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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spunky_mutters" data-source="post: 271085" data-attributes="member: 5426">You know how it is. You start play with the best of intentions. The encounters are balanced, the puzzles are easy and the treasure is practically out in the open. Then your players muddle in, miss the treasure, get stuck on some puzzles and sleepwalk into combat.I wanted to hightlight some TPKs we've had as DMs over the years to get an idea of when people cross that line, and how they feel about it. I'll start and number mine for reference.(1) Players are investigating some murders on the Council of a town. They uncover a prophecy that foretells a horrible undead plague that will be unleashed (details few but extremely grim) if the membership in the Council should fall to 13. When players arrive in town there are 18 people on the council. They fail to stop the next 4 murders despite being present when they occur. Finally discovering the culprit behind these attacks (the mayor), they go to confront him...and they kill him.So now the players are in the middle of town, in the town hall, and they have just succeeded in invoking the prophecy. I really hadn't expected this, and so I had gone a little overboard in detailing the undead. The party was 1st level, and they didn't make it out of the room. I figured they would at least think about the prophecy before they killed the mayor, especially since I read it to them again before they confronted him. This happened in a 1e game near the beginning of my first real campaign. I took a lot of flack for killing them all off, but they respected me for not caving. We were just crawling out of our powergamer/monty haul phase, and my consistency as a DM, providing their first real challenges enabled us to grow as DM/players. They brought this up often over the years, but they still let me ref until we all moved away.(I have plenty more TPKs, but I'll dole them out to bump).</blockquote>

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