Well, I had my first TPK in a long time on Monday night. We were playing Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. There's mild spoilers for it below. You've been warned!
For the past few sessions of RTTOEE, the players have been a bit too arrogant for their own good. They charged ahead, brought down 4 or 5 encounters worth of monsters on their heads at a time, but managed to survive through a bit of luck and by having 6+ players present. Tonight, they tested their luck once more and came up short.
The most frustrating thing is that they seemed to finally start to understand that the temple is divided into factions, and that they could do a lot of damage by turning the factions against each other. The week before, they had raided the earth temple and left signs that the leader of the guards at the gate had led the attack. They also dragged away fallen corpses to prevent any speak with dead castings, since they knew they were going against clerics.
So, I walked into Monday's session convinced that they were going to do something clever. I even set them up - while they camped near the gate, the Earth temple sent an emissary to beg for parlay. They missed the opportunity by sending him away, but they managed to keep up the facade that they were working with the guard commander.
Unfortunately, things totally fell apart. After a few recon missions, they saw that the earth temple had used stone shape to fortify their tunnels and had posted guards. Later, another emissary came and demanded parlay. Again, they sent him away.
As they started to make plans, it totally hit me that they were going to launch *another* assault. They didn't even try to plan anything other than an attack - the first words out of their mouths were "OK, how are we going to attack these guys?"
Nothing else! Just an attack - they assumed they had to go in guns blazing.
After about 30 minutes of arguing - they can't really make plans for anything, even ordering pizza is an epic battle - they decided to, in essence, charge forward.
That didn't work so well. Now they're all dead.
So, that's my first TPK since 1993.
The last one was a lot funnier - it was a Forgotten Realms campaign, 3rd level PCs. They were chasing a cleric of Bane and his ogre bodyguard up a steep, upward sloped passage. At the top, there was a big rock that the ogre pushed down the slope. Before the rock went rolling, the cleric used his last spell - silence 15' radius - on it. Since the party had just fought an illusionist, they immediately assumed that the big, crashing, SILENT, boulder heading towards them was an illusion. They all decided to just keep running forward after the cleric.
*SPLAT*
That ended that campaign pretty decisively.
This TPK was nowhere near as fun - it was just a slog to their eventual doom. They had two chances to escape, but I think they were simply overconfident. As I've seen other people say, some 3e players just need to learn that a withdrawal is sometimes your best option. The annoying part is that they've tried 2 other frontal assaults in the Temple, and both times they came within a whisker of a TPK.
I'm afraid they'll never learn...
For the past few sessions of RTTOEE, the players have been a bit too arrogant for their own good. They charged ahead, brought down 4 or 5 encounters worth of monsters on their heads at a time, but managed to survive through a bit of luck and by having 6+ players present. Tonight, they tested their luck once more and came up short.
The most frustrating thing is that they seemed to finally start to understand that the temple is divided into factions, and that they could do a lot of damage by turning the factions against each other. The week before, they had raided the earth temple and left signs that the leader of the guards at the gate had led the attack. They also dragged away fallen corpses to prevent any speak with dead castings, since they knew they were going against clerics.
So, I walked into Monday's session convinced that they were going to do something clever. I even set them up - while they camped near the gate, the Earth temple sent an emissary to beg for parlay. They missed the opportunity by sending him away, but they managed to keep up the facade that they were working with the guard commander.
Unfortunately, things totally fell apart. After a few recon missions, they saw that the earth temple had used stone shape to fortify their tunnels and had posted guards. Later, another emissary came and demanded parlay. Again, they sent him away.
As they started to make plans, it totally hit me that they were going to launch *another* assault. They didn't even try to plan anything other than an attack - the first words out of their mouths were "OK, how are we going to attack these guys?"
Nothing else! Just an attack - they assumed they had to go in guns blazing.
After about 30 minutes of arguing - they can't really make plans for anything, even ordering pizza is an epic battle - they decided to, in essence, charge forward.
That didn't work so well. Now they're all dead.
So, that's my first TPK since 1993.
The last one was a lot funnier - it was a Forgotten Realms campaign, 3rd level PCs. They were chasing a cleric of Bane and his ogre bodyguard up a steep, upward sloped passage. At the top, there was a big rock that the ogre pushed down the slope. Before the rock went rolling, the cleric used his last spell - silence 15' radius - on it. Since the party had just fought an illusionist, they immediately assumed that the big, crashing, SILENT, boulder heading towards them was an illusion. They all decided to just keep running forward after the cleric.
*SPLAT*
That ended that campaign pretty decisively.
This TPK was nowhere near as fun - it was just a slog to their eventual doom. They had two chances to escape, but I think they were simply overconfident. As I've seen other people say, some 3e players just need to learn that a withdrawal is sometimes your best option. The annoying part is that they've tried 2 other frontal assaults in the Temple, and both times they came within a whisker of a TPK.
I'm afraid they'll never learn...
