Two weeks ago, I played in my first Adventurer’s League session for D&D 5e. Adventurer’s League is an ongoing campaign where you can play at any game store that runs an Adventurer’s League session. The benefit of playing in Adventurer’s League is not having to commit to a weekly game and being able to take your character to each session with the experiences from the previous sessions. I specifically created Zehiri, a level #2 (now a level #3) Tiefling Paladin, whom I intend to play anytime I play Adventurer’s League. In the session I had two weeks ago, the party almost died, and I wanted to relive this because it’s a funny story now, since my character ended up being healed.

My group was securing a payload of a statue and transporting it across the plane to a woman named Chandra. During our journey, we encountered two sets of enemies. The first set of enemies featured goblins and a wolf. Within the first round of combat, the Dungeon Master (DM) had his goblin attack me. The DM rolled a natural 20, which doubles the damage my character would take. This led to me taking 11 damage from a goblin who threw a rock at me. How rude. I eventually killed the goblin with a Divine Smite, which may have been overkill, but the goblin deserved it. Divine Smite is a spell specific to the Paladin class, which allows for extra damage to be dealt to a creature if that creature was hit by a melee attack. I ended up killing one more goblin before combat ended. It was the second round of combat where things were intense.

After surviving the round of goblins, our group was attacked by another wolf and two Bugbears. One of the Bugbears kicked a log at my group, and I rolled poorly to move out of the way. I was dealt 11 points of damage there. In all of my turns, I kept rolling so low that I wouldn’t hit any of the enemies in our way. One of the party members rushed into battle and was knocked down within a turn or two. As the only healer, I was going to heal him, except I got knocked down in battle because I rolled poorly. Two out of the five members were unconscious, including the only healer, and I genuinely was concerned we were not going to get through this. There were several turns where the remaining three heroes rolled so low that they didn’t hit any of the enemies. Eventually, the battle turned to our favor when two of the remaining players cast several cantrips with a natural 20 to help kill the remaining enemies. Eventually, I was healed with medical supplies from the payload we were guarding, and I was able to level up Zehiri to level #3. The DM felt so bad for us because we kept rolling so poorly.

As I review this session, I realize things could have gone way worse. I ended up rolling well on my death saves and didn’t roll a failure. When a character loses their hit points, they roll a death save. Rolling a 1-9 is a failed roll, while rolling 10-20 is a success. If you roll three failed saves, your character dies for good. If you roll a natural one on a death save, it counts as two failures.

Overall, it was a fun session, and now I want to find more Adventurers’ Leagues to play in. In the meantime, I want to write a thorough backstory for Zehiri, so I can have it prepared when playing in future sessions. Being new to playing D&D 5e, Adventurer’s League was a great place to get back to in-person roleplaying, and I’m looking forward to roleplaying Zehiri in the future.