TPKs

[Henry]

Should the DM alter (weaken or remove) the challenge in the room? Should the DM just flat out stop the Players/PCs from going further? Should the DM just let them act on their own, and let the TPK occur "naturally"?

Does your answer vary depending on someone being "at fault" for the coming disaster?

Are TPKs "wrong" things that should not happen in D&D, ever?

Are TPKs "natural" things that just sometimes happen. (Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you.)

Quasqueton

If they fall into the TPK area/event with no fault of their own (I misjudged, I accidentally railroaded them without realizing it), then I may try to find some way to salvage it, even if it's the proverbial "wake up as prisoners, and you have to fight your way out." If they jump into an area, and had plenty of signs that they're over their heads, I let it happen. Oftentimes, they get the hint, and run like heck before there's a total massacre. Sometimes they lose people this way, but rarely is it a TPK because my players understand if they start trouble, I WON'T pull back. It took some expensive lessons to learn ths, but they did learn it.

 

[Grazzt]

Let the dice fall where they may.

Gary sums it up well in my sig line
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V

Agreed. And I agree with Gary's quote. If the adventurers have the "video game" mentality in their heads of "clear this level, move on"..."clear this level, move on"...and never run from a fight, then what happens...happens. Storming caves/mines/dungeons/whatever in search of fame and fortune is not without danger. Characters die sometimes. It happens. If they act foolishly and rush headlong into battle and the TPK (or possible TPK) is a result of THEIR OWN foolishness, then so be it. (Luckily my players are all 1e vets and remember the days of "he who fights and runs away...lives to fight another day.")

 

[Darkness]

If the adventurers have the "video game" mentality in their heads of "clear this level, move on"..."clear this level, move on"...and never run from a fight, then what happens...happens.

Concur. This is something I teach my players early on. Also, negotiations can often be more sensible than combat.

 

[the Jester]

It varies from group to group, but in my campaign- well, I'm not afraid of a tpk. In fact, I don't know of another way to really end a campaign, cuz ime there's always something else the party wants to do and it never takes so long that the party dies of old age.

 

[Harmon]

To me the TPK means that someone did something wrong. After sixteen years with no TPK, it seems that this bad of gamers is doing something right.

Players can over estimate the ability of their characters, miss understand the situation, have bad dice rolls in conjunction with the GM having good dice rolls, a plan can fall apart or a any number of reasons.

GMs that have lots of TPK (from what I have read here and seen at a few tables) seem over power their encounters- expecting the characters to run, or have some great dice rolling, when you can't expect dice to take commands (Player- "roll good now!" Dice- "piss off,").

However, I generally find that TPK come from GMs over powering encounters and little else.

 

[Endur]

I guess there are several types of TPKs.

A) There is the cinematic end of campaign TPK. The final battle of the campaign that could go either way, but its 100 to 1 against the PCs. (Think the 300 Spartans against the Persian Horde).

B) There is the GM dice are awesome and the PC dice are terrible, and the fight that was supposed to take up 20% of resources may end up slaying all of the PCs.

C) Situation B, plus the party split up, making a tough encounter extremely hazardous.

D) The left turn at Alburquerque, where the party of first level characters discovers that instead of entering the Kobold cavern, they discover the resting place of the legendary Tarrasque.

Situation A is supposed to be the cinematic finale, so the GM should do cinematic stuff.

Situation C, where the party split up, should result in the party playing a price, perhaps being wiped out.

Situation D, where the party accidentally blunders into a Monster they can't possibly fight, I might allow the party to flee, negotiate, surrender or otherwise avoid being exterminated.

Situation B is the hard one. The fight has begun and the GM realizes the party may be destroyed through nobody's fault but the dice gods. I'd probably play this one through, but I'd be on the look out for the possibility of taking PCs prisoner or allowing them to flee so that not everyone dies.

 

[James Heard]

I don't like TPKs because it's a lot of work for me to restart the game, so I try to avoid them. I don't reward stupidity and I don't fudge the dice, but I've been known to take a metagame time out and just flat out tell everyone that I don't think they've got a rat's behind chance in hell of surviving an encounter. I've even stopped an encounter at a midpoint just to school everyone on the odds of what was going on occasionally, "You see, there's at least 30 of these guys with bows that you see and someone's casting spells at you as well. Let's not even mention that all your front line fighters just got charmed. I'm not telling you guys what to do, but you might want to consider retreat because this is gonna hurt. Bad." I'm a pretty metagame-friendly GM anyways though, and oftentimes my players get the courtesy of rolling the bad guy's dice for me (because I'm dice-lazy) so theycan do the math pretty easily on their own a lot of times. "Hey, I rolled a 2. How did he hit my AC 28...OH CRAP!"

 

[ThirdWizard]

I occasionally throw an unwinnable scenario at the PCs. If they foolishly stay and fight to the last man, then they deserve a TPK for such stupidity. This has never happened by the way, they always at the very least run after one of them has fallen. The world doesn't always throw challenges at the PCs that they can beat, so it teaches them that alternate approaches are often beneficial. This, in turn, makes the PCs less likely to get TPKed in my oppinion, because they know that it is a possibility.

 

[Mallus]

But a TPK can be a real slap in the face of a wake up call to the players, allowing them to internally analyse their performance leading up to the TPK and allow them to (hopefully) learn from their mistakes, and realize that the campaign can have real consequences for 'inept' play.

But its not a job, its an adventure...

I've always felt there's a real limit of how 'good' players can be (and how 'good' they ought to fancy themselves). The game is far too subjective for anyone to really 'master' it. You have the rules set being parsed on the fly by an opionated, fallible, ignorant of a great number of things 3rd party (and that's often a best case scenario). Who also gets to determine/prioritize which strategies are successful. Then there's the whole question of what the play goals are. Most people can agree that 'avoiding PC death' is a goal. But after that? For instance my friends would be bored to tears by the thoughtful, cautious, methodical playstyle that some people consider 'smart'. They want to play quippy swashbucklers who act a split-second before thinking. Not a workgroup comprised of 'spelunker/accountant/lawyer/murders.

You want a game that punishes inept play without fail? Play chess.

 

[Mallus]

And now to answer the actual questions... sort of...

It all depends on the campaign style.

Impartiality, like lethality, is a means to an end. If that's the kind of campaign your group collectively wants, then TPK's are par for the course. They add to campaign enjoyment. (We had a 1st level TPK in our off game a few months back and it was a blast. Sat around laughing about it after the DM left wondering if he screwed up. But that's the kind of game we expected. We knew the context going in.)

However, if you're playing a narrative-heavy game (don't know what else to call them), where the characters involvement with the storyline(s) is paramount, then a TPK is pretty bad. Those kind of games typically shift the challenge away from the level of a combat encounter; "will we survive?". The challenge becomes "will our plans come to fruition?". In that framwork, permanent character death (and at the extreme end, TPK) becomes an impediment to challenging the players. Their fun comes from manipulating an ongoing story which which they have a signifigant level of involvement. If it ends, then its back to square one, and the long process of building a campaign with which they feel heavily engaged.