Most Unplanned Party Wipe

[Phlebas]

In an old second edition game, 3 low levels players (Amazon Fighter, Human Aristocrat Cleric & MU / Thief) on a boat

group captured by pirates, and the plan was to take them to the pirate island where they could escape and etc etc

party insisted on chance to escape so they broke the bonds, crept onto deck and proceeded to climb up & fall down ladder from hold while one pirate at top with a club had a free hit. 2 go unconscious, other surrenders but refuses to accept hint

escape attempt 2, somehow they get onto deck, beat up guards and then barricade hatches to trap the rest of the pirates under decks. party is now in control of boat and i'm racking my brains to work out how to rescue the campaign. Party get bored and rogue decides to clamber down outside of boat and into cabins. (i got the boat from U1 so i didn't have to spec it) Rogue finds chest, fails to find trap, ends up unconscious (poison)

other pc's start yelling down & decide somethings happened, cleric decides to climb down to narrow window ( i tell him its very narrow - ie take off your armour). player tries to force himselves through the window regardless, fails dex checks and ends up stuck.

remaining character decides to rescue cleric, climbs down, fails dex check (no climb skill) and falls into water. grabs hold of rope but unable to climb up.

So rogue unconscious in cabin, cleric stuck in window, fighter hanging on to rope in water, Boat sailing on unmanned - eventually pirates break through barricades and have a good laugh at escapees. I gave up on the campaign soon after that....

 

[Tsillanabor]

There were several almost TPKs in my Zombie Apocalypse adventure (Story Hour in the sig ) but my funniest was my first 3rd edition game.

I had come back to D&D after a lengthy absence. Got a group together consisting of my wife and a married couple we were good friends. We have a few adventures, and one of the things the group discovers is that things are often not what they seem in my campaigns.

As part of one adventure they meet a fairly high level paladin. Keep in mind this is a good party. The paladin was a planned encounter after they were injured by a close battle with some ogres. He was supposed to heal them, and had a vital piece of information for them.

The problem is one of the characters suspected that he might be evil as he was approaching. They tested him and every test showed that he was a paladin. Yet they wouldn't let him lay on hands, then wouldn't let him leave!

Eventually they attacked him and were killed. A very strange session.

 

[jollyninja]

The party was level 9. It was a random encounter in Cormanthor with 8 level 2 drow rogues. the two pc's on watch both rolled 1's for their spot, listen and saves vs the poison. two other pc's failed the save vs drow poison, leaving only three to take on the encounter. they took down half the drow but in the end, after I had decided that if they killed one more the drow would flee, two PC's went down. There was no way five drow were going to run from one severly injured, naked dwarven barbarian with a hand axe, unless he tried to make an intimidate, which he didn't. He took down two before he fell.

Thus ended the tale of Snorri the trollslayer.

 

[Stalker0]

I think the badger fight is winning

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Second Edition game, Spelljammer & FR. Party is investigating a site in Kara-Tura. It's a tower. We disembark and send our ship, the Red October, up into low orbit out of harms way (only because experienced crew was hard to come by should they get eaten by some low-level nasty that wouldn't give US a moments pause).

Entering the tower, the front door leads to a tall open room on the first level, only a stair winding up the wall to the second floor. In the middle of the ceiling is a round hole with some sort of watery, shiny illusion over it to prevent seeing through to the second floor. A blue dragon (as I recall) sticks it's head through the hole from above and breathes just after my swashbuckler uses his boots of striding and springing to leap from the door to the top of the stair to go attack it.

Standing IN the door is our dwarven cleric. About a year before (in real time!) his character had come into ownership of a +1 arquebus. Now my swashbuckler was the only other PC to use firearms and this was the only magical firearm we'd ever seen as treasure (I had to have my magical arquebus's made for me.) This weapon was worth ENORMOUS amounts of money. Naturally, the cleric had obtained a small keg of powder to go with it - 100 charges. He'd never fired it. NOT ONCE.

Standing NEXT to the dwarven cleric is a human myrmidon (2E paladin wannabe). This character owns a Necklace of Fireballs, only ONE bead of which has ever been used. You can see where this is going...

The myrmidon fails his save against the lightning - for that matter I seem to recall NOBODY made a save against the lightning except myself and the party mage just outside the door who wasn't in the area of effect. 4 other characters take max damage from a huge, ancient blue dragon. The ITEMS everyone is carrying, however, manage to make their saves vs. electricity - including the powderkeg which really has the dwarf worried as soon as he come to it on the list of things to save for. The necklace fails its save against the lightning as well. Of course NOTHING fails all the saves against the fireballs - including the powderkeg, which ALSO blows up.

The crew of the Red October, watching from thousands of feet above see a bright white-orange bloom on the world below and say, "What the ()#$*% was that?!" They descend carefully to find the entire party dead and blown several hundred feet back, the top blown off the tower, and a large dragon corpse - with no face except for raised (as if in surprise) eyebrows - right in the middle of the smoking ruin. Magical weapons of all kinds were recognizeable but melted, charred, de-magicked and useless. And on the body of the dwarf cleric was a slightly dusty but quite intact magical arquebus.

After the corspes were returned home and all the Raise Deads and such were taken care of the Dwarf cleric took up his arquebus. He walked to the crest of an exceptionally high, forlorn oceanside cliff and chucked the arquebus into the sea. Then he walked home.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Once, a RAW chuul wiped out a seven-member, 8th level party. Oddly enough, when they'd encountered a different chuul three levels previously, they wiped the floor with it.

Part of it was bad dice rolls on the players' parts, with lots of crits on my part. It didn't help that the warforged rogue went down a tunnel, separating himself from the party, where there was a maximized underwater fireball trap set up (designed as a separate encounter altogether). He went down to -11 hp from it. When the paladin went after him (leaving the rest of the party to be slaughtered! BAD PALADIN! No biscuit!), he accidentally triggered the trap while trying to drag the dead character's slagged body out, dropping him to -15 and the rogue to something like -51.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party was getting dropped like flies by the lone chuul, refusing to retreat.

 

[sniffles]

Brand-new campaign, 12th-level PCs freshly rolled up. The party descend into a pit in pursuit of a dragon.

At the bottom of the pit are three different doors. One is a portcullis inscribed with some odd sigils covered by rags. There's an invisible sentry beyond the portcullis, taunting the party as they try to figure out which entrance will get them to the dragon's lair.

The party rogue tries to check out the covered sigils cautiously. An effect from the sigil hits the warmage, but the warmage has a headband that allows the character a bonus on saves and thus succesfully resists the effect, thereby preventing the rest of the party from figuring out what the sigil could do to them.

Finally the warmage gets pissed off at the taunting sentry and tries to freeze him in his tracks (I forget which spell was used). The spell doesn't quite do the trick, though. The sentry reaches out and yanks the rag off one of the mystery sigils.

Save-or-die effect, all but one PC failed the save. 90% of the party died in the first 30 minutes of the first session of the campaign.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

The only time I've ever TPK'd the party and actually felt bad about it was when three cockatrices on a random encounter roll attacked a band of five 5th level characters. After the second round, the entire party was stone. Oops.

 

[Squire James]

Six little kobolds sitting in a tree
C-R-I-TT-I-N-G
First came Surprise
Then came Initiative
Four dead characters
Were looted with glee

(pretty dreadful, neh?)

 

[illuminatus]

I was running a GURPS campaign set in the modern world with a bit of magic and whatnot. Through earlier bad luck the team of four adventurers has got themselves captured and all were tied up in the back of a van speeding down a lonely highway. Two of them have loosened their bonds and make an attempt to overpower the two guys watching them in the back of the van. The driver turns around to do a quick stun spell taking only one second of concentration away from the road. He critically fails the drive check resulting in a fishtail skid. This would be no problem except for the second critical failure rolled in the correction of the skid. This results in a sideways skid to rollover accident at 80 MPH with no seatbelts. I roll badly for the van’s integrity and several of the doors pop open while rolling down the highway. A few bad rolls now come up for the players. No one makes a check to stay wedged and tied in the back which would have given them the equivalent of seatbelts. Two of them are ejected from the now open and rolling van. One of the ejected ends up in the path of the rolling van and even fails an easy tumble check to get out of the way. Good: all three of their captors are dead or unconscious and dieing. Bad: One character is a road pancake the other a giant road rash both dieing on the spot from injuries. The two remaining in the van are unconscious, critically wounded, and bleeding to death. Did I mention the highway was in the middle of nowhere?