Well, we had quite the three round battle just now. I won't get into the specifics as it has potential spoilers for you all but we had to fight a higher level adventurer and barely made it out alive. I was one bad roll from death and Bear was two. Gwen managed to direct help and those reinforcements saved us from sure death. One wrong move could have left us either dead or if they had escaped, living in constant fear.

It had to do with one of our backstories, someone put out a quest out of Baldur's gate to find one of ours and bring them back home alive. Though no other stipulations were made, so that could have gotten very dark very fast. This is no rescue wilderness, we are doing this with the safeties off so real trauma is possible.

I have to say it was traumatic and it will certainly keep us on our toes in the future. Considering it happened out of nowhere and we had to fight without our full gear or armor, we were very lucky help arrived.

It didn't feel very real until I stepped between the attacker and my team to keep them from taking the one he was looking for and I was struck down in one hit. For reference, our attacker was about the same challenge as the rogue Rothé. Basically our RR moment but it was an NPC and not an an animal, they had magic and advanced fighting skills along with an average of +3 on all stats, so fairly high level.

SheShe said, it needed to happen, we were too sloppy and too concerned with "peacetime fun". Message received, living serious business, we're not high enough level to let our guards down.

[Bear] A glimpse of the thin shell of civility keeps us all vigilant.

[Joy] I didn't realize SheShe was so bold, though I doubt she would have let it all end as this scenario started as a test and she could have simply wiped it out if it ended in total disaster.

Joy's right actually, we spent hours pouring over our characters, making sure we understood everything we could do now and in later levels, planning out our builds and we needed some way to truly test our abilities as they are. This started as that but SheShe decided half way through that "it's realzies, fight like your life depends on it."

We were still in the city so death wouldn't likely have been permanent, but it could have been very expensive, well beyond our means. Two of the reinforcements (of 4) had revivify so within a minute of death they could have saved any of us, but that wasn't a guarantee if they didn't gain the upper hand.