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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6924754" data-attributes="member: 42582">As you've probably seen me post before, the one time we had a TPK in our 4e game (either at the end of 2nd or beginning of 3rd - memory has failed) only two PCs actually died - one because, given how things had unfolded, there was no way he had avoided going to negative bloodied, the other because the player wanted to bring in a different PC. The rest I deemed to have been knocked out at zero hp, so they woke up in the goblin cells.This also could have been done by-the-book in 1st ed AD&D (I'll quote the passage from Gygax's DMG p 110 in a sec), but back then I was a crappier GM!From AD&D DMG:Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done.The way that I make sense of this is that the GM is entitled to adjudicate death as, instead, unconsciousness - including perhaps the same sorts of penalties, like maiming etc, that can follow from reaching -6 hp. Another way in which Gygax had more imagination in his conception of how the game can work than he is sometimes given credit for, and another point of resemblance between 4e and the classic game!</blockquote>

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