Over forty years of gaming (man, I’m old), there’s too many to count, so I’ll go with the most recent one that sticks in the mind. This was the first Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’d run since the 1980s, back in 2016-17. The setting was an alternate Roman Empire with low magic, monsters being either rare or stand ins for the various tribes (hobgoblins for Vandals, for instance). The characters had been traveling for a while and had come across a village that had been wrecked by a troll, and who was still sorting through the loot when they came upon him.

The characters leapt into action and proceeded to start getting their butts kicked by the creature, who was incensed that they were coming to steal his things, and that “stealing was wrong”. The monk character, suddenly inspired by the troll’s focus on the injustice of them coming to steal from him and attack him when he hadn’t hurt them, he started to try and preach to the troll. He apologized for their actions and in the end converted the troll to what would later be a half-assed, barely understood collection of folk ideas, bits of Bible, etc.

They escaped with their lives.

In a later, follow-up campaign set in Arthurian, end of Roman Britain, the new characters ran across the troll — twenty years later, running a parish in the Cotswolds and shaking down travelers using the bridge next to his church for alms while protecting/terrifying the life out of the locals as their priest. It was a last minute, unexpected callback that the group loved. His understanding of the Scriptures hadn’t improved at all.