Fuuuuck we had an intense battle against 8 orcs, 2 wolves & an ogre today with lvl 3 characters (paladin, rogue, sorcerer, fighter)!
The battle started out really well. We got 2 orcs at first, soon followed by 4 more. With the fighter's cleave feat, we managed to take out 4 of them in a single turn (I was the only one who didn't even hit one, let alone one-shot it). Then, two more appeared from the some distance, followed closely by the two wolves with the ogre one turn behind.
Killing the rest of the OG 6 orcs didn't pose too much of a challenge. I took some damage (11 or 12) and our rogue suffered a little less (4 or something). Killing the two orcs & two wolves that followed didn't go as well (missed hits, low damage, dodged spells). So as we failed to do much against them, the ogre also descended among us. A well placed Burning Hands killed one orc and damaged the other & wolves.
The ogre quickly took care of our rogue with a single hit (we didn't think she was in its reach because it was still quite a few spaces away from us). Another round and we got the last orc & one of the two wolves dealt with. The ogre hit our fighter to 1HP, I had 15 and our Sorcered had, like, 9. So the situation was kinda dire.
What happened is that I charged at the ogre to save our fighter (at this point we had dealt 15 points of damage to it out of 44), hit it with 10 points of damage thanks to having a Bastard Sword and spending my Smite Evil against it. Our sorcerer spent his turn at that point taking care of the last wolf. I now have an AC of 18 and the ogre had a couple of turns of lucky (for us) misses that saved me from certain death. Then our sorcerer used Daze and that was a success. Me and the fighter both missed our first attacks and the fighter didn't hit with his second attack either before the ogre would resume attacking. Our sorcerer, mostly out of spells, threw an Alchemist's Fire bottle at the ogre and set it on fire. It dealt a decent amount of damage in its first turn. I hit the ogre down to 1HP and then the fire from Alchemist's Fire killed it.
We had REALLY good luck in the beginning. This battle had TPK written all over it, but killing so many orcs within a couple of turns & not taking too much damage from the initial batch of orcs helped us deal with the "second part" of the battle with the ogre & rest, when the battle took a bad turn. Then we had a lot of luck with the two essential misses the ogre had (that would have surely killed me) and then the successful daze helped us get the extra attacks (& misses...) in without the ogre posing much threat that helped us deal enough damage to kill it.
Our GM later said he was absolutely certain that there would be almost certainly be at least 1 death, probably 2, quite likely 3 and with a decent chance of a TPK if we didn't make the right tactical retreat choices, if we even retreated (as in, if two us fled, one could've survived if we would've been wise enough to split ways, so the ogre could've only chased down one of us).
