I'm curious of the details of these encounters. Mind, I'm a 3.5 player, but I think I can get the gist of it from description.
That aside, yeah, I personally think there's a certain cutoff point for first-level challenge. You shouldn't be running into anything the fighter can't hit at least a third of the time(with the exception of tailor-made things for party dynamics) when you first walk in, and you sure as hell shouldn't need to blow that much healing right in the door.
Well the entrance to the dungeon was vertical, so when we entered, we were in a large 5 x 5 room. The minute we set down, we were ambushed by Kobold spearmen and Kobold slingers that had glue shots. It was a really tough fight, especially when the co-DM was making amazing rolls for the Kobolds. We managed to defeat them but burned through 80% of our healing surges just to stablize at half health
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Holy hell. Yeeeah, that's just a little too intense. A DM with skill in designing really challenging dungeons is a wonderful thing... until he gets too carried away and makes one far too challenging for the beginning group of adventurers involved. You need to bring this up with him, preferably as a group, not just one person. Don't lie back and count on him to see sense. Flat-out tell him, politely but directly, that his dungeons are too harsh for a first-level group and he needs to dial it back a bit unless he wants a bunch of very dead adventurers.
Sounds like a case of a DM getting fixated on his own cleverness in creating a deathtrap and not taking the players' fun into account. I've run a lot of games over the years, and I don't mind running them through miserable encounters once in a while. But even I've never had an ambush with siege crossbows you could reload and once every turn. That's ludicrous.
Hahahaha at one point I was in a 1st level 3.5 campaign being run by a friend of mine. Small group, just three PCs, and for the very first battle he tossed us up against...five or six kobolds? It was a hard fight, but in all honesty one feels that we should have acquited ourselves somewhat decently.
No.
COMPLETE PARTY WIPE. SHIP WENT DOWN WITH ALL HANDS. It was the saddest thing. We failed EVERY possible roll, the archer snapped his bowstring TWICE due to critical fails...it was really sad.
We started the fight over with 4 kobolds and pretended the previous hour never happened. Except, of course, to make jokes about "Hey, remember that time we all died?". :V
So, uh, in short, I feel your pain. And also you should really talk to your GM and explain that hard fights are nice, but that this level of difficulty is making things not fun.
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That aside, yeah, I personally think there's a certain cutoff point for first-level challenge. You shouldn't be running into anything the fighter can't hit at least a third of the time(with the exception of tailor-made things for party dynamics) when you first walk in, and you sure as hell shouldn't need to blow that much healing right in the door.
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No.
COMPLETE PARTY WIPE. SHIP WENT DOWN WITH ALL HANDS. It was the saddest thing. We failed EVERY possible roll, the archer snapped his bowstring TWICE due to critical fails...it was really sad.
We started the fight over with 4 kobolds and pretended the previous hour never happened. Except, of course, to make jokes about "Hey, remember that time we all died?". :V
So, uh, in short, I feel your pain. And also you should really talk to your GM and explain that hard fights are nice, but that this level of difficulty is making things not fun.
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