Two good stories and good experiences there. Thanks for sharing. 

I’ve been running a 5e campaign for the past two years with the same group. We’ve made it through Horde of the Dragon queen and are on the penultimate chapter of the rise of Tiamat (all-be it with plenty of changes and PC driven tangents). 

That being said I’d say my most memorable experience was as a player in another campaign. 

I joined a group playing The Curse of Strahd part way through. I was a Tabaxi Cleric ‘charlatan’ which was interesting. Worshipped a Tabaxi goddess of hedonism, which was fun. Dex based cleric with a few feats that made his Passive perception 26 or something rediculous. 

Anyway, the group consisted of an Half-Orc barbarian and Tiefling rogue (who were a couple irl and married in the game) and a Tiefling ranger (who later turned out to be a traitor all along, but I digress). 

We were moving through a little town when Strahd and his cronies attacked. It was an intense battle anyway, but became even more so when Strahd used some ability to mind control our Orc and promptly ordered him to attack his wife. 

With failed saving throws it worked and in one round he downed her. I had been attempting to flee into the nearby church but instead now attempted to move towards the rouge to heal her. 

Sadly Strahd’s second, a powerful vampire servant named Rashad or something, had other plans and then also managed to down me after a brief scuffle. Following this he proceeded to literally kill my character - the soul of my cleric left his body and ascended into the ‘caress of Sharess’ (Sharess being his Goddess). 

Now our DM at the time was a hard dice man. The dice decided the fate of everything, so a total party kill and loss of the campaign was a real possibility here.  

An NPC priest (commonor stats) rushed out of the church and used his action to revivify me. Yanking the Tabaxi’s soul from the eternal peace he had just embraced he awakened bleeding as a swarm of vampire bats then proceeded to critically hit and therefore ‘strip the flesh from his shrieking form as the swarm reduces the old priest to nothing but bones’. 

Following that I managed to pull the rogue into the church. The half-orc attempted to follow to kill me once more, but stepping across the threshold for the church lifted the curse - whilst also keeping the undead vampire types outside who after a short while retreated. (Would have been nice to figure out sooner that churches were safeground…)

It was very intense and satisfying to make it through by the skin of our teeth. 

My cleric took the bones of the priest and reverently stored them in his pack with the intention of one day casting a resurrection spell upon them to return the favour to the man who’d through his actions saved us all. As his body did not remain I did not currently have a spell that could revive him. 

A good time was had by all.