AD&D first edition is a harsh mistress. After a several month hiatus from play, 3 of the PCs in my Thursday campaign decided to enter into an arena for a fight against a group of 0-level gladiators. The gladiators had 1-6 HP each, AC 7 leather armor, swords and crossbows.

Combat in our game is something they generally avoid when they can, as it so deadly. There have been several fatalities in this campaign. But they had just come off a 3 month break, and were reverting to the way they played when they first started playing 1e with me.

The party bard gets 5 attacks/round against 0-level NPCs, and the party druid can now shape change (he opted for a lion, 3 attacks/rd plus two more if the first two hit) and the party warlock has access to spells like lightning bolt and stinking cloud.

"This will be a breeze"

They were feeling cocky, and decided to take on a large group of gladiators to drive up the betting purse, and to show off. "They won't be able to hit us, we can easily hit them, we have spells, high HP, we do more damage, and one of us (the party Aarakocra warlock) can fly!"

It started off promising, the party warlock cast a protection from normal missiles on himself, then cast enlarge on the druid, making him into a giant lion. With the subsequent damage bonus, any hit by the druid in giant lion form would slay a gladiator. They went in confident.

But things were not so easy. The gladiators scattered when the fight started (they knew better than to all stay in one place when a spell caster is around) and used their crossbows to start. The bard picked off one or two with bowfire, but there were far more gladiators than PCs

The party druid was a formidable giant lion, but his AC was not that great, and the missile fire did a hefty bit of damage before he got close enough to melee. Once there he was successful hitting, but the gladiators did 1-12 damage with each successful strike, as he was size L

The party bard charged in ready to puree his enemies with 5 attacks per round and an AC of 1, along with a bucket load of HP as he is essentially a triple class PC. And it started well, he dispatched several gladiators easily, I roll for HP, and some of them had 1 or 2 hp each.

But what he hadn't reckoned on was that a group of 5 of them would try to grapple and overbear him to the ground. They weren't going to just wait around to be slaughtered, when they saw how formidable he was with a sword, they rushed him.

Once grappled and overborne, others could strike him at +4 to hit. Not a guarantee of anything, but they started to do some real damage, and he couldn't break the grapple. The party warlock got desperate, and cast a stinking cloud on the gladiators who were grappling the bard

That took them out, but took out the bard too, and only a daring swoop and grab maneuver with a successful saving throw allowed him to extract the coughing, gagging bard taking him to safety. The only thing that saved the party druid was changing shape again, which restores HP.

Even then they only made it out by the skin of their teeth with some lucky rolls. Their opponents had 1-6 HP each, lousy AC and no magic items. People complain regularly about how "unkillable" D&D characters are, about how the game is too easy at mid to high levels.

But if you play AD&D, HP and AC aren't enough. You can still be overwhelmed, you can still die, no matter how many HP you have or what your AC is, combat is still deadly, as tactics and even bad luck can make the difference. And numbers matter.

Even magic, the source of much of the power in 1st edition, isn't a panacea, as the warlock discovered when a non-magical melee weapon hit him just fine. You are limited by the spells you have memorized and the tactical situation. Nothing is certain.

They won the day and made some coin, and since two of them almost died, it was exciting. They really had to pull it together to win, so it felt good. Still, they were talking afterwards, and the consensus was that they shouldn't be so cocky, as it was a very close call.

I see a lot of calls here on Twitter for a "deadlier" version of D&D, one that is "gritty" and "challenging". I see a lot of retroclones that claim to make the game dangerous again. I've been playing a deadly, gritty and dangerous version of D&D for decades. 1st edition AD&D.