TPK can happen - but are often just a GM not knowing how to prevent them without having boring Enconters. There are a lot of Tricks a GM can do to prevent them and manage them. But, on the "Dream" I disagree - Dreams are good for "GM Hints" and such, but not for that. A God coming down ressurecting them in exchange for "physical Services" is more satisfying and less awkward. If your Players realize when you "rescue" them, you failed as GM because of that, not because of the TPK. Encounters should be 50/50 when both sides "just Roll". Any "Trickery" should feel good for the Players - and counterbalanced by the GM with some also tricky Moves on the Opponents side. I had this Bard-like BBEG who was based on the Joker - and he had 3 Gnome Sorcerer teleporting in in a Conga-line and go "FIREBALL" around all 3 seconds while Mistystep around for some Time and then Teleport out again. So, from originally 3x3 Fireballs I made em do a "YaaaaY!" in the Middle and replaced a Fireball-Salvo with some Magical Fireworks cheering the Boss, granting him 3 Times Inspiration. Also, the Players had the chance to charm that Group and pull em on their Side - what noone did. So, they're 3 Fireballs short on the Enemys Life and desperatly searching for some hint. Originally, the Traps laid out were well concealed, but I let one Player trip over them - hidden Barrels with explosive Oil the BBEG planned to detonate magically when the Players came too close. So, I let the Players note them and use them against the Boss with "dispell Magic", which Wizzard took instead of Counterspell, mixing them both up. That Way, they also got rid of the 3 Sorcs as "colletaral". Now, they were far in the positives for Winning, so I just let the BBEG throw some "Stunning Cloud Grenades" and in the Rounds none of them could Act he just started mocking them, walking over and tormenting them. He took one Eye, one Ear, one Tusk and one Nose; one after one. Players went ballistic about that, and I could distribute in this "combat Pause" the Damage and such as needed. Now, one Round before they could move again, he smiles and Chain Lightning them full Palpatine Style until they finish him off. I may add that I do not say "He does Spell XY" instead of just describing what happens - so, if you want to interact (Counterspell f.E. or the simple Kick to the Groin), do it then when I describe it. And yes, I encourage Players to interrupt me - as long as it is not interrupting the Gameflow itself. That Way, I have the "Timeflow" in my Hands and can do "fast sequences" as well as the "MaxPayne-Focustime". Also, this Way lets you alter the Sources of Damage or such without harming the Balance of the Crunch. Like the Volley of 30 Arrows incoming on our Rogue (Groupaction, AoE-Effect. He did it on purpose to distract them and give the Party Time to cross the open Field. So, he used "Evasion" and that rolled - unsuccesful and hidden to all than me (still, he rolled it!) - his Throw for it. I could have describe how he gets nailed, but I choose that one: As the black Wall of Arrows comes close, you hear the whizzing Sound of their Feathers in the Wins - and your Reflexes kick in. The Arrows come towards you, 40 Meters, 20 Meters, 10 meters....5.....and you srat see the single Arrows in the Pattern. You start moving, but, as you are used to it but still cursing the inconvinience of it, your Body feels slow and heavy. 2 Meters and you turn right, the first two Arros pass by and a high piched Wizz is to hear. you duck a bit, a Third pass your Head, brushing through your Hair as you lift your right foot to evade the Arrow slamming with a "Thud" into the Ground. with the left, you jump up, accelerating and turning in the Air whils 3 - 4 - 7 -9 Arrows pass past you. The Sound of multiple Arrows hitting the Ground appears, but for you it is the Rhythm to dance by. Your Body turns, and you land again, your legs deaccelerating your Body as you land, like Springs eating up the Force you moved with - and the first little numbness sets in. You see the next 4 Arrows, but with a cocky turning of your Head, your long elven Hair flowing around, you evade them seemingly with a simple move of your head. Then, you realize that one Arrow that was left - and you need to pull in your belly, forming a sudden Question Mark with your Body for it to - sucessfully - pass by instead of jamming itself right in your Liver - for the Price of you feeling some more Muscles snap inside your Body due to tis extreme Strain you put on them. You suffer 34 Damage due to this. But, far in the distance you hear the Enemy Commanders furious Voice scolding his Archers for missing you.while you see your Party darting into the next Cover unseen. Time to get out and follow them. Using this, you have so much freedom for compensatig good and bad Rolls on all sides, compensate pure Idiocy and such, TPK will be more of a concious, consentual decision rather than some "mistake". The only Circumstance a Char should "just Die" is when all involved just act horrendous stupidly. I can not tell how often I got some Players "saved for Interrogation by the BBEG" and such. And no, I am not a "nice GM" - I am the Guy who is known for his capability of displaying extreme cruelty whilst keeping fair. Last Thing I GMd my Party got 3 Times a "Death" which forced them to Retreat and later on attack from an other Vector with heightened Security until they were partly succesful (Shadowrun). The Money they made were eaten up mostly for Preperation (2 more as planned) and the Medical bill. They bareley made any money when it would not have been for them to "grab some Paydata on the Way as well" - so, it went like I planned it.
Funny how you do not suggest fudging the dice or revealing to the players how you did fudge the damage dice show them a behind the screen point of view. I also dont think you explained why you should keep tpks in your game. Let us say for example the game is dnd and the players decide to fight a dragon when all they had to do was retrieve something from its horde and the dragon breathes fire you say the damage is 36 show them the damage actually was 56 they survive and run away after retrieving the item when you remind them that was their goal. Well didnt i avoid the tpk and still get my point across?
As a player, and insane as this sounds, I actualy like a TPK from time to time. Does it suck when it happens? Sure. But I much much rather see my character die, than GM taking it easy on me. Sounds patronizing and I don't like it - there are even some GM's that fudge dice to avoid it .... and that sucks. I know GM's (normal GM's atleast) hate TPK's and deaths in general, as it screws up with the campaign they worked on. And I understand - but a dream sequence out of nowhere is too much IMO. Maybe if it is sudden and short and planned (like in Final Destination movies where it only takes first 5 min of the movie and it is only a way to set it up), then it COULD work. What my point is - I like a failure to be an option - and I want to believe a GM will see it through, if TPK occurs, and not pussyfoot arround it (pardon the language). And that includes "meaningless" deaths aswell ... D&D world can be a dangerous place - and if my character falls of his horse and dies ... well ... that's part of the "realism". This is the game afterall and not a book - so death must be present or I just get borred hornestly. EDIT: I must stress tho - that I don't like a game with a lot of random encounters or meaningless checks. Example: We established my character can jump over 2m gap ... so there should be no checks when I'm jumping over 1m chasm....my guy can do that automaticaly (despite that, strictly by the rules I would die if I roll double 1's). If the distance is 1.8m ... or maybe 2.2m or distance is unknown or there are other factors - like weather or my character is wounded... then yes check is defenitley in order ... and if I fall and die ... I die.
@@davidmoseley1082 Do not lie to your players. An NPC can lie to your players characters in the story but when YOU lie about the dice it is YOU lying to your players. Would you be ok if your players lied about their dice rolls to you? Do not think so. I roll in the open for everything that would be perceptible by people, combat rolls, saves, ability checks that are not mental etc. The things rolled out of sight are things you could not perceive with your senses. You make a deception check and my NPC makes an insight check against it then it will be rolled out of sight because you would have no idea if your deception worked or not till the NPC's actions make the outcome perceptible. As to why TPK should be kept in the game that is simple. 1. Players learn things from TPK's. They learn their limits and they learn strategy and tactics. If you never die why improve your tactical play and do better? 2. It provides stakes to the action. If you will not kill the party then there are no stakes. You might as well just take the rolling of combat out and just role play the combat entirely descriptively with the party always being victorious. At that point you have taken the "Game" part out of Role Playing Game. 3. TPK's can be great story opportunities for later campaigns. My best example. In my campaigns I run them in my own world co created by me and my brother. Plenty of places in the game world have ended up named for former characters and parties and their failures and successes over the 30+ years the world has been going. Had a newer player ask about an area close to where the party was named Feldrin's Folly. The place was renamed after an adventuring party all died there. The player who played Feldrin in a campaign 2 decades before was at the table and so I asked hm to tell the story about the tragic end of the party Feldrin was the leader of. Was a wonderful hour of storytelling that ensued. 4. A lot of players will not like a campaign they feel does not challenge them. A campaign where a DM is totally against TPK's and will not do them is pretty obvious and will alienate those players and they will leave. I know I would not play in a campaign where TPK's are not possible due to the DM coddling us players.
One of my characters was doing a spooky divination wizard. At the start of the campaign I gave him the gift of prophecy from his god. We were doing a harder campaign then I normally run. Basically he had 1 charge where he could rewind up to 24 hours, that part of the session being a vivid dream of events to come. None of the other characters knew about it, so when he shouted "NO!" as the 3rd PC fell and everyone was clearly feeling super stressed they got a nice surprise of the Wizard waking up and telling them their fate, enough to change it and win. They loved it and they enjoyed the reveal that this spooky character had it the whole time and sacrificed it for his friends.
Free idea for post-TPK adventure: all of the characters end up in the same afterlife, despite their varying faiths/alignments. Turns out there's some kind of aberration which has corrupted whatever mechanism sorts souls into the correct afterlife, and the local psychopomp is willing to give you free tickets back to the prime Material of you deal with it.
I was thinking more like the enemies start hitting for non-lethal and it becomes an escape. I have some slaver organizations in a world I setup. No guarantees that the slavers will be what the players encounter, but if they do they will only attempt to knock out the players. Key is of course they should notice before the TPK that their enemies are actively trying to avoid killing them in favor of knocking them out.
As long as the DM's girlfriend isn't running a group for the first time and has a giant Owl Bear in the afterlife that expects all of the players to have sex with each other to get back to their lives. Ya, it was a thing.
@@TheMindBullets well, that's... What? I would absolutely have broken character and refused to keep playing in that situation. I hope no one got severely traumatized.
if you make it a dream sequence, end your session, review what they did and make subtle changes to what they are going to encounter. With the right tweaks / circumstances it might be possible for the PCs to believe it was some form of divine foreshadowing. E.g. The temple they entered was in perfect condition. Next time they arrive at it, its clearly been a ruin for a thousand years (so clearly they were in a dream before, that now *makes sense*). Do they remember the inscription above the door that has now faded beyond recognition? Don't make it a straight "redo".
Dragons of Dreams had hints of this, playing the same encounters over and over, some PCs dying, then mysteriously being alive again a moment later, then all of them showing up to the throne room at once. God, it was great.
We had the "it was a dream" situation once, but we were all in a pretty dark place IRL at that moment (for reasons related to the situation in our country, not sure I want to go into details) and we just wanted to have it, logically or not.
I've only been in one truly near-TPK that I feel blame on an individual player was justified. A player in the party had repeatedly gotten bored of their characters and swapped, and the GM told them the last time they asked that the character would need to die if they wanted to change again. What happened next session was that we were going into a high-level enemy fortress through an obviously trapped backdoor. The rogue walked up and was about to start disabling the traps when this player stated that they charged the door, setting off all of the traps on the door before anyone had time to back away and only two characters had survived the dozen lightning runes. The GM promptly stopped the session, kicked the player out of the group (this was an online D&D group) and after about 30 minutes had it so that a divine favor was given to the healers who had happened to be the survivors with enough resurrects to bring the party back. This was a campaign that had gone on for 2 and a half years at that point if I remember correctly, so no one was wanting to start over because one person decided to ruin everyone's fun.
At that point you just retcon the previous 5 minutes and go back to "rogue is disabling traps." No need for literal divine intervention in the narrative.
@@NessOnett8 having divine intervention justified the sudden disappearance of the character. Otherwise they would need some way to remove the character. Easy solution, Deus ex machina.
Honestly a decent amount of this falls on the dm for not just letting the player switch out their character. Obviously the player is a selfish asshole for doing that and should have sought other means but it's also kind of a dick move on the dm's part to pigeonhole them into a character that they didn't want to play
@@wilhelmkreis6578 Its entirely the fault of the player. If anything, the DM was too nice in allowing the player to change more than once. Allwoing a player to do that creates a ton of extra work and disrupts the narrative, party dynamic, party and encounter balance, ect. Why should the Dm have to deal with a player who constantly changes characters and forces the DM to do extra work coming up with narrative reasons to remove a character and introduce a new one, rebalancing encounters, ect, just because some idiot couldn't make up his mind about what he wanted to play and stick with it. This kind of shit effects not only the DM, but other player too, who might have picked their classes and abilities based on what other people were doing to balance the party. The DM was perfectly justified in not letting him switch again without dying. Honestly, that DM must have been a saint because the majority I know would have kicked a player that disruptive and self-centred out way sooner, including myself.
I laughed at your dream sequence segment. I did exactly that in my last campaign. (We were learning a new system and hadn't figured out the balance yet.) I laughed harder when you said that you should only do that once every ten years. That was exactly how long that campaign lasted! Good to know that I'm good for another dream sequence. ;)
recently our gm did a one off for a friends bachelor party, where we were not playing the characters in our normal campaign. we went full murder hobo and we were slaughtered like animals - it was a good way for the gm to show new players that he wont protect from your own stupidity forever. then when we went back to our normal campaign in the next session, everyone was a bit more cautious as they were playing characters near and dear to their hearts
I am a fairly inexperienced DM, I've started a handful of campaigns before but never finished them before the group disbands due to real life interfering. I started my current game about a year ago with two friends who had never played before. The plan was to give them some easy combat as a sort of tutorial that also thrusts them into the story: the two characters would meet on the road, moments before a third traveler with a blue cap yells for help while being attacked by wolves. What followed was a mix between the players being inexperienced, me overestimating their abilities by having too many wolves, and really, REALLY, bad dice rolls. It was a TPK in the first 10 minutes of their first ever D&D game. So, I called a quick break and tried to think of how to salvage the situation, and hatched a plan. When we resumed, I started with one of the characters waking from a dream, shortly before meeting the other player she recognized from her dream, and who she witnessed die to some wolves, but he had no idea who she was (to this day she still hasn't told him about the dream yet either). They went to a town, dealt with some punk kids, accepted a job to run an errand to a lumber mill, etc. However on the way to the mill, they heard a voice calling for help. They round a bend and see the same traveler with the blue cap being attacked by wolves. This time though, there were less wolves than the dream; the alpha is missing from the scene. Having a better grasp of what to do, and with better dice rolls, they bested the wolves and saved the blue capped man. He looked at them, thanked them by name, and the session ended. Now, originally this traveler was a minor quest giver to direct the players to a nearby farm, but after the TPK I completely dropped the old adventure hooks I had in mind and ran with this. The traveler is now some mysterious wandering wizard, possibly even an avatar of some celestial being, who warns them of dark times approaching. The alpha wolf has yet to appear again, but the seed is there for the secret villain of this arc to be a creature that appears as a shadow wolf corrupting the forest (still ironing out the details for the final encounter), that will have been 'foretold' from session 1. So far so good, the 'it was all a dream' approach worked well this time around.
Reminds me of a story I'm working on, where a group of adventurers help a mysterious Druid in exchange for ancient wisdom. She teaches them by forcibly putting them to sleep and running them through the same scenario over and over, ending in a different, and entirely unforeseen, TPK every time, seemingly no matter what they do. It's like she's a really bad GM or something, I guess.
I have honestly never experienced a TPK. As a player I have gotten close a couple of times. Most often, it was the epic final battle, which made it a blast. There was that chance that we could actually lose. As a GM, my campaigns are more often role-play heavy and players are allowed some independence of action, so TPK opportunities are actually rare. That said, in my last session, my players entered a cave that kept getting warmer, and then they realized they were at the base of a volcano. Immediately, one of them said, "We're walking into a TPK!" and they fled the cave. No monsters, no lava flows, no immediate threat, they just ran. We ended the session with the players warily returning to investigate. The irony is that, unless they make a massive number of stupid mistakes, like jumping into the lava, there is no way a TPK will happen. The fact that it is a volcano has no real relationship to the actual plot. It made me laugh my ass off, especially as the closest they have gotten to a TPK so far was almost accidentally blowing up their own ship.
Next time my players TPK I'm going to use dream sequence. Than when they 'win' on the next go round, say 'now you wake up'. Groundhogs day them with an unknown enemy trapping then in a dream sequence
I think if you're doing a dream sequence from the get go, give a couple of hints associated with dreams: describe numbers blurry, besmirched out generally hard to read, have one (maybe old and generally confused) NPC have a complete non sequitur in the middle of the conversation or just something akin to that Matrix scene with the two cats déjà vú. Make the players uncomfortable and then give them some relief - at least until one of them gets the idea to wonder why the hell that thing just happened.
@@adahnliegl740 My understanding of the idea is this is Etrigan's clever way of hiding the dream contingency to save the party from the TPK as if it were planned sequence. A very clever idea, I must say.
Don't overdo the dream sequence thing though, it'll actually piss off your players, once or twice is friggin hilarious though. I did this once, had them all 'wake up' to their city under attack by flaming hot skinned winged beasts with riders just laying hell to the place, they were slinging spells and using resources and doing everything they could to stave off the assault, when it looked grim one the creatures let out an ear piercing screech that jolted the entire party from their sleep, they all woke up in a cold sweat, still tired feeling unrested, when they got outside the rest of the townfolk looked pretty shaken and tired. The players hated the whole "it was just a dream" but at the same time they told me they loved it as it was part of the story of the world we were playing in. I have to admit, hearing "I freaking hate you so much right now" was pretty satisfying cause they were quite literally on the edge of their chairs for the 'encounter'. They spent the rest of the session researching how that could happen to a whole town and learned things were getting serious since the BBEG had access to people that could walk and modify dreams
I used the "You are now in the underworld and have to escape to regain your lives" in a Theros campaign to great effect. It was very fun and reinforced the feel of the setting (Greek mythology).
This could be done with any kind campaign really. In a more generic setting you can a devil or powerful fey swipe up their souls and then the characters gotta get out of hell or this beings realm.
My campaign is actually starting like that. Each person was a level 3 pirate that was doing his own thing when somehow or another they were killed in unheroic ways, and so they were sent to purgatory which takes the form of ships traveling on the river Styx. They then have to escape and regain their lives
I ran a game for 5 new players and TPKed them last week. It was an unfortunate but very deserved outcome to the Lost Mines of Phandelver. They had failed to succeed at anything and cause a lot of havoc. They didn't deal with any of the bosses (Klarg, Iarno, etc) and they burned down some of the houses in the town (not entirely by accident either). In the end, after 6 sessions and getting no closer to any goals, I had to decide that the enemy forces regrouped and planned an ambush. During that, their luck was aboslutely awful - 4 skeletons, 1 nothic and Iarno the mage were able to take the five 3rd level characters out without taking any casualties (the party didn't even kill one skeleton - that's how rotten their luck was).
Oh, in the end they had great fun and agreed that their characters were hopelessly lost and poorly motivated. Got lots of messages saying it was great fun and hope to get completely wrecked again in the next game.
Recently I had a player charge in and get 1 shot by a boss, after that battle ensued, only barely alive person left out of the battle was 1 player, who looked quite a heroic in that situation. I think TPKs are ofc a possibility but close death scenarios bind players to their characters.
I think the "Do or die" event used as "Session One" story opening has its value. It is an early test: Do the characters work as a group? If they do not, then it is best to detect the problem early, as it is a good reason to start the campaign over, with the character creation getting more focus on the ability to work together.
One of my favorites is the party being revived by a shady necromancer to which they now owe a great debt. Or, if it's a pirate campaign, let the players respawn in Davey Jones' Locker from which they have to escape (Pirates of the Caribbean style )
I'm currently running a Grim Hollow campaign, heavily inspired by the dread and atmosphere of Darkest Dungeon. They players are playing inquisitors working for an organization that fights to protect the world from the horrors around it. Pulling zero punches is the name of the game here, and the players were appropriately warned multiple times before beginning the campaign, and we all agreed to play a dark, dreadful, and most of all, deadly campaign. I'm being absolutely merciless, and if they all die, they all die. Another team of inquisitors will just pick up where they left off. It's pretty satisfying to see them play really smart and do their best to survive the ordeal, we are all loving it so far.
That's incredible! I've always liked the idea of a Darkest Dungeon TTRPG dynamic. It's one of my favorite games of all time, and it would translate beautifully into TTRPGs with the right party. Glad it's going well for you!
I've only backtracked once, although not a TPK although it nearly was and half the party died, now if it had been the players fault via their decision making or just the fate of the Dice then i would have stood by what happened, but a couple of hours after the session I was re-reading through my notes and the campaign stuff and noticed that I'd ran the encounter wrong and as a result it was far harder than it was supposed to be, so it wasn't their mistake it was my own and it wasn't just a regular death it was a proper disintigration so it wasn't a job for Revivify or anything they had at their level, so accepting my own mistake, I worked it into the story and gave them a way of bringing the characters back through the help of an important NPC the party was already looking for. Ironically enough the same party did meet it's ultimate end via TPK when through their own actions they got bored of trying to figure out a puzzle and instead decided to just trigger the trap and deal with the results, the result was a surprise Beholder and their subsequent deaths.
One post-TPK rescue I've used: the party is resurrected by a powerful evil creature or faction, one that is a rival or opponent to whatever evil the party has been fighting. They are offered continued existence, but in magical servitude to this evil group (but still on a mission to defeat the BBEG or whoever). When I did this, the party was amazingly motivated to escape this circumstance, which led to some fun side adventures and renewed party interest in the campaign.
We nearly had a TPK in the Descent into Avernus campaign in playing in last week. Thanks to Lulu the Hollyphant and some amazing dice rolls from the warlock, three of six players survived (I wasn't one of them). Fortunately there was a good opportunity to introduce new characters right around the corner. We certainly learned some lessons, and I'm looking forward to trying out my new monk.
I am a new DM, been watching most of this series a couple years now and about a year and a half ago I was asked to DM to try my hand. Well, after a couple of sessions of pre-level 1 misadventures (PCs were children) and time skipped to level 1 after things started. Anyway, I ran an adventure from "Rolled & Tolled" and the normal DM decided to go MurderHobo rather than follow the clues they got. So when the uh went to the manor of the Vampress Baroness they had burned through resources. Got through a tough fight (they should have breezed through had they not fought the village) they then triggered a trap AND pissed off Vampire Spawn. TPK. The "normal" DM blamed me and the adventure for being broken. Then COVID happened and that group broke up. One day, I will share full info in a Horror Story or something...
Nope. That's a TPK that should have happened. Most new DM's pull punches and it sounds like the normal DM counted on you doing that. In my opinion, pulling punches is a mistake (most of the time). BUT, some nights, all monsters crit with every attack so I'll fudge some of those attacks (or if players have a night where they can't roll above a 10 to hit the monsters, I'll have the monsters miss, too) because I find TPK by dice to be REALLY unsatisfying.
Important: never think the players got it. They will think in a completely different direction. They interpreted clues differently, do not find them etc. I mean yeah its not smart to walk into a vampire manor unprepared but still. It can feel unfair to players
I came close to a tpk last session when the party were fighting four ogres (not dnd btw). The group was split into 1 PC and 5 PCs but had arranged themselves in such a manner that only one ogre could attack each grouping so the 1 (the most experienced and capable fighter) dispatched one ogre by herself without taking any damage and the other 5 killed another ogre whilst taking a little bit of damage. In the meantime (this was happening in a mostly dark dungeon) one of the ogres had tried circling around to ambush the single PC and the fourth ogre had just grabbed a huge piece of stone rubble, as one character ran down some stairs in the dark, failed an easy check and tripped, ending up landing 6ish feet away from that ogre in pitch black darkness. The Ogre threw their stone but luckily missed (because it was dark) and at the end of the round he was surrounded by the group of five. However, through sheer luck on my side of the screen, he knocked out three of those combatants (one hit on the head each, the tank would’ve been outright dead from full HP hadn’t he worn a helmet) without taking any more damage within the next two turns and almost did the same to the fourth PC (druidic healer out of magic) before being dispatched by the roguish PC who had remained in the back throwing knives. I ended the session with that, because it fit and I also needed to figure out if the last ogre, the boss, was going to abandon his lair or fight the weekend intruders. I am quite curious how they will handle him. They know there’s one more ogre, but they don’t know where and have no idea, if they’ve dealt any damage to him so far. I’d kinda like it if one PC died, but in the end the dice decide. Anyhow, that was only somewhat related to the topic of the video, which was as always quite interesting.
I literally just did this in a game of starjammer. After an arguement over who should fly the ship, the pilot lost and the gunner took over. Several jumps in and she flew them into a radiation belt and over the next five days the whole crew died of radiation sickness. At some point, you gotta let them deal with their shit. So we laughed, said good game and discussed what to play next.
Yes, I remember once I was involved in a TPK caused by a stupid decision made by one of the other characters. Not much, for the GM, to do to save the situation. Difficult to save characters from committing suicide.
@@larsdahl5528 My mantra and my players know it well: I can save you from the dragon. I can save you from the lich. I cannot and will not save you from yourselves.
@@override367 I'm 35. Tabletop gaming is my hobby. This is what I do with my free time. I have no problem ending a campaign because I enjoy building them and I'm also not so attached to them I will do anything to keep them from ending. I'm not sure if you were trying to offend me, but I'm insulted that you think I'm immature, flippant, or just plain stupid to let a story conclude without a happy ending every time.
@@ShadowKatt Man, I actually wish I was you. It takes me so much motivation for me to even start writing my campaign and setting. I really like dnd, but actually building settings and preparing for sessions feels like a chore to me instead of something enjoyable. Being able to end a campaign like that would be impossible for me, I have huge respect for you.
I love my NPCs. I once had a tag a long monk that I was playing in addition to the party for a couple sessions that saved the group just because the dice rolls said so. Was able to take the aggro of all three Giants, and with the help of patient defence take no damage from any of them allowing the party to gather themselves and take out the giants. I expected them to die, as a means of allowing them to escape, but instead they rallied behind my character, and overcame the odds. And my friends told me how awesome said npc was. they felt a real gratitude and appreciation to this character I had created to be a helpful guide for the start who instead turned into one of the groups closest allies.
Rather than edit my initial comment, I will just add another, as this one is a serious suggestion rather then a toss-off bit of humor: Never forget the well-used trope of the heroes having somehow wandered into/been trapped by a time loop. In television shows, this sort of plot device is introduced by having everyone die as a result of a seemingly unavoidable catastrophic situation. Then, one of the main characters "wakes up" at some point in the recent past; usually a few hours (or a couple of days at the outside) from the point of the wipe. Other characters are often shown as gaining awareness of the loop one by one after some number of iterations, in others, only the single character is aware and must figure out how to transmit their gained knowledge into the next loop. The first idea, including the variant where everyone is aware of the loop immediately, is far easier from the role-playing and group participation perspective. But remember, it is most often the case in fiction that with each subsequent failure and "reset" of the loop for "group awareness" situations, the amount of time they have before the SPLAT! (whatever its nature), is continually and successively diminished. Obviously, this only works narratively in certain settings where the DM can constrain PC actions to some degree, because otherwise they can just decide to bugger off Sir Robin style whilst their minstrels mock them mercilessly, and you should have just gone with the "it was all a dream" solution. Instead, whatever time frame is initially chosen, it should be short enough that all of the elements that lead to the TPK are in play and the forces in motion cannot be avoided easily by simply convincing the group to go the other direction, not open that particular door, don't enter that nebula, etc. It should be long enough, however, that the PCs can explore other avenues of action, and more importantly, discover clues that point them in the correct direction of their single avenue of escape. You should not necessarily start exponentially shortening the remaining time at first. Instead, you should rather let your inner Evil-DM out for a bit of fun as you again slaughter everyone in the party another time or two in cruel and inventive fashion. But, if the players start becoming more bold and fearless in their own actions in trying to escape this fiendish plot (and they almost certainly will), hopefully at least one of them will realize that a successful escape will almost certainly leave those who died in that last loop thoroughly dead. This particular possibility of handling a TPK is one that requires both the correct general situation and a small amount of forethought when planning the adventure as to what the nature of the loop is (intentional or accidental), who/what is responsible, and what some possible solutions/avenues of escape might be. You will want more than one of these last considerations, as you don't want to introduce this narrative device only to have your PCs stumble onto the solution on the first go around. Make them sweat it out and feel the stakes a bit by having alternative "correct" solutions up your sleeve!
My most recent tpk came when the party ran across a trap door labeled "Magic Weapons Armory! NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY!" The door led to a portal that transported them into oblivion. They all walked through in spite of various tests that indicated that this was at least a one way trip. In hindsight, this trap was perhaps a little too perfect since they just assumed that it was a one way portal to a boss or something.
I’ve been DMing since the late 80s. Solid advice. TPKs happen. What happens after is just as important. Last TPK I did revealed that the players were all suffering under a curse that claimed their souls and brought them back to 1st level immediately after their first adventure. They had no memory of the prior adventures or xp, but all of them had unsettling dreams about the previous adventures and then they had to figure out the curse.
Flashbacks to Bobby Ewing in the shower (yes old here) would support your “dream sequence” hesitation. I like the planned/intentional dream sequence. I would suggest including subtle inconsistencies (missing weapon, new spell or missing spell, different color of something) that will probably be ignored by the players in the excitement, written off to the DM being confused/forgetful or the players misremembering. After the fact, those clues will all make sense, “proving” it was planned all along. I once did something similar, not with a dream, but the party was being impersonated by a group so well that they didn’t know they we not genuine. Weapons were different, the starting location was “on the road” instead of from their last location. The group meeting themselves was priceless!
As a Fate GM, I use TPK not to kill but to change story route. Successfully winning a combat scenario allows the PCs to get what they intend, but losing (TPK) to a scenario means they get what they don't intend. My friends were generally scared of losing a year old character, so I told them we won't have PC deaths. Now they try riskier things, and the narrative will continue regardless of the result. (My personal gripe is TPKs ending the campaign when I had more cool stuff to show the PCs) A TPK is normally a reset of the party right? A serious PC failure. So I'll let everyone keep their characters, but maybe reset where they are, what they have, etc. No more money, or weapons, or you end up in a slave camp and there is a really long detour to get back onto the main journey. Or, this is the new main plot, etc. I believe Fate also has a mechanic for surviving death encounters but taking on a "troubled aspect" such as arachnophobia if your team was wiped by giant spiders.
Just like to add my two cents to this: In my opinion it is always a good idea to work as a team, even if one player made a bad decision. Last sunday one of my fellow players desided to attack a guarded carriage and nobody expected that. My character was not willing to pick that fight and i as a player was more than worried that we are outnumbered and outgunned. Still i joined the attack instead of sneaking away because i like to be a teamplayer. For me there is nothing worse than a player who refuses to participate in this kind of situation. All players should either help in the attack or try to defuse the situation. I don´t imply that a player/character should akt like a complete morron and die for someone who does not get that he´s acting like a madman but you need at least take some action to help your fellow player. If the player keeps doing thing after you try to stop him thats another storry and i would then gladly let him delve into his doom. Redconning TPK´s with "dreams" or "visions" could feel somehow cheep because it will leave a bad taste in your mouth that the gm safed your asses with a deus ex machina. I had a characte once i rly liked and the gm was aware of that. At some point in the story this character died and my gm offered to bring her back. But at this given time i could not see any logical reason how anybody would a) find her body in the swamp and b) would use a resurrection a total stranger instead of just taking her stuff and dump the body back So i thanked my GM for the offer but rolled a new Charakter. Sometimes the death of a character is the logical conclusion to his journey - even if it´s hard to led go.
My only issue with the "help even if you normally wouldn't" scenario is if the player hesitating is a paladin, given that depending on their path/deity of choice it could literally lead to them falling and losing their powers.
On the flip side, I don’t agree with making my character do something they wouldn’t because of another character’s stupidity. If they die, they die. In my opinion, expecting everyone to try to help out or do something because one player did something is kinda selfish. Sometime’s characters aren’t always gonna protect/help everyone. Not all people are the same, after all. I don’t think your opinion is bad at all mind you, just stating my point of view.
"You could do it once with a party every ten years or so" Or, roll a percentile. When everyone starts getting bummed about dying in this random event, give them a random chance for this all to just be a bad dream. Make it a dramatic roll. Also. The going to hell idea is beautiful. And I'm putting that in my box
(Uncle as old skool dm): Rocks fall, everyone dies.... youve been poisoned, poison used to be an instant death.... trap fall into lava all dead.... bad news the ferry captain was drunk and sinks into the sea.... (My uncle back in the day as Gm): 3 sessions ago, an NPC briefly mentioned the Tavern here, was the most popular for 500 km and alcohol abuse had never been so bad. Having to use perception and discover the captain was inebriated was so clearly telegraphed if you were taking this seriously paying attention... Do i gotta handhold you guys, Guess you guys should have brought 15 long poles each into the dungeon, i mean most dungeons, or farmer's field are like 98% instant death traps by area, also the shop had them available, how could ive been more clear!!! Got no one to blame but yourselves for the party wipe.... 70's/80's - 1st and 2nd edition adnd custom party sojourns = nightmares still to this day....
@@shinybugg9156 refusal to update beyond 70's/80's Ad&d pure, unforgiving, pc punishment. He still DM's the oldskool OG gygax way... Always from a DM VS. PC's perspective. Lol he has been trying to (unsuccessfully) explain THACO to me for.... ohhh 17ish years now.... 🤯
The two TPKs that I remember happening with my various groups were all just BAD luck with the dice, players rolling low and monsters rolling REALLY high, and not big important fights either usually mildly random ones! So we usually rolled back to a decent point and played again from there
I think the lessons people should learn from such are: (1) Get the dice off the table. (Dice are to add spice to the game. - Not controlling it.) (2) Reduce the amount of combat. (Fewer and faster combats.) (3) Be less stupid in combat situations. (Fights are dangerous, act accordingly.)
Im a player and we had just contacted our powerful patrons with our location so they could collect a person we had captured for them. A trap went off that set off a blasting jelly storage in the cellar which killed us all. Because we had contacted the patrons with our exact location they were able to get there in time to revive us. It was very stressful and we have been insane about checking for traps ever since
I once ran Lost Mine as an intro to Curse of Strahd. During the Venomfang fight we had a TPK but I pulled some punches and allowed some of the party to survive. It ended up feeling cheap to everyone and left us all dissatisfied. Having watched this video and with hindsight I should've just had them die, really played up the scene and done a colorful "outro" and then ended the session with them awakening in the Mists. I learned a lot from that campaign, even if it wasn't the greatest game, and sometimes I think that's all that you can do is just to try to learn from it and move forward.
My dad is ADAMANTLY against PCs EVER dying! He started a campaign with a friend of his, the friend's wife, stepdaughter and a friend of his and they died pretty early in the adventure! They just made new characters and pretty much continued from there. I got to join for a couple of sessions but then had my job get in the way so I had to stop playing! Being an adult SUCKS sometimes!
There was actually some good stuff in the first few episodes or so... I was actually hopeful they may have reversed the decline in quality. Then they flushed it all down the drain...
I love doing this in my sprawling multi-year campaigns - We had a campaign a while ago where the TPK was not only planned, but a part of the plot - we woke up in coffins on the beach at the beginning of the campaign, and TPK'd in the middle of the campaign... only to wake up in coffins on the beach again. I then ran a similar thing in a campaign later, where the party was absolutely meant to wipe, as a part of the plot, but I left it a bit loose to the details of exactly *where* they wiped. I'm running another on Sunday where the party will likely wipe, but if they do, they're going to find themselves in front of this demigod figure that they've been somewhat familiar with the entire campaign. I also had a character prophesize his own death, and I got a great chance to make it happen about 15 sessions later... It was one of the coolest narrative things I've been a part of. It all comes down to how it's done and what, exactly, you do to make your players believe in your skills as a DM.
“It was all a dream” always feels cheap, unless you’ve done a lot with dreams, as you said. I’ve had the party rescued at the last moment before, that kinda works. Like they all go unconscious but then they wake up in the garrison and the town guard stormed in and saved the day. Whatever you do it feels like Deus Ex Machina.
Sometimes Deus Ex Machina is what is needed to get past something that sucks the fun out of the game. Everyone will shake their heads at how unrealistic it is, and then they will move on. And very quickly the unrealistic episode will fade into the past (or will have turned into something to laugh about) and everyone will be having fun with the campaign again. Use it sparingly, but don't afraid to use it when needed.
My ruling for the Deus Ex Machina situations is that anyone still rolling death saves has to finish rolling them. They don’t automatically stabilize. That way, some members of the party may well die, and the impact is felt, but the story can continue. I love when a character or two dies, but TPKs kind of suck
Tpk’d my party twice during Tomb of Annihilation. Both were planned to almost certainly be a TPK (but could have been won with amazing play or dice rolls). First they entered a temple and found themselves facing Acererak, under levelled for the encounter. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but was very obvious in hindsight - they were being “inserted” into historical events in a dream sequence. Used it to finally reveal who the big bad was, as well as put the fear in them. When they finally faced Acererak he tpk’d them again. This time they were levelled enough, but I used a modified, proper, spell list for him, as his spell list is terrible, and played him as an almost eternal, genius, lich, pulling out all the stops and holding nothing back. It was the “sacrifice yourself to overcome the great evil” moment. Again, I had planned for it. They were resurrected by the Spirit of Ubtoa, to find 6 months had passed, and the campaign continued, with them now being the agent of Ubtoa to fully restore Chult. At some point in a future, different, campaign I will have the same players go up against Acererak again…
As a player, I have only been close to one TPK. The DM didn't want to play anymore, so during the big bad battle, brought in two more former players to help DM (so that he wasn't 'to blame' for the tpk) and set about trying to wipe us out. Thing is, one of the guest DM's wasn't on board with this plan, and actively helped us out. We won the battle, barely, but had taken a few losses. Then the guest DM took over our campaign, and stated that the battle had been an illusion, to fake our deaths so that the bad guys from that campaign wouldn't ever come looking for us. A little retro tweak to state that we all "died" in the fighting, and we changed locations and carried on.
I had a big story fight that left two of the three player characters dead the other week. I privately gave each of the dead players get-out-of-jail-with-many-strings-attached cards with the god whose minions they were battling giving the opportunity to live if they served him, and both characters rejected the offer for different character reasons. Everyone took it in really good stride because it was a high-lethality campaign and the players knew something like this could happen at nearly any time. We are taking it as an opportunity to create a "season 2" as it were, with a new session zero, a year and a half time-skip, and a whole new angle of characters coming in with new motivations to investigate the same problem (now a much bigger problem over a year later!). The one returning character will have had a radical personal transformation after surviving the harrowing experience and going to ground for a year and a half. Everyone's really excited to start again. I'm so fortunate to have players with such good attitudes.
I wrote and ran a module for a fantasy LARP I belonged to that led to a very unintended TPK. The module was scaled to be underpowered according to the level of any party that took it on and the combat was geared to be fairly light and quick. The goal was for the players to focus on investigating and finding clues to a strange bit of experimental sorcery that was attempted "offstage" prior to the module. It was the information-gathering prelude to a story arc. The players all ranged from experienced to storied veterans and they outnumbered their adversaries, who were also no match for them in terms of combat or magical capacity. *Two critical issues led to the TPK:* The players did not work as a group. They did not heal a pivotal, yet easily dealt with debuff on their lead warrior, a paladin. Instead of using teamwork, the players scattered to chase individual hobgoblins around. When the paladin was hit with a spell that caused in-game blindness (shut your eyes, no fighting allowed), the players did not "waste the power" to heal the malady. Rather than fix the problem, they relied on the paladin's blind fighting skill--which allowed him to open his eyes and engage in limited combat (he could not move around to attack; enemies had to approach him). In addition to the mages in the group who had healing, the paladin could have even healed himself of this at any time. There was an unfortunate trend among some players to leave in-game debuffs/injuries untreated if they did not deem the issue "significant" or if they thought they could compensate. In this case, the party got worn down and picked off one at a time. I was sick to my stomach watching this. I kept screaming in my head, "WHAT ARE THEY DOING?" But I let it play out to its finality. Most of the party was able to resurrect per the LARP's mechanics; the paladin had no resurrections left though. As this all went down, an in-game funeral was already being held for another character who previously met his end in-game. Needless to say, emotions were a bit raw when they learned they had to plan another in-game funeral...
I've done the dream sequence once, and I've DM'ed players that were just reckless and they died like every 3 sessions regularly, but in 25 years I've only gotten 1 true, everyone's dead TPK. I set my challenge rating like 2 levels over the PC's but typically my players are so cautious I kill one maybe every 2 years or so. I don't fudge roll, so when players die, I typically just ask out of character, "do you want me to do some sort of deus machina intervention", because in the end I prefer to have the players happy, and don't care who's alive or who's dead, or what's the internal narrative, We're just regular ass people playing a game, not plotting a tv show. So if they ever do go the save me route, which they rarely do, I'll make a compelling reason they made it. The only time I do not ask the players if they want an olive branch is when they were in Pvp... 'cause it's better one of you didn't make it anyways
The Heroic Sacrifice bit was actually what happened in our Starfinder campaign. Except we flew into a Black Hole Reactor Core instead of the sun to destroy the multi-planet-big ultra fortress of evil because we didn't exactly do anything to prevent it.
I actually have used the dream solution for a tpk when the party was chasing down orcs through an enchanted forest they were camping for the night and the party and NPCs got ambushed. The party after waking up from the dream did the exact same thing except for they rallied the NPCs and then countercharged the ambush. In the scenario the party is two priests who are brothers and a wizard accompanying a group of knights and men at arms chasing after the orc raiders. Since then I've given them visions to move the narrative in a certain way for example after finding weird magical armor on some of the orcs (and carrying it off) the priests have visions at night of a black chain and ball around their shoulders that they're dragging along a volcanic surface up a mountain and in the dream they know that the only way to salvation is to throw the black chain in to the volcano. And if they don't get the hint. the armor might start to attempt to corrupt them or they might get a vision directly telling them to destroy it. Or lose their powers as clerics.
In my opinion, you can have all those benefits without killing all the party. I think that character deaths are good, mainly in campaigns which have a dark atmosphere as mine do, but killing all the team can be too strong. I've sometimes killed players because they often take bad decisions or sometimes just because you sometimes have to remind that players can die and they have to be careful. An epic death of a character can be an epic story players will remember for a long time. However, killing all the team is, in my opinion, too much, unless you have saved them sometimes in the past and they're just so silly that you have to kill them. That can happen, and in that case, there's no other option
Love the concepts here. I'm currently running Age of Worms converted to 5e and the party is learning very fast that taking risks can be an issue. Can't wait for level 5 when the completely unreasonable 2nd boss fight happens. It's gonna be great.
Also, if you want to set a precedence or instill the idea that the campaign will be harsh/difficult, you can use a session 0 or 'pre-campaign' session where you hand out char to the players to play an they adventure only to TPK. This would then follow the "new party" going in search of the TPK group and begin your Campaign.
using the tpk dream deus ex machina thing to insert some occult spiritual phenomenon into the party is freaking genious oh wow. that's the joy of rpg, so many wonderfull stories can naturally build themselves based on the situations
I've had 2 near TPK experiences in my time playing DnD. The first time around we ended up getting surrounded by a bunch of undead that were heavily attracted to my bard's magic. He ended up getting destroyed by them and then a big bug which I can't remember the name of ends up wiping out the undead and the rest of the party except for one. The one that survived was our monk barbarian half orc who had a movement speed of 120ft in a single turn. So that guy just ended up running out as fast as he can without getting provoked since he was close of dying as well. My second near TPK is actually my current campaign that is about to end. We were exploring these ruins to find some profit and found a underground temple of some sort. There were a bunch of traps and mimics in the temple and in the center of the area was this big stone coffin. Around the room there were a bunch of drawings that were telling a story about a giant and how he became one of the strongest of them all. Our dumbass druid decided to open it even with warnings from the other party members and even the DM. Turns out it was a lich storm giant's home that we encountered. My character, who is a bear warrior orc, went down to less than 50% hp within a single turn of the lich storm giant. Fortunately, our sorcerer knew dimension door and we managed to escape with bearly an hp left. That soon later bit us in the ass while we were sailing in the ocean with a very strange thunder storm approaching us that soon engulfed us and cause our ship to be destroyed. I should note that both of these are in 3.5e since my DM prefers that over 5e.
In my central campaign, we’ve had 2 TPKs so far (both at the hands of goblin hordes). Our DM handled it by fading to black and giving us an escape mission, where we had to break out of our cells and get our belongings back before wreaking havoc from the inside. No “as the last of you gets knocked unconscious, the goblins stab all of you to make sure you’re actually dead, session over, bring new characters next time.” In my opinion, it was a really good way to give our actions consequences while still giving us a sense of agency.
Great analysis- hoping my PCs defeat Orcus, but.. Love your content! You're the best! This is my obligatory content to improve your results in the UA-cam algorithm. :)
I've DM'd for groups ranging from 2 to 10, mostly fairly successfully. I can't say I've done a TPK. But most of the gains you reference, I think I've gained by dropping the occasional PC. The Leroy Jenkins player is often the one most likely to cause a TPK, and the cautious Rogue that stays in the shadows is far less likely to "need to learn a lesson." As such, simply not pulling punches, and let the Leroy Jenkins guy impale himself on the plainly visible dangers serves pretty well. I've even had parties vote to not resurrect the character, as his existence puts the rest of the party in danger. THAT is a helluva lesson...
One good way to explain it away as a dream is that the players were unknowingly captured by the enemy earlier and has been placed under a sleep curse of some kind, the take was however enough to wake up the last player that died, and they awaken to se their fellow players still asleep around them and need to find something in the environment that can help awaken their companions (perhaps over powering a mage or garden with an item that can awaken them, or cutting a vine connected to them that has been causing the dream) better yet they don't wake up but are back a few days before they died, but everything is a bit off and they now need to escape the dream, either by fighting an entity or reaching a certain location within the dream
I've had 2 TPKs - First was in my early years of DMing. The group lost in a narrative battle against the BBEG's second-in-command. The group nearly won, but in the end, everybody died. It turned out to be an unsatisfying end, however, as everyone was getting into the meat and potatoes of the campaign. I learned my lesson that day. Cut to a few weeks ago; my group are tricked into summoning Orcus. The Demon Lord, in all his undead glory, utterly kills the group. However, as they are raised as undead to serve in his army, their deities interject and prevent Orcus from claiming their champions. The 2nd part of the 3 part campaign ended with a narrative TPK, and the group loved it.
I was running a 40k rpg where we had a TPK in a side story mission. Long story short one of the PC rolled too well on an attack, which caused all the grenades the all bandits were carrying to go off while the party was in a confined area and in close combat. This turned out to be fortuitous, since it turned into an investigation hook for them to explore their own backgrounds as genetice experiments using the Emperor's genetic code.
I've seen a few TPK's in my time. Most recent TPK I've experienced, the GM retconned a pretty decently satisfyingly TPK with a player majority vote. We fought our main target, he randomly exploded on death and everyone dropped to 0 and died from super unfortunate death saves. I decided to have my character die and it kinda just was bland, but at least my old character will come back as a rival of sorts. I tend to be hyper critical on myself when something bad happens on both sides of the screen, if only to turn into a heatsink. Reviewing your actions is good, but try not to be too hard on yourself especially when those actions require impractical levels of clairvoyance. I've seen alot of personal improvement from character deaths, TPK's and sudden campaign ends that I've committed or experienced, and it's nice to have the disappointment and unsatisfactory outcomes and personal feelings be deemed natural, rather than a mark of failure. Also, I'm pretty sure that airborne poison could be avoided with any one of the myriad of wind spells, but that's not a conversation for here. Thank you for reading my comment, I hope it was useful.
My very first level 1 party was wiped out by goblins, clearly I am the best GM! As a side note that group doesn’t let me GM for them anymore, but I found another party and am slightly less prone to murdering them
I remember a TPK we had several years ago. My ex was the DM, and she'd worked for months on the campaign, she had plans for us up until level 12 at least. We lasted two hours(To clarify, two hours within the game world, we managed a session and a half). Between the dice hating me, our druid, and our fairy assassin, the paladin forgetting the warning he'd been given five minutes earlier, and our barbarian deciding that going into an epic rage as the walls fell was the perfect response we had no chance.
I'm kinda surprised you didn't mention the "everyone wakes up in a jail cell" or something. I've done that, but only cause it was bad guys that would have done that and they wanted to feed the adventurers to their dragon. They were all at 1 hp and had to escape on their own and be all stealthy trying to escape. One of the best player deaths I've had was a player that time and time again Leroy Jenkins every battle. There were arms coming out of the walls and pillars with a huge demon at the end of the room. This player, an assassin type, runs in by himself to hit the demon once. He got grabbed and absolutely destroyed. The team tried to save him, but I had the demon choose to do a coup de grace instead of going for another player since it was a demon. That player had to make a new character and played differently from then on.
I used a lot of prophetic dreams through an NPC the party rescued and took care of. They were always vague, but after the first few things related to dreams happened and the players (way later) connected the dots, suddenly they went over everything this little girl said WITH SUCH VIGOR! It was all set up to be memories of a destroyed timeline. The final BBEG they were going to face off against was one that in a different timeline won against the party. I decided that the wizard of the party would've spent his entire lifetime researching time magic and eventually changed some key events to give the CURRENT party a better chance at defeating this entity. Regretfully the game ended due to a falling out with some players before I could get to the final confrontation, but it's still been one of my longest running games with some of the coolest plot points I made imo.
Sometimes we'll start over, but there are requirements for that. If it's a complete screw up on my part as DM, I own it. Sometimes I haven't described the situation of environment as well as I thought. Sometimes there is a misunderstanding of a spell (specifically the radius or something like that). Sometimes it's a permanent thing. But we try to prevent it because we don't play often and it's hard enough to keep up with things sometimes.
Apart from back in the late 70's when we were kids and didn't understand the game properly and we TPK'd every session... they can only happen in my games through a pretty much dedicated run of dumbass decisions and I honestly can't remember having one in the past decade. Apart from the "Special Ones". People say that "railroading" and forcing a deliberate TPK are both bad things for a DM to do. I did both at the same time and my players considered it one of the best adventures they ever played. My campaigns are pretty plot literate, and heavy on the narrative. Lots of linear threads and goals broken down into "Books" or "Volumes" or whatever someone wants to call them. Between each major plot line I throw in a couple of things: 1) a couple of weeks of free time for the players to chase any ideas they may want to follow up on, and 2) occasional "Cut Scenes"... basically one shots where they play other characters that I have prepared, going on a mission that may be involved in the overall plot but outside their immediate impact. (These can also provide campaign literate "back up" PCs. So, should one of the main PCs die, they can skip to one of the ones they've already played within the campaign... excellent way to avoid the "So... why are we doing all this" crap of integrating a new party member.) One such cut scene involved them playing a group of spies taking a secret document through enemy lines and delivering it to a military commander... fairly standard fayre. The campaign itself was about the players' homeland defending against an invading force that had failed to conquer them a hundred or so years before and were back to finish the job... under new ownership... I pushed them through a very specific route, and since they were all rogues and not particularly keen on fighting military units, this was fairly easy. One by one they died in the castle grounds and the last one fell on a stone staircase just yards from the gateway that would have led to his escape and success in his mission. It was only toward the end of the session, that one of the players started to realise that the map looked familiar... and when the last guy died on the stairs... he realised that it was EXACTLY in the position in a very similar (though badly damaged and ruined after 100 years) skeleton in a very similar castle that they had searched weeks before in order to find... "the lost scroll"... I'd just aged the map significantly, and placed it the opposite way round. all the PCs had died exactly where the ancient remains had been found and it was only when I described how the last body was laying that the rest of them suddenly worked it out. The "cut scene" was taking place a hundred years earlier during the OTHER war, and it was basically just a bit of flavour to show them what had led to their previous adventure. The unexpected upshot of this was that the players seemed to become even more invested in the overall campaign goal. Unless you are a novice... IF you are allowing TPK's to happen on Random Encounters with no back up plan... you are no longer a "GM;" great or otherwise. You are a "DM" and that doesn't stand for Dungeon Master... you are merely a "Dice Monitor." Here's a box for your stuff, hand in your ID at reception.
Had a TPK in my most recent Lancer campaign. Had the squad "come to" in a cryo bay aboard a space station orbiting Mars. They continue on missions as normal, until they stumble upon derelict cruiser, one last seen over a decade ago. On board, they start finding some oddly familiar mechs, weapons, etc... and bodies, bodies in particularly familiar uniforms. Now the crew of cloned pilots get to try and reconcile their deaths with the new lease on life they've (somehow) been given.
I have a general rule in my games. "I won't try to kill your characters, but I won't give you plot armor if you decide to make a dumb decision." I also give them warning, both in AND out of game, if what they are doing is a really bad idea. If we take the idea of the party dying to a random encounter because they decided not to take weapons, I'll have different NPC's tell them that they should bring stuff cause of various rumors they've heard or various encounters they had nearly escaped from. I once had a TPK happen due to a boss monster where the major driving force before the fight was that if they had a certain weapon (which they had all the resources in the world to find) it would make the fight extremely easy. Instead they decided "We've got this" despite having, I kid you not, 12 NPC's and 4 out of game warnings that this would go poorly, the last one literally stating "This creature will kill you if you don't get the weapon, that's the point of the mission". Most of the players were like "fair, you did warn us. It was still really fun though!" and then this one guy stood up and said "Not cool trying to kill out characters dude." I looked him dead in the eye "I gave you over a dozen warnings, the last of which I literally told you that you would die without the weapon. I don't like that we TPK'd either, but I'm not going to hand you plot armor cause you made a stupid choice. If you don't like it you're more than free to leave, doors right over there. Now if you'll excuse me, we've got new characters to roll."
TPK are needed. My very first TPK was in a Fight back in D&D 3.5. Our team. A Dwarven Fighter, a Half-Elf Ranger, a Human Rogue, Elven Psionic fought a Villain that obtained a mighty relic called Tooth of Tarrasque wich gave him insanely Strenght after he stabbed himself with it. So instead of fleeing from him, we tried to stop him and got absolutely murdered in 5 Rounds. Our Fighter dropped on the first Attacks, me the Ranger dropped after i took the hit for our Elven Psionic and the Rogue was the only one trying to run off but got oneshotted in the fifth Round after the Villain threw a Spear shaped Rock at him wich impaled him due to a critical hit. We learned at that day, sometimes we have to run from fights and wait for the best time to strike back
Had a TPK literally my first session as a DM. I'm running the lost mine of Phandelver right now as my first game, and I originally had 3 of my friends as players (now 5) and the 3 goblins that ambushed the characters (which I reduced from 4 goblins btw) just... completely wiped them out. I told them they woke up to find their stuff stolen, with the exception of one player who in one short encounter decided she did NOT want to be a wizard and got to switch her next character to a fighter.
I liked this video. In the past I found your videos kinda angry and pompous. This was a nice, positive video with lots of good advice. I will have to tune in again!
the "Dream" sequence/resurrection could, if there is a Paladin/Cleric/ divine char in the part, be a 'vision' from the diety showing a warning. It doesn't have to be a 'dream' and that all the characters had. This way, you can let the one char RP out what their vision was (which actually had all the players involved instead of just a narrative to one player) and have the party discuss the ramifications of it. - but yes also agree that is a one in a campaign type resolution. Alternatively I have seen it set up as a 'Challenge' between dieties to "resolve" some dispute between them and had the 'mortals' act out and resolve the conflict letting the dieties to abide by the results. Then the dieties 'resurrect' the party and reveal the 'challenge' and then send them on their merry way.
I've actually designed a game that's based around PC deaths you as a player have your own stat/skill sheet and each time you die you start out at lv1 regardless of the general party lv But each time your soul rembers your previous lives so you get a small stats boost and 1 skill as a legacy skill
It creates an interesting new dynamic because well yes the new hero will be slightly stronger once he gets to catch up in lv until then the party is having to deal with keeping him alive at the same time So 5 pc's all at lv 10 and one dies so instead of fighting a cr 10 battle it is now a cr8 battle because average lv is now 8 and well 4 lv10 and 1 lv1 can probably handle it is the lv1 is not stupid or very unlikely
if you're using the "it's all a dream" approach, it might be interesting to make it so the characters had been trapped by a evil wizard that was making them have those dreams and the party now has to escape the place they're in or something like that, could result in a good session.
My group has of late turned somewhat morally towards the opportunistic side, their characters all started out neutral or good but nowadays they lean more on the neutral evil side of things so what I'm planning in sense of a TPK-szenario should it occur would be a redemption in hell sort of thing. They would wake up in limbo and be told they are gonna be send to hell but have a chance of turning their fates. Returning to life isn't on the table at that point (unless they really impress me with unconvential hijinks) but the epilogue of that campaign would be them avoiding an eternity in hell and maybe entering elysium, perhaps joining their deceased loved ones or ascending to a higher existence. I think that would be a good send-off for a TPK, it could involve past slain foes and people they wronged or failed to save, idk the idea seems cool to me.
In my current game, we TPKed on our 1st encounter. Our dm had a balanced encounter with lots of goblons but we all rolled terrible on our initiative. I didn't get an attack before I was out. So we started over & he removed 1 goblin. We rolled amazing on our initiative. We wiped out the goblins with hardly a scratch. Fast forward a year, we are chasing down a horde of dragons who are terrorising the country. Random encounter along an open road with of course a dragon. Again we suck at initiative. Dragon downs 4 out of 5 of our party with it's first breath attack. I then suggest that this is my characters dream. Everyone love the idea. My guy now has a harder time over coming fear of dragons. It all works narratively & best part was the DM didn't have to suggest it. He is not above killing our characters, but he wants it to be fun.
Was running The Death House for the 5e D&D Ravenloft campaign. All the players save for one were brand new. The boss at the end of the adventure was triggered by the one experienced player, ironic, and it then killed them all one by one. In hindsight a dream sequence would've probably been best for that.
My personal opinion of total party kills is that if it happens because of bad rolls and choices a tpk is fine or if the party makes bad choices. Go with it if it happens but never force it to happen.
We once had a player caused TPK. The player rolled really badly in Warhammer 40K version of a sanity check, went paranoid and blew up the whole party (she was the demolition expert). The rest of us, including the GM, just kind of sat there staring at her a bit helplessly.... (She'd turned off her comm device and refused to believe any of us were real). I mean... it was valid but there went 8 months of game play :P
I've never had a TPK as a DM. Came close once, but I didn't have to fudge the rolls to let the party win. Never had a TPK as a player either. If we lost half the party we called it a tough fight. I think I've been lucky to have groups that recognize they aren't strong enough to take on a dragon at this time, and avoid fighting what we can't happen.
I had an almost TPK incident with my party some time ago, I had setup the encounter with X many melee, X many archers, X many casters... the party kinda half-assed investigated what was going on and charged the temple head on. The wizard necromancer having done sense life on most of the armored melee and getting no life reading ASSUMED they were undead so she went in slinging anti-undead spells... they were dread gaurds (constructs) and 2 rounds wasted, there was a defense cleric, 2 battle wizards and 2 ballista crews inside so they were met with a LOT of ranged resistance. As the fight progressed the wizard went down, the duskblade was badly hurt, the fighter went down and the party made the call to flee as they saw they were losing badly. The duskblade for whatever reason decided to charge a spell and jump back into the door and throw it, I personally saved her arse by fudging the damage she took which was initially putting her at -20 or so, i put her at -7 and unconscious. The party learned they are in fact NOT immortal and started exercising more caution when going into situations.
Great advice! I got a lot of inspiration out of this...only trouble is how do you deal with an encounter where only 2 or 3 out of 5 PCs died? Something I've struggled to find a solution to.
We had a TPK recently. Entirely our own fault, we split the party and got what we deserved. The GM openly asked what we wanted to do - Follow-Up, new adventure, dramatic escape with a bit of a hand-wave, etc. In the end, we decided to do new characters on another continent in the world, and we took the opportunity to rotate in some new players to the group. I’m fully expecting some references to the last campaign to pop up at some point… There’s a suit of Power Loader Full Plate sitting, battery-less, in a jungle somewhere on a continent to the west of us…
I had this one adventure where the players had entered another character's mindspace and were acting as fellow adventureres the NPC knew in her adventuring days but used their own stats. They played out this mission that ended with everyone but the NPC dead, so when one of her friends died they were expelled from the body and watched the rest of the scene unfold.
Never had to do a TPK as a DM, but ive always said, if more than half of the Players die, keep calm carry on and let the monster do its thing, inevitably resulting in the TPK. My players agree ot would also be the better option for the entire group as they prefer to restart equal than to be a carry for the group. They say the same thing when faced with a pretty high level monster. Death or Glory and as a DM i do reward them heavily if they just scrape past the verge of a monster that could probally TPK them
I've found another good way to prevent a TPK is have one or more of the PCs wake up finding themselves imprisoned by the enemies, clinging to life, perhaps being held for ransom or as a bargaining chip in a prisoner exchange with the PCs' patrons/faction. Obviously, this only works in limited circumstance (a PC who was incinerated by a dragon or eaten by sharks probably isn't "waking up from a coma" later on), but in many cases it's believable that at least one of the characters could have survived and get a second chance to escape and/or raise their party. Since they will certainly have been stripped of their possessions and possibly permanently maimed/disabled, this has the advantage of penalizing them mechanically while still giving the story a chance to continue if you and the players really want to carry on with those characters. The PC's are powerful people, after all (especially if you've been running this campaign for years), and powerful people are much more valuable alive than dead. Or if they aren't so powerful, perhaps the enemies view them as valuable slave labor, if that's a paradigm you're willing to run in your game. The disadvantage to this strategy is that it forces you to chose between sidelining the plot you actually want to be running in favor of a prison break or prisoner exchange adventure, or simply skipping over all that which is a bit less fulfilling. But it is a good option if you don't want to do something cheesy/cliche like a "dream sequence," or blatantly gamey like "your characters get resurrected by the local church and they took 20k gold from you to pay for it."
im actually planning to do a one shot that ends with a tpk, later i'll start a campaign in the same world that revolves around the thing that the oneshot characters failed to do, its such a fun idea
I've never had a FULL TPK, but I had several PK's in our big game that really hurt (but they were justified, if frustrating). Our really amazing GM had long since told us, "I'm not TRYING to kill the players, especially in random encounters, but I'm not going to stop you from dying if you really fuck up".
My inclination is that I'd be a lot more likely to use something like the dream sequence if it was a party who was new to roleplaying in general, and maybe to a lesser degree a given system or setting in particular. If the death is caused by something that the party would know but they haven't internalized yet, or if by someone not knowing or realizing something about how things work, it seems less problematic for me to go for the mulligan. As a bonus, it might serve as a good lesson on what happens when you don't follow a commonsense rule while still allowing them to continue the story or with those characters. For other situations, my go-to thinking is about consequences. Assuming the TPK doesn't make for a suitably dramatic story, and/or the party doesn't want to be done there, I'll think about what might hurt as characters without being a direct physical consequence like that. Maybe a favorite NPC was maimed or killed while defending them, maybe the town they were operating out of gets attacked and pillaged by the big bad while they're out of commission recuperating after a rescue, maybe resources they had plans for suddenly get spend or are damaged keeping them alive, or maybe who or whatever ended up saving them is either something you really don't want to be in debt to, or who being associated with will cause problems. Heck, maybe the means the being uses imposes some problem on them (e.g. being revived through corrupted magic) or the being takes the opportunity to add one (e.g. while they were unconscious and it was saving them, it also bound them to it in some way). Maybe one could even use time itself: it could have taken the PCs some time to recover or be revived, during which they aren't able to do anything. After awakening from being incapacitated in such a way, they discover that their rivals and enemies had no such limitation and were able to act freely during that time. These ways, you don't lose the narrative or characters, but they hardly get away from their deaths scot free.
My party is much more of a Leverage crew in their mission statement and approach to situation. Only 1 character as muscle w the rest having different specializations, but as adventurers they're all CAPABLE of fighting. But anyway we dodged a BIG blss through wits and deception and some minor explosives, but one day we wanted a noncanon one shot and did a "what if" boss fight for if the baddie caught onto us... It went into a near tpk w only 2 of us left at 1 hp. This made us feel extra glad in the Smoke And Mirrors approach we did take with it in actual canon-campaign.
*Thanks for watching!* Let us know in the comments below your experiences of a TPK in your TTRPGs, whether as the GM or as a player.
Sorry but no. This video has lost me as a viewer. This is NOT Great GM advice.
TPK can happen - but are often just a GM not knowing how to prevent them without having boring Enconters.
There are a lot of Tricks a GM can do to prevent them and manage them.
But, on the "Dream" I disagree - Dreams are good for "GM Hints" and such, but not for that. A God coming down ressurecting them in exchange for "physical Services" is more satisfying and less awkward.
If your Players realize when you "rescue" them, you failed as GM because of that, not because of the TPK.
Encounters should be 50/50 when both sides "just Roll". Any "Trickery" should feel good for the Players - and counterbalanced by the GM with some also tricky Moves on the Opponents side. I had this Bard-like BBEG who was based on the Joker - and he had 3 Gnome Sorcerer teleporting in in a Conga-line and go "FIREBALL" around all 3 seconds while Mistystep around for some Time and then Teleport out again. So, from originally 3x3 Fireballs I made em do a "YaaaaY!" in the Middle and replaced a Fireball-Salvo with some Magical Fireworks cheering the Boss, granting him 3 Times Inspiration.
Also, the Players had the chance to charm that Group and pull em on their Side - what noone did.
So, they're 3 Fireballs short on the Enemys Life and desperatly searching for some hint.
Originally, the Traps laid out were well concealed, but I let one Player trip over them - hidden Barrels with explosive Oil the BBEG planned to detonate magically when the Players came too close. So, I let the Players note them and use them against the Boss with "dispell Magic", which Wizzard took instead of Counterspell, mixing them both up.
That Way, they also got rid of the 3 Sorcs as "colletaral".
Now, they were far in the positives for Winning, so I just let the BBEG throw some "Stunning Cloud Grenades" and in the Rounds none of them could Act he just started mocking them, walking over and tormenting them. He took one Eye, one Ear, one Tusk and one Nose; one after one. Players went ballistic about that, and I could distribute in this "combat Pause" the Damage and such as needed.
Now, one Round before they could move again, he smiles and Chain Lightning them full Palpatine Style until they finish him off.
I may add that I do not say "He does Spell XY" instead of just describing what happens - so, if you want to interact (Counterspell f.E. or the simple Kick to the Groin), do it then when I describe it. And yes, I encourage Players to interrupt me - as long as it is not interrupting the Gameflow itself. That Way, I have the "Timeflow" in my Hands and can do "fast sequences" as well as the "MaxPayne-Focustime".
Also, this Way lets you alter the Sources of Damage or such without harming the Balance of the Crunch.
Like the Volley of 30 Arrows incoming on our Rogue (Groupaction, AoE-Effect. He did it on purpose to distract them and give the Party Time to cross the open Field. So, he used "Evasion" and that rolled - unsuccesful and hidden to all than me (still, he rolled it!) - his Throw for it. I could have describe how he gets nailed, but I choose that one:
As the black Wall of Arrows comes close, you hear the whizzing Sound of their Feathers in the Wins - and your Reflexes kick in. The Arrows come towards you, 40 Meters, 20 Meters, 10 meters....5.....and you srat see the single Arrows in the Pattern. You start moving, but, as you are used to it but still cursing the inconvinience of it, your Body feels slow and heavy. 2 Meters and you turn right, the first two Arros pass by and a high piched Wizz is to hear. you duck a bit, a Third pass your Head, brushing through your Hair as you lift your right foot to evade the Arrow slamming with a "Thud" into the Ground. with the left, you jump up, accelerating and turning in the Air whils 3 - 4 - 7 -9 Arrows pass past you. The Sound of multiple Arrows hitting the Ground appears, but for you it is the Rhythm to dance by. Your Body turns, and you land again, your legs deaccelerating your Body as you land, like Springs eating up the Force you moved with - and the first little numbness sets in. You see the next 4 Arrows, but with a cocky turning of your Head, your long elven Hair flowing around, you evade them seemingly with a simple move of your head. Then, you realize that one Arrow that was left - and you need to pull in your belly, forming a sudden Question Mark with your Body for it to - sucessfully - pass by instead of jamming itself right in your Liver - for the Price of you feeling some more Muscles snap inside your Body due to tis extreme Strain you put on them. You suffer 34 Damage due to this.
But, far in the distance you hear the Enemy Commanders furious Voice scolding his Archers for missing you.while you see your Party darting into the next Cover unseen. Time to get out and follow them.
Using this, you have so much freedom for compensatig good and bad Rolls on all sides, compensate pure Idiocy and such, TPK will be more of a concious, consentual decision rather than some "mistake". The only Circumstance a Char should "just Die" is when all involved just act horrendous stupidly. I can not tell how often I got some Players "saved for Interrogation by the BBEG" and such. And no, I am not a "nice GM" - I am the Guy who is known for his capability of displaying extreme cruelty whilst keeping fair.
Last Thing I GMd my Party got 3 Times a "Death" which forced them to Retreat and later on attack from an other Vector with heightened Security until they were partly succesful (Shadowrun). The Money they made were eaten up mostly for Preperation (2 more as planned) and the Medical bill. They bareley made any money when it would not have been for them to "grab some Paydata on the Way as well" - so, it went like I planned it.
Funny how you do not suggest fudging the dice or revealing to the players how you did fudge the damage dice show them a behind the screen point of view. I also dont think you explained why you should keep tpks in your game. Let us say for example the game is dnd and the players decide to fight a dragon when all they had to do was retrieve something from its horde and the dragon breathes fire you say the damage is 36 show them the damage actually was 56 they survive and run away after retrieving the item when you remind them that was their goal. Well didnt i avoid the tpk and still get my point across?
As a player, and insane as this sounds, I actualy like a TPK from time to time. Does it suck when it happens? Sure. But I much much rather see my character die, than GM taking it easy on me. Sounds patronizing and I don't like it - there are even some GM's that fudge dice to avoid it .... and that sucks. I know GM's (normal GM's atleast) hate TPK's and deaths in general, as it screws up with the campaign they worked on. And I understand - but a dream sequence out of nowhere is too much IMO. Maybe if it is sudden and short and planned (like in Final Destination movies where it only takes first 5 min of the movie and it is only a way to set it up), then it COULD work.
What my point is - I like a failure to be an option - and I want to believe a GM will see it through, if TPK occurs, and not pussyfoot arround it (pardon the language). And that includes "meaningless" deaths aswell ... D&D world can be a dangerous place - and if my character falls of his horse and dies ... well ... that's part of the "realism". This is the game afterall and not a book - so death must be present or I just get borred hornestly.
EDIT: I must stress tho - that I don't like a game with a lot of random encounters or meaningless checks. Example: We established my character can jump over 2m gap ... so there should be no checks when I'm jumping over 1m chasm....my guy can do that automaticaly (despite that, strictly by the rules I would die if I roll double 1's). If the distance is 1.8m ... or maybe 2.2m or distance is unknown or there are other factors - like weather or my character is wounded... then yes check is defenitley in order ... and if I fall and die ... I die.
@@davidmoseley1082 Do not lie to your players. An NPC can lie to your players characters in the story but when YOU lie about the dice it is YOU lying to your players. Would you be ok if your players lied about their dice rolls to you? Do not think so. I roll in the open for everything that would be perceptible by people, combat rolls, saves, ability checks that are not mental etc. The things rolled out of sight are things you could not perceive with your senses. You make a deception check and my NPC makes an insight check against it then it will be rolled out of sight because you would have no idea if your deception worked or not till the NPC's actions make the outcome perceptible.
As to why TPK should be kept in the game that is simple.
1. Players learn things from TPK's. They learn their limits and they learn strategy and tactics. If you never die why improve your tactical play and do better?
2. It provides stakes to the action. If you will not kill the party then there are no stakes. You might as well just take the rolling of combat out and just role play the combat entirely descriptively with the party always being victorious. At that point you have taken the "Game" part out of Role Playing Game.
3. TPK's can be great story opportunities for later campaigns. My best example. In my campaigns I run them in my own world co created by me and my brother. Plenty of places in the game world have ended up named for former characters and parties and their failures and successes over the 30+ years the world has been going. Had a newer player ask about an area close to where the party was named Feldrin's Folly. The place was renamed after an adventuring party all died there. The player who played Feldrin in a campaign 2 decades before was at the table and so I asked hm to tell the story about the tragic end of the party Feldrin was the leader of. Was a wonderful hour of storytelling that ensued.
4. A lot of players will not like a campaign they feel does not challenge them. A campaign where a DM is totally against TPK's and will not do them is pretty obvious and will alienate those players and they will leave. I know I would not play in a campaign where TPK's are not possible due to the DM coddling us players.
One of my characters was doing a spooky divination wizard. At the start of the campaign I gave him the gift of prophecy from his god. We were doing a harder campaign then I normally run. Basically he had 1 charge where he could rewind up to 24 hours, that part of the session being a vivid dream of events to come.
None of the other characters knew about it, so when he shouted "NO!" as the 3rd PC fell and everyone was clearly feeling super stressed they got a nice surprise of the Wizard waking up and telling them their fate, enough to change it and win. They loved it and they enjoyed the reveal that this spooky character had it the whole time and sacrificed it for his friends.
That's a fun idea. Super memorable.
That is very clever
🤔 not bad
Cool! 😃
This is actually super cool. Was there a cost to this gift or was it freely given?
Free idea for post-TPK adventure: all of the characters end up in the same afterlife, despite their varying faiths/alignments. Turns out there's some kind of aberration which has corrupted whatever mechanism sorts souls into the correct afterlife, and the local psychopomp is willing to give you free tickets back to the prime Material of you deal with it.
I was thinking more like the enemies start hitting for non-lethal and it becomes an escape. I have some slaver organizations in a world I setup. No guarantees that the slavers will be what the players encounter, but if they do they will only attempt to knock out the players. Key is of course they should notice before the TPK that their enemies are actively trying to avoid killing them in favor of knocking them out.
Isn't this what Guy talked about, in some fashion at least?!
This remembers me together again
As long as the DM's girlfriend isn't running a group for the first time and has a giant Owl Bear in the afterlife that expects all of the players to have sex with each other to get back to their lives. Ya, it was a thing.
@@TheMindBullets well, that's... What? I would absolutely have broken character and refused to keep playing in that situation. I hope no one got severely traumatized.
if you make it a dream sequence, end your session, review what they did and make subtle changes to what they are going to encounter. With the right tweaks / circumstances it might be possible for the PCs to believe it was some form of divine foreshadowing. E.g. The temple they entered was in perfect condition. Next time they arrive at it, its clearly been a ruin for a thousand years (so clearly they were in a dream before, that now *makes sense*). Do they remember the inscription above the door that has now faded beyond recognition? Don't make it a straight "redo".
Dragons of Dreams had hints of this, playing the same encounters over and over, some PCs dying, then mysteriously being alive again a moment later, then all of them showing up to the throne room at once. God, it was great.
We had the "it was a dream" situation once, but we were all in a pretty dark place IRL at that moment (for reasons related to the situation in our country, not sure I want to go into details) and we just wanted to have it, logically or not.
I've only been in one truly near-TPK that I feel blame on an individual player was justified. A player in the party had repeatedly gotten bored of their characters and swapped, and the GM told them the last time they asked that the character would need to die if they wanted to change again. What happened next session was that we were going into a high-level enemy fortress through an obviously trapped backdoor. The rogue walked up and was about to start disabling the traps when this player stated that they charged the door, setting off all of the traps on the door before anyone had time to back away and only two characters had survived the dozen lightning runes. The GM promptly stopped the session, kicked the player out of the group (this was an online D&D group) and after about 30 minutes had it so that a divine favor was given to the healers who had happened to be the survivors with enough resurrects to bring the party back. This was a campaign that had gone on for 2 and a half years at that point if I remember correctly, so no one was wanting to start over because one person decided to ruin everyone's fun.
At that point you just retcon the previous 5 minutes and go back to "rogue is disabling traps." No need for literal divine intervention in the narrative.
@@NessOnett8 having divine intervention justified the sudden disappearance of the character. Otherwise they would need some way to remove the character. Easy solution, Deus ex machina.
Honestly a decent amount of this falls on the dm for not just letting the player switch out their character. Obviously the player is a selfish asshole for doing that and should have sought other means but it's also kind of a dick move on the dm's part to pigeonhole them into a character that they didn't want to play
@@wilhelmkreis6578 Its entirely the fault of the player. If anything, the DM was too nice in allowing the player to change more than once. Allwoing a player to do that creates a ton of extra work and disrupts the narrative, party dynamic, party and encounter balance, ect. Why should the Dm have to deal with a player who constantly changes characters and forces the DM to do extra work coming up with narrative reasons to remove a character and introduce a new one, rebalancing encounters, ect, just because some idiot couldn't make up his mind about what he wanted to play and stick with it. This kind of shit effects not only the DM, but other player too, who might have picked their classes and abilities based on what other people were doing to balance the party. The DM was perfectly justified in not letting him switch again without dying. Honestly, that DM must have been a saint because the majority I know would have kicked a player that disruptive and self-centred out way sooner, including myself.
@@Dadpai I think it's fine to weave between characters as long as you do it gracefully.
I laughed at your dream sequence segment. I did exactly that in my last campaign. (We were learning a new system and hadn't figured out the balance yet.) I laughed harder when you said that you should only do that once every ten years. That was exactly how long that campaign lasted! Good to know that I'm good for another dream sequence. ;)
recently our gm did a one off for a friends bachelor party, where we were not playing the characters in our normal campaign. we went full murder hobo and we were slaughtered like animals - it was a good way for the gm to show new players that he wont protect from your own stupidity forever. then when we went back to our normal campaign in the next session, everyone was a bit more cautious as they were playing characters near and dear to their hearts
I am a fairly inexperienced DM, I've started a handful of campaigns before but never finished them before the group disbands due to real life interfering. I started my current game about a year ago with two friends who had never played before. The plan was to give them some easy combat as a sort of tutorial that also thrusts them into the story: the two characters would meet on the road, moments before a third traveler with a blue cap yells for help while being attacked by wolves. What followed was a mix between the players being inexperienced, me overestimating their abilities by having too many wolves, and really, REALLY, bad dice rolls. It was a TPK in the first 10 minutes of their first ever D&D game.
So, I called a quick break and tried to think of how to salvage the situation, and hatched a plan. When we resumed, I started with one of the characters waking from a dream, shortly before meeting the other player she recognized from her dream, and who she witnessed die to some wolves, but he had no idea who she was (to this day she still hasn't told him about the dream yet either). They went to a town, dealt with some punk kids, accepted a job to run an errand to a lumber mill, etc. However on the way to the mill, they heard a voice calling for help. They round a bend and see the same traveler with the blue cap being attacked by wolves. This time though, there were less wolves than the dream; the alpha is missing from the scene. Having a better grasp of what to do, and with better dice rolls, they bested the wolves and saved the blue capped man. He looked at them, thanked them by name, and the session ended.
Now, originally this traveler was a minor quest giver to direct the players to a nearby farm, but after the TPK I completely dropped the old adventure hooks I had in mind and ran with this. The traveler is now some mysterious wandering wizard, possibly even an avatar of some celestial being, who warns them of dark times approaching. The alpha wolf has yet to appear again, but the seed is there for the secret villain of this arc to be a creature that appears as a shadow wolf corrupting the forest (still ironing out the details for the final encounter), that will have been 'foretold' from session 1.
So far so good, the 'it was all a dream' approach worked well this time around.
Reminds me of a story I'm working on, where a group of adventurers help a mysterious Druid in exchange for ancient wisdom. She teaches them by forcibly putting them to sleep and running them through the same scenario over and over, ending in a different, and entirely unforeseen, TPK every time, seemingly no matter what they do. It's like she's a really bad GM or something, I guess.
Whenever someone says "total TPK", I can't help but be reminded some people still say "ATM machine".
RIP in peace is another one that comes to mind
PIN number
HIV Virus
Those types of mistakes give me headaches. Gotta need a cup of chai tea to process this.
GM, "Right, so you've all been slain by the Valley Ogres... Roll up Ogre characters."
I have honestly never experienced a TPK. As a player I have gotten close a couple of times. Most often, it was the epic final battle, which made it a blast. There was that chance that we could actually lose. As a GM, my campaigns are more often role-play heavy and players are allowed some independence of action, so TPK opportunities are actually rare.
That said, in my last session, my players entered a cave that kept getting warmer, and then they realized they were at the base of a volcano. Immediately, one of them said, "We're walking into a TPK!" and they fled the cave. No monsters, no lava flows, no immediate threat, they just ran. We ended the session with the players warily returning to investigate. The irony is that, unless they make a massive number of stupid mistakes, like jumping into the lava, there is no way a TPK will happen. The fact that it is a volcano has no real relationship to the actual plot. It made me laugh my ass off, especially as the closest they have gotten to a TPK so far was almost accidentally blowing up their own ship.
Next time my players TPK I'm going to use dream sequence. Than when they 'win' on the next go round, say 'now you wake up'. Groundhogs day them with an unknown enemy trapping then in a dream sequence
I think if you're doing a dream sequence from the get go, give a couple of hints associated with dreams: describe numbers blurry, besmirched out generally hard to read, have one (maybe old and generally confused) NPC have a complete non sequitur in the middle of the conversation or just something akin to that Matrix scene with the two cats déjà vú.
Make the players uncomfortable and then give them some relief - at least until one of them gets the idea to wonder why the hell that thing just happened.
@@adahnliegl740 My understanding of the idea is this is Etrigan's clever way of hiding the dream contingency to save the party from the TPK as if it were planned sequence. A very clever idea, I must say.
Don't overdo the dream sequence thing though, it'll actually piss off your players, once or twice is friggin hilarious though. I did this once, had them all 'wake up' to their city under attack by flaming hot skinned winged beasts with riders just laying hell to the place, they were slinging spells and using resources and doing everything they could to stave off the assault, when it looked grim one the creatures let out an ear piercing screech that jolted the entire party from their sleep, they all woke up in a cold sweat, still tired feeling unrested, when they got outside the rest of the townfolk looked pretty shaken and tired. The players hated the whole "it was just a dream" but at the same time they told me they loved it as it was part of the story of the world we were playing in. I have to admit, hearing "I freaking hate you so much right now" was pretty satisfying cause they were quite literally on the edge of their chairs for the 'encounter'. They spent the rest of the session researching how that could happen to a whole town and learned things were getting serious since the BBEG had access to people that could walk and modify dreams
I used the "You are now in the underworld and have to escape to regain your lives" in a Theros campaign to great effect. It was very fun and reinforced the feel of the setting (Greek mythology).
This could be done with any kind campaign really. In a more generic setting you can a devil or powerful fey swipe up their souls and then the characters gotta get out of hell or this beings realm.
My campaign is actually starting like that. Each person was a level 3 pirate that was doing his own thing when somehow or another they were killed in unheroic ways, and so they were sent to purgatory which takes the form of ships traveling on the river Styx. They then have to escape and regain their lives
I ran a game for 5 new players and TPKed them last week. It was an unfortunate but very deserved outcome to the Lost Mines of Phandelver. They had failed to succeed at anything and cause a lot of havoc. They didn't deal with any of the bosses (Klarg, Iarno, etc) and they burned down some of the houses in the town (not entirely by accident either). In the end, after 6 sessions and getting no closer to any goals, I had to decide that the enemy forces regrouped and planned an ambush. During that, their luck was aboslutely awful - 4 skeletons, 1 nothic and Iarno the mage were able to take the five 3rd level characters out without taking any casualties (the party didn't even kill one skeleton - that's how rotten their luck was).
Oh, in the end they had great fun and agreed that their characters were hopelessly lost and poorly motivated. Got lots of messages saying it was great fun and hope to get completely wrecked again in the next game.
they tought they were playing GTA haha
Recently I had a player charge in and get 1 shot by a boss, after that battle ensued, only barely alive person left out of the battle was 1 player, who looked quite a heroic in that situation. I think TPKs are ofc a possibility but close death scenarios bind players to their characters.
I think the "Do or die" event used as "Session One" story opening has its value.
It is an early test: Do the characters work as a group?
If they do not, then it is best to detect the problem early, as it is a good reason to start the campaign over, with the character creation getting more focus on the ability to work together.
One of my favorites is the party being revived by a shady necromancer to which they now owe a great debt. Or, if it's a pirate campaign, let the players respawn in Davey Jones' Locker from which they have to escape (Pirates of the Caribbean style )
I'm currently running a Grim Hollow campaign, heavily inspired by the dread and atmosphere of Darkest Dungeon. They players are playing inquisitors working for an organization that fights to protect the world from the horrors around it. Pulling zero punches is the name of the game here, and the players were appropriately warned multiple times before beginning the campaign, and we all agreed to play a dark, dreadful, and most of all, deadly campaign. I'm being absolutely merciless, and if they all die, they all die. Another team of inquisitors will just pick up where they left off. It's pretty satisfying to see them play really smart and do their best to survive the ordeal, we are all loving it so far.
That's incredible! I've always liked the idea of a Darkest Dungeon TTRPG dynamic. It's one of my favorite games of all time, and it would translate beautifully into TTRPGs with the right party. Glad it's going well for you!
I've only backtracked once, although not a TPK although it nearly was and half the party died, now if it had been the players fault via their decision making or just the fate of the Dice then i would have stood by what happened, but a couple of hours after the session I was re-reading through my notes and the campaign stuff and noticed that I'd ran the encounter wrong and as a result it was far harder than it was supposed to be, so it wasn't their mistake it was my own and it wasn't just a regular death it was a proper disintigration so it wasn't a job for Revivify or anything they had at their level, so accepting my own mistake, I worked it into the story and gave them a way of bringing the characters back through the help of an important NPC the party was already looking for. Ironically enough the same party did meet it's ultimate end via TPK when through their own actions they got bored of trying to figure out a puzzle and instead decided to just trigger the trap and deal with the results, the result was a surprise Beholder and their subsequent deaths.
One post-TPK rescue I've used: the party is resurrected by a powerful evil creature or faction, one that is a rival or opponent to whatever evil the party has been fighting. They are offered continued existence, but in magical servitude to this evil group (but still on a mission to defeat the BBEG or whoever). When I did this, the party was amazingly motivated to escape this circumstance, which led to some fun side adventures and renewed party interest in the campaign.
We nearly had a TPK in the Descent into Avernus campaign in playing in last week. Thanks to Lulu the Hollyphant and some amazing dice rolls from the warlock, three of six players survived (I wasn't one of them). Fortunately there was a good opportunity to introduce new characters right around the corner. We certainly learned some lessons, and I'm looking forward to trying out my new monk.
Alexa. Play “Hokage’s Funeral”
*-plays broken flute-*
I am a new DM, been watching most of this series a couple years now and about a year and a half ago I was asked to DM to try my hand. Well, after a couple of sessions of pre-level 1 misadventures (PCs were children) and time skipped to level 1 after things started.
Anyway, I ran an adventure from "Rolled & Tolled" and the normal DM decided to go MurderHobo rather than follow the clues they got. So when the uh went to the manor of the Vampress Baroness they had burned through resources. Got through a tough fight (they should have breezed through had they not fought the village) they then triggered a trap AND pissed off Vampire Spawn.
TPK.
The "normal" DM blamed me and the adventure for being broken. Then COVID happened and that group broke up. One day, I will share full info in a Horror Story or something...
Nope. That's a TPK that should have happened. Most new DM's pull punches and it sounds like the normal DM counted on you doing that.
In my opinion, pulling punches is a mistake (most of the time). BUT, some nights, all monsters crit with every attack so I'll fudge some of those attacks (or if players have a night where they can't roll above a 10 to hit the monsters, I'll have the monsters miss, too) because I find TPK by dice to be REALLY unsatisfying.
@@urdaanglospey6666 By dice/luck is how mine happened, at least the ones I remember!
Important: never think the players got it. They will think in a completely different direction. They interpreted clues differently, do not find them etc.
I mean yeah its not smart to walk into a vampire manor unprepared but still.
It can feel unfair to players
Also relatively new DM here. In my humble opinion you did the right thing. I bet the seasoned DM was just salty that “you let their character die”…
The "seasoned" DM in my group also tpk'd my game but kinda knew he was when he did it and accepted his fate.
I came close to a tpk last session when the party were fighting four ogres (not dnd btw). The group was split into 1 PC and 5 PCs but had arranged themselves in such a manner that only one ogre could attack each grouping so the 1 (the most experienced and capable fighter) dispatched one ogre by herself without taking any damage and the other 5 killed another ogre whilst taking a little bit of damage. In the meantime (this was happening in a mostly dark dungeon) one of the ogres had tried circling around to ambush the single PC and the fourth ogre had just grabbed a huge piece of stone rubble, as one character ran down some stairs in the dark, failed an easy check and tripped, ending up landing 6ish feet away from that ogre in pitch black darkness. The Ogre threw their stone but luckily missed (because it was dark) and at the end of the round he was surrounded by the group of five. However, through sheer luck on my side of the screen, he knocked out three of those combatants (one hit on the head each, the tank would’ve been outright dead from full HP hadn’t he worn a helmet) without taking any more damage within the next two turns and almost did the same to the fourth PC (druidic healer out of magic) before being dispatched by the roguish PC who had remained in the back throwing knives.
I ended the session with that, because it fit and I also needed to figure out if the last ogre, the boss, was going to abandon his lair or fight the weekend intruders. I am quite curious how they will handle him. They know there’s one more ogre, but they don’t know where and have no idea, if they’ve dealt any damage to him so far. I’d kinda like it if one PC died, but in the end the dice decide.
Anyhow, that was only somewhat related to the topic of the video, which was as always quite interesting.
I literally just did this in a game of starjammer. After an arguement over who should fly the ship, the pilot lost and the gunner took over. Several jumps in and she flew them into a radiation belt and over the next five days the whole crew died of radiation sickness.
At some point, you gotta let them deal with their shit. So we laughed, said good game and discussed what to play next.
Yes, I remember once I was involved in a TPK caused by a stupid decision made by one of the other characters.
Not much, for the GM, to do to save the situation. Difficult to save characters from committing suicide.
@@larsdahl5528 My mantra and my players know it well: I can save you from the dragon. I can save you from the lich. I cannot and will not save you from yourselves.
Are you a teenager? I'm legitimately curious how the fuck people have enough free time to just flippantly throw their campaigns away like this
@@override367 I'm 35. Tabletop gaming is my hobby. This is what I do with my free time. I have no problem ending a campaign because I enjoy building them and I'm also not so attached to them I will do anything to keep them from ending.
I'm not sure if you were trying to offend me, but I'm insulted that you think I'm immature, flippant, or just plain stupid to let a story conclude without a happy ending every time.
@@ShadowKatt Man, I actually wish I was you. It takes me so much motivation for me to even start writing my campaign and setting. I really like dnd, but actually building settings and preparing for sessions feels like a chore to me instead of something enjoyable. Being able to end a campaign like that would be impossible for me, I have huge respect for you.
I love my NPCs. I once had a tag a long monk that I was playing in addition to the party for a couple sessions that saved the group just because the dice rolls said so. Was able to take the aggro of all three Giants, and with the help of patient defence take no damage from any of them allowing the party to gather themselves and take out the giants. I expected them to die, as a means of allowing them to escape, but instead they rallied behind my character, and overcame the odds. And my friends told me how awesome said npc was. they felt a real gratitude and appreciation to this character I had created to be a helpful guide for the start who instead turned into one of the groups closest allies.
Rather than edit my initial comment, I will just add another, as this one is a serious suggestion rather then a toss-off bit of humor:
Never forget the well-used trope of the heroes having somehow wandered into/been trapped by a time loop. In television shows, this sort of plot device is introduced by having everyone die as a result of a seemingly unavoidable catastrophic situation. Then, one of the main characters "wakes up" at some point in the recent past; usually a few hours (or a couple of days at the outside) from the point of the wipe. Other characters are often shown as gaining awareness of the loop one by one after some number of iterations, in others, only the single character is aware and must figure out how to transmit their gained knowledge into the next loop.
The first idea, including the variant where everyone is aware of the loop immediately, is far easier from the role-playing and group participation perspective. But remember, it is most often the case in fiction that with each subsequent failure and "reset" of the loop for "group awareness" situations, the amount of time they have before the SPLAT! (whatever its nature), is continually and successively diminished. Obviously, this only works narratively in certain settings where the DM can constrain PC actions to some degree, because otherwise they can just decide to bugger off Sir Robin style whilst their minstrels mock them mercilessly, and you should have just gone with the "it was all a dream" solution.
Instead, whatever time frame is initially chosen, it should be short enough that all of the elements that lead to the TPK are in play and the forces in motion cannot be avoided easily by simply convincing the group to go the other direction, not open that particular door, don't enter that nebula, etc. It should be long enough, however, that the PCs can explore other avenues of action, and more importantly, discover clues that point them in the correct direction of their single avenue of escape.
You should not necessarily start exponentially shortening the remaining time at first. Instead, you should rather let your inner Evil-DM out for a bit of fun as you again slaughter everyone in the party another time or two in cruel and inventive fashion. But, if the players start becoming more bold and fearless in their own actions in trying to escape this fiendish plot (and they almost certainly will), hopefully at least one of them will realize that a successful escape will almost certainly leave those who died in that last loop thoroughly dead.
This particular possibility of handling a TPK is one that requires both the correct general situation and a small amount of forethought when planning the adventure as to what the nature of the loop is (intentional or accidental), who/what is responsible, and what some possible solutions/avenues of escape might be. You will want more than one of these last considerations, as you don't want to introduce this narrative device only to have your PCs stumble onto the solution on the first go around. Make them sweat it out and feel the stakes a bit by having alternative "correct" solutions up your sleeve!
My most recent tpk came when the party ran across a trap door labeled "Magic Weapons Armory! NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY!"
The door led to a portal that transported them into oblivion. They all walked through in spite of various tests that indicated that this was at least a one way trip. In hindsight, this trap was perhaps a little too perfect since they just assumed that it was a one way portal to a boss or something.
I’ve been DMing since the late 80s. Solid advice. TPKs happen. What happens after is just as important. Last TPK I did revealed that the players were all suffering under a curse that claimed their souls and brought them back to 1st level immediately after their first adventure. They had no memory of the prior adventures or xp, but all of them had unsettling dreams about the previous adventures and then they had to figure out the curse.
Flashbacks to Bobby Ewing in the shower (yes old here) would support your “dream sequence” hesitation. I like the planned/intentional dream sequence. I would suggest including subtle inconsistencies (missing weapon, new spell or missing spell, different color of something) that will probably be ignored by the players in the excitement, written off to the DM being confused/forgetful or the players misremembering. After the fact, those clues will all make sense, “proving” it was planned all along.
I once did something similar, not with a dream, but the party was being impersonated by a group so well that they didn’t know they we not genuine. Weapons were different, the starting location was “on the road” instead of from their last location. The group meeting themselves was priceless!
As a Fate GM, I use TPK not to kill but to change story route. Successfully winning a combat scenario allows the PCs to get what they intend, but losing (TPK) to a scenario means they get what they don't intend.
My friends were generally scared of losing a year old character, so I told them we won't have PC deaths. Now they try riskier things, and the narrative will continue regardless of the result. (My personal gripe is TPKs ending the campaign when I had more cool stuff to show the PCs)
A TPK is normally a reset of the party right? A serious PC failure. So I'll let everyone keep their characters, but maybe reset where they are, what they have, etc. No more money, or weapons, or you end up in a slave camp and there is a really long detour to get back onto the main journey. Or, this is the new main plot, etc.
I believe Fate also has a mechanic for surviving death encounters but taking on a "troubled aspect" such as arachnophobia if your team was wiped by giant spiders.
I had my first TPK ever recently since I starting GMing in 1981.
It was with Alien RPG so it was to be expected.
@Warren Higgins It was player vs player more than the actual Alien.
@@DarranSims That fits right into that universe, too ;) (especially if one of them was an android)
I wouldn't count it if it is EXPECTED! That's like calling the end of Ten Candles a TPK! Ten Candles doesn't end until everyone is dead, or CRAZY!
@@JacksonOwex To be fair I have ran loads of Alien RPG one-shots (30+ games) and only had one TPK.
Wait when did GoT have a final season? I thought they just left off on a cliffhanger and for some reason definitely decided not to finish it.
Just like to add my two cents to this: In my opinion it is always a good idea to work as a team, even if one player made a bad decision. Last sunday one of my fellow players desided to attack a guarded carriage and nobody expected that. My character was not willing to pick that fight and i as a player was more than worried that we are outnumbered and outgunned. Still i joined the attack instead of sneaking away because i like to be a teamplayer. For me there is nothing worse than a player who refuses to participate in this kind of situation. All players should either help in the attack or try to defuse the situation. I don´t imply that a player/character should akt like a complete morron and die for someone who does not get that he´s acting like a madman but you need at least take some action to help your fellow player. If the player keeps doing thing after you try to stop him thats another storry and i would then gladly let him delve into his doom.
Redconning TPK´s with "dreams" or "visions" could feel somehow cheep because it will leave a bad taste in your mouth that the gm safed your asses with a deus ex machina.
I had a characte once i rly liked and the gm was aware of that. At some point in the story this character died and my gm offered to bring her back. But at this given time i could not see any logical reason how anybody would a) find her body in the swamp and b) would use a resurrection a total stranger instead of just taking her stuff and dump the body back
So i thanked my GM for the offer but rolled a new Charakter.
Sometimes the death of a character is the logical conclusion to his journey - even if it´s hard to led go.
My only issue with the "help even if you normally wouldn't" scenario is if the player hesitating is a paladin, given that depending on their path/deity of choice it could literally lead to them falling and losing their powers.
On the flip side, I don’t agree with making my character do something they wouldn’t because of another character’s stupidity. If they die, they die.
In my opinion, expecting everyone to try to help out or do something because one player did something is kinda selfish. Sometime’s characters aren’t always gonna protect/help everyone. Not all people are the same, after all.
I don’t think your opinion is bad at all mind you, just stating my point of view.
"You could do it once with a party every ten years or so"
Or, roll a percentile. When everyone starts getting bummed about dying in this random event, give them a random chance for this all to just be a bad dream. Make it a dramatic roll. Also. The going to hell idea is beautiful. And I'm putting that in my box
Greek and roman mythology had a lot of tales of heroes going to the afterlife to rescue a loved one or family member.
(Uncle as old skool dm): Rocks fall, everyone dies.... youve been poisoned, poison used to be an instant death.... trap fall into lava all dead.... bad news the ferry captain was drunk and sinks into the sea....
(My uncle back in the day as Gm): 3 sessions ago, an NPC briefly mentioned the Tavern here, was the most popular for 500 km and alcohol abuse had never been so bad. Having to use perception and discover the captain was inebriated was so clearly telegraphed if you were taking this seriously paying attention...
Do i gotta handhold you guys,
Guess you guys should have brought 15 long poles each into the dungeon, i mean most dungeons, or farmer's field are like 98% instant death traps by area, also the shop had them available, how could ive been more clear!!!
Got no one to blame but yourselves for the party wipe....
70's/80's - 1st and 2nd edition adnd custom party sojourns = nightmares still to this day....
He sounds like a bad DM
@@shinybugg9156 refusal to update beyond 70's/80's Ad&d pure, unforgiving, pc punishment.
He still DM's the oldskool OG gygax way...
Always from a DM VS. PC's perspective.
Lol he has been trying to (unsuccessfully) explain THACO to me for.... ohhh 17ish years now....
🤯
The two TPKs that I remember happening with my various groups were all just BAD luck with the dice, players rolling low and monsters rolling REALLY high, and not big important fights either usually mildly random ones! So we usually rolled back to a decent point and played again from there
I think the lessons people should learn from such are:
(1) Get the dice off the table. (Dice are to add spice to the game. - Not controlling it.)
(2) Reduce the amount of combat. (Fewer and faster combats.)
(3) Be less stupid in combat situations. (Fights are dangerous, act accordingly.)
Im a player and we had just contacted our powerful patrons with our location so they could collect a person we had captured for them. A trap went off that set off a blasting jelly storage in the cellar which killed us all. Because we had contacted the patrons with our exact location they were able to get there in time to revive us. It was very stressful and we have been insane about checking for traps ever since
I once ran Lost Mine as an intro to Curse of Strahd. During the Venomfang fight we had a TPK but I pulled some punches and allowed some of the party to survive. It ended up feeling cheap to everyone and left us all dissatisfied.
Having watched this video and with hindsight I should've just had them die, really played up the scene and done a colorful "outro" and then ended the session with them awakening in the Mists.
I learned a lot from that campaign, even if it wasn't the greatest game, and sometimes I think that's all that you can do is just to try to learn from it and move forward.
Well you definitely shouldn't set out with that as your goal as a gm, but they should exist and they should be in games.
My dad is ADAMANTLY against PCs EVER dying! He started a campaign with a friend of his, the friend's wife, stepdaughter and a friend of his and they died pretty early in the adventure! They just made new characters and pretty much continued from there. I got to join for a couple of sessions but then had my job get in the way so I had to stop playing! Being an adult SUCKS sometimes!
@@JacksonOwex Isn't that what you do? Pick up with new characters?
"I mean, we've all watched Game of Thrones final season, right?"
Nope! To this day I haven't seen any of Game of Thrones. And I don't intend to start.
Same here.
Keep it up, warrior
There was actually some good stuff in the first few episodes or so... I was actually hopeful they may have reversed the decline in quality. Then they flushed it all down the drain...
The books are pretty good 👉👈
Highly recommend the books ^^
Your page is so cool. I appreciate all the work this channel does.
I love doing this in my sprawling multi-year campaigns - We had a campaign a while ago where the TPK was not only planned, but a part of the plot - we woke up in coffins on the beach at the beginning of the campaign, and TPK'd in the middle of the campaign... only to wake up in coffins on the beach again. I then ran a similar thing in a campaign later, where the party was absolutely meant to wipe, as a part of the plot, but I left it a bit loose to the details of exactly *where* they wiped. I'm running another on Sunday where the party will likely wipe, but if they do, they're going to find themselves in front of this demigod figure that they've been somewhat familiar with the entire campaign.
I also had a character prophesize his own death, and I got a great chance to make it happen about 15 sessions later... It was one of the coolest narrative things I've been a part of. It all comes down to how it's done and what, exactly, you do to make your players believe in your skills as a DM.
“It was all a dream” always feels cheap, unless you’ve done a lot with dreams, as you said. I’ve had the party rescued at the last moment before, that kinda works. Like they all go unconscious but then they wake up in the garrison and the town guard stormed in and saved the day. Whatever you do it feels like Deus Ex Machina.
Sometimes Deus Ex Machina is what is needed to get past something that sucks the fun out of the game. Everyone will shake their heads at how unrealistic it is, and then they will move on. And very quickly the unrealistic episode will fade into the past (or will have turned into something to laugh about) and everyone will be having fun with the campaign again. Use it sparingly, but don't afraid to use it when needed.
My ruling for the Deus Ex Machina situations is that anyone still rolling death saves has to finish rolling them. They don’t automatically stabilize. That way, some members of the party may well die, and the impact is felt, but the story can continue. I love when a character or two dies, but TPKs kind of suck
New graphics are an awesome touch! Great info as always!
Tpk’d my party twice during Tomb of Annihilation.
Both were planned to almost certainly be a TPK (but could have been won with amazing play or dice rolls).
First they entered a temple and found themselves facing Acererak, under levelled for the encounter. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but was very obvious in hindsight - they were being “inserted” into historical events in a dream sequence. Used it to finally reveal who the big bad was, as well as put the fear in them.
When they finally faced Acererak he tpk’d them again. This time they were levelled enough, but I used a modified, proper, spell list for him, as his spell list is terrible, and played him as an almost eternal, genius, lich, pulling out all the stops and holding nothing back. It was the “sacrifice yourself to overcome the great evil” moment.
Again, I had planned for it. They were resurrected by the Spirit of Ubtoa, to find 6 months had passed, and the campaign continued, with them now being the agent of Ubtoa to fully restore Chult.
At some point in a future, different, campaign I will have the same players go up against Acererak again…
As a player, I have only been close to one TPK. The DM didn't want to play anymore, so during the big bad battle, brought in two more former players to help DM (so that he wasn't 'to blame' for the tpk) and set about trying to wipe us out. Thing is, one of the guest DM's wasn't on board with this plan, and actively helped us out. We won the battle, barely, but had taken a few losses. Then the guest DM took over our campaign, and stated that the battle had been an illusion, to fake our deaths so that the bad guys from that campaign wouldn't ever come looking for us. A little retro tweak to state that we all "died" in the fighting, and we changed locations and carried on.
I had a big story fight that left two of the three player characters dead the other week. I privately gave each of the dead players get-out-of-jail-with-many-strings-attached cards with the god whose minions they were battling giving the opportunity to live if they served him, and both characters rejected the offer for different character reasons. Everyone took it in really good stride because it was a high-lethality campaign and the players knew something like this could happen at nearly any time. We are taking it as an opportunity to create a "season 2" as it were, with a new session zero, a year and a half time-skip, and a whole new angle of characters coming in with new motivations to investigate the same problem (now a much bigger problem over a year later!). The one returning character will have had a radical personal transformation after surviving the harrowing experience and going to ground for a year and a half. Everyone's really excited to start again. I'm so fortunate to have players with such good attitudes.
I wrote and ran a module for a fantasy LARP I belonged to that led to a very unintended TPK.
The module was scaled to be underpowered according to the level of any party that took it on and the combat was geared to be fairly light and quick. The goal was for the players to focus on investigating and finding clues to a strange bit of experimental sorcery that was attempted "offstage" prior to the module. It was the information-gathering prelude to a story arc.
The players all ranged from experienced to storied veterans and they outnumbered their adversaries, who were also no match for them in terms of combat or magical capacity.
*Two critical issues led to the TPK:* The players did not work as a group. They did not heal a pivotal, yet easily dealt with debuff on their lead warrior, a paladin.
Instead of using teamwork, the players scattered to chase individual hobgoblins around. When the paladin was hit with a spell that caused in-game blindness (shut your eyes, no fighting allowed), the players did not "waste the power" to heal the malady. Rather than fix the problem, they relied on the paladin's blind fighting skill--which allowed him to open his eyes and engage in limited combat (he could not move around to attack; enemies had to approach him). In addition to the mages in the group who had healing, the paladin could have even healed himself of this at any time.
There was an unfortunate trend among some players to leave in-game debuffs/injuries untreated if they did not deem the issue "significant" or if they thought they could compensate.
In this case, the party got worn down and picked off one at a time.
I was sick to my stomach watching this. I kept screaming in my head, "WHAT ARE THEY DOING?" But I let it play out to its finality.
Most of the party was able to resurrect per the LARP's mechanics; the paladin had no resurrections left though.
As this all went down, an in-game funeral was already being held for another character who previously met his end in-game. Needless to say, emotions were a bit raw when they learned they had to plan another in-game funeral...
I've done the dream sequence once, and I've DM'ed players that were just reckless and they died like every 3 sessions regularly, but in 25 years I've only gotten 1 true, everyone's dead TPK. I set my challenge rating like 2 levels over the PC's but typically my players are so cautious I kill one maybe every 2 years or so. I don't fudge roll, so when players die, I typically just ask out of character, "do you want me to do some sort of deus machina intervention", because in the end I prefer to have the players happy, and don't care who's alive or who's dead, or what's the internal narrative, We're just regular ass people playing a game, not plotting a tv show. So if they ever do go the save me route, which they rarely do, I'll make a compelling reason they made it. The only time I do not ask the players if they want an olive branch is when they were in Pvp... 'cause it's better one of you didn't make it anyways
The Heroic Sacrifice bit was actually what happened in our Starfinder campaign.
Except we flew into a Black Hole Reactor Core instead of the sun to destroy the multi-planet-big ultra fortress of evil because we didn't exactly do anything to prevent it.
The Intro was golden! That "wait what" got me.
I actually have used the dream solution for a tpk when the party was chasing down orcs through an enchanted forest they were camping for the night and the party and NPCs got ambushed. The party after waking up from the dream did the exact same thing except for they rallied the NPCs and then countercharged the ambush.
In the scenario the party is two priests who are brothers and a wizard accompanying a group of knights and men at arms chasing after the orc raiders.
Since then I've given them visions to move the narrative in a certain way for example after finding weird magical armor on some of the orcs (and carrying it off) the priests have visions at night of a black chain and ball around their shoulders that they're dragging along a volcanic surface up a mountain and in the dream they know that the only way to salvation is to throw the black chain in to the volcano.
And if they don't get the hint. the armor might start to attempt to corrupt them or they might get a vision directly telling them to destroy it.
Or lose their powers as clerics.
In my opinion, you can have all those benefits without killing all the party. I think that character deaths are good, mainly in campaigns which have a dark atmosphere as mine do, but killing all the team can be too strong. I've sometimes killed players because they often take bad decisions or sometimes just because you sometimes have to remind that players can die and they have to be careful. An epic death of a character can be an epic story players will remember for a long time. However, killing all the team is, in my opinion, too much, unless you have saved them sometimes in the past and they're just so silly that you have to kill them. That can happen, and in that case, there's no other option
great description of all deaths
Love the concepts here. I'm currently running Age of Worms converted to 5e and the party is learning very fast that taking risks can be an issue. Can't wait for level 5 when the completely unreasonable 2nd boss fight happens. It's gonna be great.
Also, if you want to set a precedence or instill the idea that the campaign will be harsh/difficult, you can use a session 0 or 'pre-campaign' session where you hand out char to the players to play an they adventure only to TPK. This would then follow the "new party" going in search of the TPK group and begin your Campaign.
Brilliant and extremely helpful video, I thank you good sir
using the tpk dream deus ex machina thing to insert some occult spiritual phenomenon into the party is freaking genious oh wow.
that's the joy of rpg, so many wonderfull stories can naturally build themselves based on the situations
That Combat Folio thing looks cool, certainly better than my half-assed tables on paper behind my DM screen ^^.
I've had 2 near TPK experiences in my time playing DnD. The first time around we ended up getting surrounded by a bunch of undead that were heavily attracted to my bard's magic. He ended up getting destroyed by them and then a big bug which I can't remember the name of ends up wiping out the undead and the rest of the party except for one. The one that survived was our monk barbarian half orc who had a movement speed of 120ft in a single turn. So that guy just ended up running out as fast as he can without getting provoked since he was close of dying as well.
My second near TPK is actually my current campaign that is about to end. We were exploring these ruins to find some profit and found a underground temple of some sort. There were a bunch of traps and mimics in the temple and in the center of the area was this big stone coffin. Around the room there were a bunch of drawings that were telling a story about a giant and how he became one of the strongest of them all. Our dumbass druid decided to open it even with warnings from the other party members and even the DM. Turns out it was a lich storm giant's home that we encountered. My character, who is a bear warrior orc, went down to less than 50% hp within a single turn of the lich storm giant. Fortunately, our sorcerer knew dimension door and we managed to escape with bearly an hp left. That soon later bit us in the ass while we were sailing in the ocean with a very strange thunder storm approaching us that soon engulfed us and cause our ship to be destroyed.
I should note that both of these are in 3.5e since my DM prefers that over 5e.
In my central campaign, we’ve had 2 TPKs so far (both at the hands of goblin hordes). Our DM handled it by fading to black and giving us an escape mission, where we had to break out of our cells and get our belongings back before wreaking havoc from the inside. No “as the last of you gets knocked unconscious, the goblins stab all of you to make sure you’re actually dead, session over, bring new characters next time.” In my opinion, it was a really good way to give our actions consequences while still giving us a sense of agency.
Great analysis- hoping my PCs defeat Orcus, but..
Love your content! You're the best! This is my obligatory content to improve your results in the UA-cam algorithm. :)
I've DM'd for groups ranging from 2 to 10, mostly fairly successfully. I can't say I've done a TPK. But most of the gains you reference, I think I've gained by dropping the occasional PC. The Leroy Jenkins player is often the one most likely to cause a TPK, and the cautious Rogue that stays in the shadows is far less likely to "need to learn a lesson." As such, simply not pulling punches, and let the Leroy Jenkins guy impale himself on the plainly visible dangers serves pretty well.
I've even had parties vote to not resurrect the character, as his existence puts the rest of the party in danger.
THAT is a helluva lesson...
One good way to explain it away as a dream is that the players were unknowingly captured by the enemy earlier and has been placed under a sleep curse of some kind, the take was however enough to wake up the last player that died, and they awaken to se their fellow players still asleep around them and need to find something in the environment that can help awaken their companions (perhaps over powering a mage or garden with an item that can awaken them, or cutting a vine connected to them that has been causing the dream) better yet they don't wake up but are back a few days before they died, but everything is a bit off and they now need to escape the dream, either by fighting an entity or reaching a certain location within the dream
I've had 2 TPKs - First was in my early years of DMing. The group lost in a narrative battle against the BBEG's second-in-command. The group nearly won, but in the end, everybody died. It turned out to be an unsatisfying end, however, as everyone was getting into the meat and potatoes of the campaign. I learned my lesson that day. Cut to a few weeks ago; my group are tricked into summoning Orcus. The Demon Lord, in all his undead glory, utterly kills the group. However, as they are raised as undead to serve in his army, their deities interject and prevent Orcus from claiming their champions. The 2nd part of the 3 part campaign ended with a narrative TPK, and the group loved it.
I was running a 40k rpg where we had a TPK in a side story mission. Long story short one of the PC rolled too well on an attack, which caused all the grenades the all bandits were carrying to go off while the party was in a confined area and in close combat. This turned out to be fortuitous, since it turned into an investigation hook for them to explore their own backgrounds as genetice experiments using the Emperor's genetic code.
I've seen a few TPK's in my time. Most recent TPK I've experienced, the GM retconned a pretty decently satisfyingly TPK with a player majority vote. We fought our main target, he randomly exploded on death and everyone dropped to 0 and died from super unfortunate death saves. I decided to have my character die and it kinda just was bland, but at least my old character will come back as a rival of sorts.
I tend to be hyper critical on myself when something bad happens on both sides of the screen, if only to turn into a heatsink. Reviewing your actions is good, but try not to be too hard on yourself especially when those actions require impractical levels of clairvoyance.
I've seen alot of personal improvement from character deaths, TPK's and sudden campaign ends that I've committed or experienced, and it's nice to have the disappointment and unsatisfactory outcomes and personal feelings be deemed natural, rather than a mark of failure.
Also, I'm pretty sure that airborne poison could be avoided with any one of the myriad of wind spells, but that's not a conversation for here.
Thank you for reading my comment, I hope it was useful.
My very first level 1 party was wiped out by goblins, clearly I am the best GM!
As a side note that group doesn’t let me GM for them anymore, but I found another party and am slightly less prone to murdering them
I remember a TPK we had several years ago. My ex was the DM, and she'd worked for months on the campaign, she had plans for us up until level 12 at least. We lasted two hours(To clarify, two hours within the game world, we managed a session and a half). Between the dice hating me, our druid, and our fairy assassin, the paladin forgetting the warning he'd been given five minutes earlier, and our barbarian deciding that going into an epic rage as the walls fell was the perfect response we had no chance.
I'm kinda surprised you didn't mention the "everyone wakes up in a jail cell" or something. I've done that, but only cause it was bad guys that would have done that and they wanted to feed the adventurers to their dragon. They were all at 1 hp and had to escape on their own and be all stealthy trying to escape.
One of the best player deaths I've had was a player that time and time again Leroy Jenkins every battle. There were arms coming out of the walls and pillars with a huge demon at the end of the room. This player, an assassin type, runs in by himself to hit the demon once. He got grabbed and absolutely destroyed. The team tried to save him, but I had the demon choose to do a coup de grace instead of going for another player since it was a demon. That player had to make a new character and played differently from then on.
I used a lot of prophetic dreams through an NPC the party rescued and took care of. They were always vague, but after the first few things related to dreams happened and the players (way later) connected the dots, suddenly they went over everything this little girl said WITH SUCH VIGOR!
It was all set up to be memories of a destroyed timeline. The final BBEG they were going to face off against was one that in a different timeline won against the party. I decided that the wizard of the party would've spent his entire lifetime researching time magic and eventually changed some key events to give the CURRENT party a better chance at defeating this entity.
Regretfully the game ended due to a falling out with some players before I could get to the final confrontation, but it's still been one of my longest running games with some of the coolest plot points I made imo.
Sometimes we'll start over, but there are requirements for that. If it's a complete screw up on my part as DM, I own it. Sometimes I haven't described the situation of environment as well as I thought. Sometimes there is a misunderstanding of a spell (specifically the radius or something like that). Sometimes it's a permanent thing. But we try to prevent it because we don't play often and it's hard enough to keep up with things sometimes.
Apart from back in the late 70's when we were kids and didn't understand the game properly and we TPK'd every session... they can only happen in my games through a pretty much dedicated run of dumbass decisions and I honestly can't remember having one in the past decade.
Apart from the "Special Ones".
People say that "railroading" and forcing a deliberate TPK are both bad things for a DM to do.
I did both at the same time and my players considered it one of the best adventures they ever played.
My campaigns are pretty plot literate, and heavy on the narrative. Lots of linear threads and goals broken down into "Books" or "Volumes" or whatever someone wants to call them. Between each major plot line I throw in a couple of things:
1) a couple of weeks of free time for the players to chase any ideas they may want to follow up on,
and
2) occasional "Cut Scenes"... basically one shots where they play other characters that I have prepared, going on a mission that may be involved in the overall plot but outside their immediate impact. (These can also provide campaign literate "back up" PCs. So, should one of the main PCs die, they can skip to one of the ones they've already played within the campaign... excellent way to avoid the "So... why are we doing all this" crap of integrating a new party member.)
One such cut scene involved them playing a group of spies taking a secret document through enemy lines and delivering it to a military commander... fairly standard fayre.
The campaign itself was about the players' homeland defending against an invading force that had failed to conquer them a hundred or so years before and were back to finish the job... under new ownership...
I pushed them through a very specific route, and since they were all rogues and not particularly keen on fighting military units, this was fairly easy. One by one they died in the castle grounds and the last one fell on a stone staircase just yards from the gateway that would have led to his escape and success in his mission.
It was only toward the end of the session, that one of the players started to realise that the map looked familiar... and when the last guy died on the stairs... he realised that it was EXACTLY in the position in a very similar (though badly damaged and ruined after 100 years) skeleton in a very similar castle that they had searched weeks before in order to find... "the lost scroll"... I'd just aged the map significantly, and placed it the opposite way round. all the PCs had died exactly where the ancient remains had been found and it was only when I described how the last body was laying that the rest of them suddenly worked it out.
The "cut scene" was taking place a hundred years earlier during the OTHER war, and it was basically just a bit of flavour to show them what had led to their previous adventure. The unexpected upshot of this was that the players seemed to become even more invested in the overall campaign goal.
Unless you are a novice... IF you are allowing TPK's to happen on Random Encounters with no back up plan... you are no longer a "GM;" great or otherwise. You are a "DM" and that doesn't stand for Dungeon Master... you are merely a "Dice Monitor." Here's a box for your stuff, hand in your ID at reception.
Great video today, Guy!
Had a TPK in my most recent Lancer campaign. Had the squad "come to" in a cryo bay aboard a space station orbiting Mars. They continue on missions as normal, until they stumble upon derelict cruiser, one last seen over a decade ago. On board, they start finding some oddly familiar mechs, weapons, etc... and bodies, bodies in particularly familiar uniforms. Now the crew of cloned pilots get to try and reconcile their deaths with the new lease on life they've (somehow) been given.
I have a general rule in my games. "I won't try to kill your characters, but I won't give you plot armor if you decide to make a dumb decision." I also give them warning, both in AND out of game, if what they are doing is a really bad idea. If we take the idea of the party dying to a random encounter because they decided not to take weapons, I'll have different NPC's tell them that they should bring stuff cause of various rumors they've heard or various encounters they had nearly escaped from. I once had a TPK happen due to a boss monster where the major driving force before the fight was that if they had a certain weapon (which they had all the resources in the world to find) it would make the fight extremely easy. Instead they decided "We've got this" despite having, I kid you not, 12 NPC's and 4 out of game warnings that this would go poorly, the last one literally stating "This creature will kill you if you don't get the weapon, that's the point of the mission". Most of the players were like "fair, you did warn us. It was still really fun though!" and then this one guy stood up and said "Not cool trying to kill out characters dude." I looked him dead in the eye "I gave you over a dozen warnings, the last of which I literally told you that you would die without the weapon. I don't like that we TPK'd either, but I'm not going to hand you plot armor cause you made a stupid choice. If you don't like it you're more than free to leave, doors right over there. Now if you'll excuse me, we've got new characters to roll."
TPK are needed.
My very first TPK was in a Fight back in D&D 3.5. Our team. A Dwarven Fighter, a Half-Elf Ranger, a Human Rogue, Elven Psionic fought a Villain that obtained a mighty relic called Tooth of Tarrasque wich gave him insanely Strenght after he stabbed himself with it. So instead of fleeing from him, we tried to stop him and got absolutely murdered in 5 Rounds. Our Fighter dropped on the first Attacks, me the Ranger dropped after i took the hit for our Elven Psionic and the Rogue was the only one trying to run off but got oneshotted in the fifth Round after the Villain threw a Spear shaped Rock at him wich impaled him due to a critical hit. We learned at that day, sometimes we have to run from fights and wait for the best time to strike back
Had a TPK literally my first session as a DM. I'm running the lost mine of Phandelver right now as my first game, and I originally had 3 of my friends as players (now 5) and the 3 goblins that ambushed the characters (which I reduced from 4 goblins btw) just... completely wiped them out. I told them they woke up to find their stuff stolen, with the exception of one player who in one short encounter decided she did NOT want to be a wizard and got to switch her next character to a fighter.
I liked this video. In the past I found your videos kinda angry and pompous. This was a nice, positive video with lots of good advice. I will have to tune in again!
the "Dream" sequence/resurrection could, if there is a Paladin/Cleric/ divine char in the part, be a 'vision' from the diety showing a warning. It doesn't have to be a 'dream' and that all the characters had. This way, you can let the one char RP out what their vision was (which actually had all the players involved instead of just a narrative to one player) and have the party discuss the ramifications of it. - but yes also agree that is a one in a campaign type resolution.
Alternatively I have seen it set up as a 'Challenge' between dieties to "resolve" some dispute between them and had the 'mortals' act out and resolve the conflict letting the dieties to abide by the results. Then the dieties 'resurrect' the party and reveal the 'challenge' and then send them on their merry way.
I've actually designed a game that's based around PC deaths you as a player have your own stat/skill sheet and each time you die you start out at lv1 regardless of the general party lv
But each time your soul rembers your previous lives so you get a small stats boost and 1 skill as a legacy skill
It creates an interesting new dynamic because well yes the new hero will be slightly stronger once he gets to catch up in lv until then the party is having to deal with keeping him alive at the same time
So 5 pc's all at lv 10 and one dies so instead of fighting a cr 10 battle it is now a cr8 battle because average lv is now 8 and well 4 lv10 and 1 lv1 can probably handle it is the lv1 is not stupid or very unlikely
if you're using the "it's all a dream" approach, it might be interesting to make it so the characters had been trapped by a evil wizard that was making them have those dreams and the party now has to escape the place they're in or something like that, could result in a good session.
My group has of late turned somewhat morally towards the opportunistic side, their characters all started out neutral or good but nowadays they lean more on the neutral evil side of things so what I'm planning in sense of a TPK-szenario should it occur would be a redemption in hell sort of thing. They would wake up in limbo and be told they are gonna be send to hell but have a chance of turning their fates. Returning to life isn't on the table at that point (unless they really impress me with unconvential hijinks) but the epilogue of that campaign would be them avoiding an eternity in hell and maybe entering elysium, perhaps joining their deceased loved ones or ascending to a higher existence. I think that would be a good send-off for a TPK, it could involve past slain foes and people they wronged or failed to save, idk the idea seems cool to me.
In my current game, we TPKed on our 1st encounter. Our dm had a balanced encounter with lots of goblons but we all rolled terrible on our initiative. I didn't get an attack before I was out. So we started over & he removed 1 goblin. We rolled amazing on our initiative. We wiped out the goblins with hardly a scratch.
Fast forward a year, we are chasing down a horde of dragons who are terrorising the country. Random encounter along an open road with of course a dragon. Again we suck at initiative. Dragon downs 4 out of 5 of our party with it's first breath attack. I then suggest that this is my characters dream. Everyone love the idea. My guy now has a harder time over coming fear of dragons. It all works narratively & best part was the DM didn't have to suggest it. He is not above killing our characters, but he wants it to be fun.
Was running The Death House for the 5e D&D Ravenloft campaign. All the players save for one were brand new. The boss at the end of the adventure was triggered by the one experienced player, ironic, and it then killed them all one by one. In hindsight a dream sequence would've probably been best for that.
My personal opinion of total party kills is that if it happens because of bad rolls and choices a tpk is fine or if the party makes bad choices. Go with it if it happens but never force it to happen.
We once had a player caused TPK. The player rolled really badly in Warhammer 40K version of a sanity check, went paranoid and blew up the whole party (she was the demolition expert). The rest of us, including the GM, just kind of sat there staring at her a bit helplessly.... (She'd turned off her comm device and refused to believe any of us were real). I mean... it was valid but there went 8 months of game play :P
I've never had a TPK as a DM. Came close once, but I didn't have to fudge the rolls to let the party win.
Never had a TPK as a player either. If we lost half the party we called it a tough fight. I think I've been lucky to have groups that recognize they aren't strong enough to take on a dragon at this time, and avoid fighting what we can't happen.
I had an almost TPK incident with my party some time ago, I had setup the encounter with X many melee, X many archers, X many casters... the party kinda half-assed investigated what was going on and charged the temple head on. The wizard necromancer having done sense life on most of the armored melee and getting no life reading ASSUMED they were undead so she went in slinging anti-undead spells... they were dread gaurds (constructs) and 2 rounds wasted, there was a defense cleric, 2 battle wizards and 2 ballista crews inside so they were met with a LOT of ranged resistance. As the fight progressed the wizard went down, the duskblade was badly hurt, the fighter went down and the party made the call to flee as they saw they were losing badly. The duskblade for whatever reason decided to charge a spell and jump back into the door and throw it, I personally saved her arse by fudging the damage she took which was initially putting her at -20 or so, i put her at -7 and unconscious. The party learned they are in fact NOT immortal and started exercising more caution when going into situations.
You've got one of the best accents I've ever heard and so well spoken, do you do voiceover work?
Great advice! I got a lot of inspiration out of this...only trouble is how do you deal with an encounter where only 2 or 3 out of 5 PCs died? Something I've struggled to find a solution to.
We had a TPK recently. Entirely our own fault, we split the party and got what we deserved. The GM openly asked what we wanted to do - Follow-Up, new adventure, dramatic escape with a bit of a hand-wave, etc.
In the end, we decided to do new characters on another continent in the world, and we took the opportunity to rotate in some new players to the group.
I’m fully expecting some references to the last campaign to pop up at some point… There’s a suit of Power Loader Full Plate sitting, battery-less, in a jungle somewhere on a continent to the west of us…
I had this one adventure where the players had entered another character's mindspace and were acting as fellow adventureres the NPC knew in her adventuring days but used their own stats. They played out this mission that ended with everyone but the NPC dead, so when one of her friends died they were expelled from the body and watched the rest of the scene unfold.
Very good advice, thanks :)
Never had to do a TPK as a DM, but ive always said, if more than half of the Players die, keep calm carry on and let the monster do its thing, inevitably resulting in the TPK. My players agree ot would also be the better option for the entire group as they prefer to restart equal than to be a carry for the group.
They say the same thing when faced with a pretty high level monster. Death or Glory and as a DM i do reward them heavily if they just scrape past the verge of a monster that could probally TPK them
I've found another good way to prevent a TPK is have one or more of the PCs wake up finding themselves imprisoned by the enemies, clinging to life, perhaps being held for ransom or as a bargaining chip in a prisoner exchange with the PCs' patrons/faction. Obviously, this only works in limited circumstance (a PC who was incinerated by a dragon or eaten by sharks probably isn't "waking up from a coma" later on), but in many cases it's believable that at least one of the characters could have survived and get a second chance to escape and/or raise their party. Since they will certainly have been stripped of their possessions and possibly permanently maimed/disabled, this has the advantage of penalizing them mechanically while still giving the story a chance to continue if you and the players really want to carry on with those characters. The PC's are powerful people, after all (especially if you've been running this campaign for years), and powerful people are much more valuable alive than dead. Or if they aren't so powerful, perhaps the enemies view them as valuable slave labor, if that's a paradigm you're willing to run in your game.
The disadvantage to this strategy is that it forces you to chose between sidelining the plot you actually want to be running in favor of a prison break or prisoner exchange adventure, or simply skipping over all that which is a bit less fulfilling. But it is a good option if you don't want to do something cheesy/cliche like a "dream sequence," or blatantly gamey like "your characters get resurrected by the local church and they took 20k gold from you to pay for it."
im actually planning to do a one shot that ends with a tpk, later i'll start a campaign in the same world that revolves around the thing that the oneshot characters failed to do, its such a fun idea
I've never had a FULL TPK, but I had several PK's in our big game that really hurt (but they were justified, if frustrating). Our really amazing GM had long since told us, "I'm not TRYING to kill the players, especially in random encounters, but I'm not going to stop you from dying if you really fuck up".
My inclination is that I'd be a lot more likely to use something like the dream sequence if it was a party who was new to roleplaying in general, and maybe to a lesser degree a given system or setting in particular. If the death is caused by something that the party would know but they haven't internalized yet, or if by someone not knowing or realizing something about how things work, it seems less problematic for me to go for the mulligan. As a bonus, it might serve as a good lesson on what happens when you don't follow a commonsense rule while still allowing them to continue the story or with those characters.
For other situations, my go-to thinking is about consequences. Assuming the TPK doesn't make for a suitably dramatic story, and/or the party doesn't want to be done there, I'll think about what might hurt as characters without being a direct physical consequence like that. Maybe a favorite NPC was maimed or killed while defending them, maybe the town they were operating out of gets attacked and pillaged by the big bad while they're out of commission recuperating after a rescue, maybe resources they had plans for suddenly get spend or are damaged keeping them alive, or maybe who or whatever ended up saving them is either something you really don't want to be in debt to, or who being associated with will cause problems.
Heck, maybe the means the being uses imposes some problem on them (e.g. being revived through corrupted magic) or the being takes the opportunity to add one (e.g. while they were unconscious and it was saving them, it also bound them to it in some way).
Maybe one could even use time itself: it could have taken the PCs some time to recover or be revived, during which they aren't able to do anything. After awakening from being incapacitated in such a way, they discover that their rivals and enemies had no such limitation and were able to act freely during that time.
These ways, you don't lose the narrative or characters, but they hardly get away from their deaths scot free.
My party is much more of a Leverage crew in their mission statement and approach to situation. Only 1 character as muscle w the rest having different specializations, but as adventurers they're all CAPABLE of fighting.
But anyway we dodged a BIG blss through wits and deception and some minor explosives, but one day we wanted a noncanon one shot and did a "what if" boss fight for if the baddie caught onto us... It went into a near tpk w only 2 of us left at 1 hp. This made us feel extra glad in the Smoke And Mirrors approach we did take with it in actual canon-campaign.