Total Party Kills

[Munin]

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I've been dming almost non-stop since 3rd edition and I haven't lost a player yet, much less an entire party. I've come pretty close, and I've offed a couple of npc allies, but not a player.

Now my mother-in-law on the other hand....

She decides she wants to see how the table looks from the other side of the DM screen, so she picks out a Dungeon adventure and we co-dm the thing, basically she runs it and I keep her straight on the rules.

It sounded pretty cut and dry: a bunch of orcs in a dragon turtle shell raid a village. The party cuts 'em down pretty quick, until they get to the last orc...who proceeds to massacre the entire party. It was so beautiful to watch a plain ole, straight out of the MM orc turn into a rampaging death machine in the hands of my mother-in-law.

I almost wept for joy.

 

[Darklone]

I would start another campaign after a TPK and probably ask another player to DM it.

I never had a TPK yet (I´m a wussie DM it seems) but in my current group, only one of 8 PCs has been around since the campaign started... luckily I had my fingers in the backgrounds of all replacement chars or chars of new players, so they fit together better now than they did in the beginning... but did you ever have the problem that a group loses focus after too many new PCs?

 

[tennyson]

This may not work specifically for your campaign, but we had a problem with a TPK in one of our earlier sessions and altered the story as such:

The PCs work for a small trading business and we found it very difficult to keep adding characters to replace deaths since the trading business was tightly knit (basically like a family). Constantly adding new characters made the continuity of the story non-existant. Anyway, I had the players create two extra PCs (this was at 2nd level, and the newly created PCs were 1st). This gave each player 3 PCs. Basically, the only way the story changed was that the trading business was larger, totalling 9 PCs and the owner.

We instituted a house rule with the following stipulations:

1. Players can only use one PC per session.

2. Players can switch up, but only at the beginning of a session, and only if their "active" charcater can physcially make contact with the new "active" charcter.

3. Gold and items can be traded freely between your 3 characters (again, as long as they can realistically hand the items to one another at some point).

4. Once your PC dies, you may enter in one of your other characters (if it is physically and locationally possible). Once all of your PCs die, you may create a new one at a pre-determined penalty. You may not create a new PC until all three of your existing PCs are gone for good.

5. "Inactive" characters receive a pre-determined percentage of the "active" charcaters experience (it is assumed that they are running missions for the business in the background). This keeps them constantly gaining XP, but not as fast as the "active" characters.

Again, this worked great for our campaign, and it is not too flexible as it stands, but I'm sure with a little tweaking it might be a solution for you. All of my players use one PC exclusively, and leave the others strictly for backup.

However, it is also nice when not everyone can make it - simply institute the backup characters for an unrelated adventure from the main plotline.

It may seem like having all of those characters takes away from the effort put into making one character stand out, but if the switches are made very seldom (or only when dearly needed) it can really put some ease into a story's flow and believability.

Hope that helps!

 

[Zappo]

I haven't had a TPK yet as a DM. Uhm, except for an instance where the PCs used the equivalent of a one-way portal to reach an isolated cave on Pandemonium and forgot to carry a plane shift scroll to get out.

In the current Ravenloft campaign, we very nearly got all of us killed at the end of a converted Vecna Reborn.

Spoiler

Vokar, or whatever the name of Vecna's cleric, is simply insanely tough. He was, oh, about 9 or 10 levels above us and apparently the fact that his god was mostly dead didn't hinder his spellcasting at all; he easily killed half of us (the rest fled), and raised Vecna. I couldn't think of a way to avoid fighting him, either. How the hell are you supposed to complete that adventure?

Anyway, the DM magicked us out of that one.

In a FR campaign, we killed one of those wingless guardian drakes from MoF and it was a very, very close fight. Let's say that one more round from the dragon would have certainly resulted in a TPK. Whoever gave CR 5 to that thing should be shot.

As a DM, I avoid killing PCs if I can help it. I have plots and hooks tied around each one of them, and every single death means that the whole campaign will have to take a detour. I protect PCs from stupid or anticlimactic deaths, unless they really deserve it for something foolish they've done. The best players still have the characters from the beginning of the campaign. A TPK is frustrating for everyone involved, destroys the story, and generally has no good quality at all, so it just doesn't happen.