yes that would count as a critical threat, which means I get to roll to try to confirm the critical hit.  So I roll and the die comes up with another 20 on it much to the surprise of everyone at the table.  The DM tells me to roll one more time and I get a 19 on that die roll.  What happened there is the DM was using a variant rule (not sure where it came from) where if you crit threat with a weapon, confirm with a 20, and hit one more time, the creature/character that got hit dies instantly…

My character killed the leader of the opposing force in one hit, and he was undamaged up  until I cast a spell at him.

At this point it's a morale check for the rest of the raiding force, and only the ones directly under the leader made it and rallied.  Everyone else on their side broke and ran.  However the remaining three opponents that remained were bad enough that we still needed to pack up and leave, and one character made a brave last stand to hold them off while the rest of us escaped.  However people were amazed at how far the situation went from being hopeless to fairly decent with just the one spell.  In fact one guy had something in his background about needing a reason to trust magic again and he figured that counted quite well.  After the session I was talking with the DM and he determined that the guys that ran away gave the group experience points in addition to the one guy that died on their side, and after the points were totaled up and divided among the remaining players (how exp is sorted in all things D&D) we realized that there was enough per person that we could all make level 3 just from that fight.  Usually in situations like that the group would go to level 2 and be 1 experience point short for the next level but the DM decided that situation was bad enough the extra level was more than warranted, so our group got to benefit from one entire level without having to worry about any of the problems inherent with it.

I'll end this particular tale with the spell I used to cause all this chaos, Ray of Frost.  It's a level zero spell or a cantrip (either name works) that does 1D3 points of damage (roll 1D6 and divide by 2 rounding the fraction up) normally.