Everyone needs a hero. Edited for readability.


     So, I have this friend who is a really great DM mainly for one reason: he doesn't really have everything planned out for the players to follow, on our last campaign, for instance, the main villain was literally created by one of the players. Let us come to the first session of his new campaign. We have a party of eight, none of whom know each other, and who have just awoken in this place none of them knew, but two of them had an idea of what it was. We're all beginning at level 9 here, btw. 

     We talk to a guy who's just sitting there, watching as the eras change, and he tells us that, in order to move on, we must open the well, and, in order to do so, we must defeat the guardian of the well. So we go to the place where the well should be, summon the guardian and engage in battle. This is probably a great point to mention that we were all without our weapons, or any equipment at all. There was a lot of rock-throwing. 

     Enter: the druid. This dwarf none of us knows nothing about starts literally spitting out large snakes. 16. Not satisfied, he, himself, turns into a snake. "I get to attack this mf 17 times", he thought. OFF: we're all laughing and trying to figure out the logistics of the 16 snakes taking their action, probably should point out that the guardian of the well had used dodge, meaning this would potentially another 32 dice rolls for the snakes to attack. Cool, no problem, we used a website to cast the die, and moved on. All snakes miss. And so we kept battling for a while, and all of a sudden we reach this boss' final form. 

     He now has a legendary action that any character that is bleeding will cause an explosion around themselves (that besides an explosion around the guardian himself). Ok, that's bad. We keep fighting, but one of our guys is bleeding. Explosions happen, some of us take a lot of damage, his next turn comes around: there are three of us bleeding. The DM rolls the explosions, three of us are already considering our characters as having fallen. Then the druid pokes at the DM and says: "oh I forgot. 

     But in the interest of fairness I'll let you know now: the snakes are bleeding". The DM breaks out in vicious laughter. The two guys (besides me) who were in the radius of the explosions take a moment to understand what just happened. Each explosion dealt 4d8 damage. There are 3 character bleeding, plus 16 snakes, plus the guardian. That's 20 explosions. We go back to the site, now to do the saving throws and, finally, the damage. There are 5 of us in range of the explosions (and we're all so packed together that we're potentially struck by all of them). 

     The total damage of all the explosions goes up to 320~340. The druid dies. My monk dies. Our paladin dies. And one of our barbarians. But then there was the fifth guy. A second barbarian who was grappling the guardian. He only got the damage from ~8 explosions, and, even then, all at a quarter damage. So while the four of us died, he just kept grappling the guardian, barely shaken by the explosions around him. 


     But you want to know the best part? By the time the explosions happened the guardian was already dead. But as a legendary action, they took place no matter what. So immediately after half of our party died, the fight was over. The only survivors were the spellcasters who had moved away from the fight. The well is now open. 

     The good thing is that I think the DM was already expecting some of us to die, since we had no equipment and all, so the well was actually somewhat of a healing well, and we all managed to live, in the end. Though most of us are now honestly afraid of the druid, and it seems to be a general consensus that if his doe some shady shit like throwing up large snakes again, we have a good enough reason to kill him.