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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agamon" data-source="post: 518439" data-attributes="member: 184">I've only caused a TPK once in my 19 years, and I'm rather ashamed of it, but considering the details...We were playing pretty late on a weekday night about 8 years ago.  I all of a sudden felt very tired and run down, and announced that we should stop for the night.  The players, one of them especially (Neil, by name), figured they were close to finishing the current adventure, which they were, and insisted we keep going.  A half-hour passes, and I'm really not feeling well.  I insist once more that we quit, but everyone pressures me to finish.  Rather preturbed, I concede.The final battle was a cleric and her ogre minions.  The party was about 5th level, and these were 2E rules.  The baddies won initiative, and the cleric cast Hold Person on the 4 healthiest PCs, who all failed thier saving throws.  The other 2 had a handful of hit points between them and didn't last the round.Realizing I was becoming very sick, I simply said, "There, you're all dead.  Can we quit now?"To this day, I still remember the fever I suffered through as I tried to sleep the rest of that night.  I was down and out with a pretty nasty flu bug for a few days.One positive out it: Neil has passed the story on to new players, and everyone now knows one of my main rules: When the DM says it's time to quit, it's time to quit.  No one argues the point with me anymore. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Other than that, I've never been responsible for killing an entire party.  There have been times when they've made very bad choices and gotten themselves into some deep doodoo, but for the most part, I usually let them squirm, assuming the worst, and let them work their way out of the mess they've made.</blockquote>

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