Frustrated by unavoidable TPK

[Shazman]

This Saturday, I experienced my first TPK. If it was due to bad luck or poor tactics on our part, it would have been easier to deal with. The problem is that it was engineered to be an almost certain TPK. It happened in final encounter of a very famous published adventure, so it wasn't the result of a vindictive DM. He just ran it the way it was written. I loved the adventure up until the TPK. Basically, if you had no way of escaping the last encounter so you could rest before facing it, you were doomed. The only feasible way to do this was to have a wizard or sorcerer able to use teleport in a slienced area with the rest of the party right next to them. How can you expect to have such a specific set of circumstances be essential to party survival? This is the essence of poor adventure design. What game designer says, "I'm going to write an awesome adventure where there's a TPK at the end." It makes no sense to me.

 

[hong]

Which adventure was this?

 

[Dragon Snack]

SPOILER (in spoiler tags, since black shows up on alternate colour schemes - PS)...

Spoiler

Red Hand of Doom, perhaps?

I lost my copy of that adventure, but I remember thinking the ending was a bit much. My memory is a little fuzzy though, since my group had a TPK before they made it that far and I never actually ran it (I don't remember the silence, but it's been over 6 months).

 

[Shazman]

Which adventure was this?

Spoiler






Red Hand of Doom

 

[Schmoe]

Spoiler below

Spoiler

You're supposed to run.

So, not unavoidable.

 

[gizmo33]

Any encounter with an EL that predicts death for the PCs should not cause the DM to be surprised when one or more of them dies. You would think they would all run away (or something) but they often don't - especially if they're not used to that kind of campaign. This is a common enough situation that IMO it should be in a list on page 1 of the DMG.

 

[Shazman]

Spoiler














It may be unavoidable, but not reasonably so. Unless, you tailor your party for this
encounter that your PC's have no warning about ,or are lucky enough to have a wizard or sorcerer with an awesome initiative, teleport or dim door available, and a greater metamagic rod of silent spell, you are hosed. I know a group that defeated this encounter using teleport, but I'm pretty sure the DM hand-waved away the silence effect. This is in addition to having a very difficult encounter previous to this one, that seriously taxes your resources.
We accomplished our goal, so we sort of won, but it cost us our lives.