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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9512097" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Sounds tricky! I think your assessment of the situation is sound.The question you are going to get is whether the PCs went after the dragon "stupidly" or whether it was just bad luck. Ie, did they know what they were getting into and risk bad odds, or was it a random wilderness encounter roll when they had no particular reason to believe such dragons were likely to show up?In the first case, the general assumption is that reasonable players will respond to the TPK with, "Well, yeah, we had that coming." In the second case, while I think it can be fun, most people respond much more poorly.So what I'd be doing in the mean time is planning for the TPK. What are the options for afterwards? Let's assume everyone really wants to keep playing this campaign with these characters, since that's the most common modern assumption.Here are some suggestions:-You could have them play through a scenario in the Outer Planes to be able to get returned to life if you want to go really fun.Or, if there isn't any major time constraint that signals campaign failure conditions, you could advance the timeline and have an NPC resurrect their characters, with some complications. Lots of options here:-The NPC could be friendly and helpful, but only able to do so much. Maybe they got resurrected in an inconvenient location or time.-The NPC could be insist on some sort of payment, so they basically have to take time out of their life to pay them back with a quest of the NPC's choosing.-The NPC could be unfriendly and resurrect them with magical strings attached. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Bonds" target="_blank">Azure Bonds</a> novel (or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Azure_Bonds" target="_blank">Curse of the Azure Bonds</a> computer game) is an example.-The timeline could be advanced a very long time. Whether that means decades, centuries, or millennia is for you to decide. Whatever was going on in the world has long since past, but now these adventurers/heroes/mercenaries/scoundrels (whatever) from the past has popped into this new world. What comes next?The important thing is to make the consequences feel like a real deal, so it's not just a DM Deus Ex Machina, but feels like something that would be possible or likely to happen in the setting. So instead of having the resurrecting NPC randomly stumble across their corpses, come up with a whole story around it. Someone might have intentionally gone searching for them for some reason, or they might have stumbled upon them somehow with a fun explanation. (A little humor could be good here, unless your group doesn't like humor, and then I would be sad for you all.)And, there's still that 1 in 3 chance that they pull off the escape, so you don't have to totally plot it out ahead of time. Just having some ideas to noodle around can help you deal with the fallout if they do all die though. "Don't worry, the campaign isn't over...this is D&D."</blockquote>

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