What normally happens after a TPK?

[Bullgrit]

In your experience, what is the normal game effect of a TPK?

Do the Players just make up new characters to carry on the campaign/mission/quest?

Or does everything restart with a whole new campaign?

* I'm using "campaign" in the sense of a story/plot. That is, the new party may start in the same world, even in the same city, but not necessarily on the same plot as the deceased party.

You may have experienced both game effects after a TPK, but what do you consider the norm?

Bullgrit

 

[Steel_Wind]

First of all, I don't have TPKs very often. In fact, I can't remember the last time one of my campaigns ended in a TPK (if one ever did, in fact). It's certainly been decades since that happened -- probably the early 1980s, if it ever did happen.

So this is a difficult question. "Ordinary" suggests it is a routine event. It most certainly isn't routine. At all.

The timing of the TPK, however, is everything.

If the TPK happened towards the end of the metaplot and the good guys lost, that's it. We're done. Bad Guys win; Good Guys lose. It's over.

If it was at the very beginning of what was planned to be a long-running metaplot campaign, it might be that we would restart with other characters. I don't think it's likely -- but it is certainly possible.

Otherwise, the question of whether I am even going to continue as GM/DM is very much in doubt. I ordinarily take a break between campaigns and somebody else in the group will rotate into my GM spot in our gaming circle. A TPK towards the later stages of the campaign is likely to provoke a change of campaign, era and possibly even game system. It would be a monumental event that would takes weeks if not months to sort itself out.

There would be nothing "ordinary" about it at all.

TPKs have happened from time to time (twice that I recall) in the campaigns run by one of the other GMs in my gaming circle. Those events have resulted in a complete end of the campaign and a complete switch in game systems, too.

Again, it has been a "game shaking/world changing" event. A TPK is not the end of the party - it's not even the end of the campaign. It's been the end of that entire game system being played in our group for quite some time.

There is one other TPK that I can recall that ended on the final encounter with the Drow Queen in a 3.x campaign. The Good guys lost; the Drow won. There was nothing to continue, that was the end of the cmapaign, win or lose. I was not a player in that one, but the DM was a good friend of mine and seemed to blame itself on how it ended. I thought it was not an unsatisfactory result and would reinforce to the players in subsequent campaigns that they really can lose. In short, the downer TPK ending in the final battle was a set-up for the next campaign being all the sweeter.

The players it turned out, were equally as philosophical. It was a good year before he DM'd a campaign again, however. These things take time and have consequences in our gaming group.

I appreciate that others may have very different experiences. I can't speak to those - all I can relay is the experiences in my own gaming group.

[Edit: System Test to see if edit has been properly reflected. Please ignore.]

 

[Mark]

The five stages of TPK are:

1) Denial: "This can't be happening to our characters!" - Looking for missed bonuses for saving throws and magic items the player thought he might have forgotten. No rolling. Not accepting or even acknowledging the loss.

2) Anger: "You Bastard!" - Feelings of wanting to climb over the table and choke the DM, anger at the other players for not keeping the the party alive, blaming everyone else for the TPK.

3) Bargaining: "Maybe this was a dream?" - Bargaining often takes place before the marking the fatal HP on the sheets. Attempting to make deals with the DM regarding the circumstance of the TPK to try and create a loophole. Begging, wishing, praying for the PCs to come back to life.

4) Depression: "I don't know why we bother playing at all." - Overwhelming feelings of hopelessness, frustration, bitterness, self pity, mourning loss of the PCs as well as the hopes, dreams and plans for any future characters. Feeling lack of control, feeling numb. Perhaps feeling like selling all gaming materials.

5) Acceptance: "What the next campaign going to feature?" - There is a difference between resignation and acceptance. Sometimes this takes the form of creating the new characters while other times changing DMs is the only way to move on. You have to accept the loss of the PCs, not just play the exact same characters with a different names.

 

[coyote6]

I voted Other; I don't think we've even started over in the same setting. I think we've mostly gone and played in entirely different game systems.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I've played in a few games in which dead PCs always came back to life ie they had a built in auto-rez, though always with a penalty such as xp loss. In those games a TPK doesn't derail the plot, we just continue. But that's not really what I'd call a TPK.

On the two occasions I've experienced a real TPK, the game stopped completely. Though on the first occasion it was a planned grand finale, the game would've ended even if some PCs had survived. None did - the GM nuked us. It was a superhero game, the US military dropped a bomb on us cause they feared we were too powerful. I still think that was a great ending.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Campaign ends - so much of the campaign depends upon relationships with NPCs, and although you can lose all but one PC and still continue (parties in my games often look like the proverbial murphys shovel), a TPK just cuts off everything, and there is no reasonable way to bring an entirely new party into the story.

Thats for me, anyway.

Cheers

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I don't think I've ever been involved in a TPK (excluding con games, and then I think only in games like Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia where it isn't the same thing), as either a player or a GM. I've played in campaigns where I'm sure we would have responded to a TPK by continuing the same campaign with new characters. I've played in campaigns where we probably would have abandoned the campaign (in Bullgrit's distinction between a campaign and a world) but continued playing in the world. And I've played in games where a TPK would probably have deep sixed the whole game world, or maybe even the whole gaming group.

I did have an interesting experience recently where a near TPK essentially ended an adventure, even though we kept playing in the same game world with the surviving characters. Out of a five character group (seven if you count some NPC henchmen), all but two of the characters died, with the survivors barely making it out alive. The players decided fairly unanimously to leave that dungeon and local area of the gameworld behind, to heck with the progress that they had made and the local plothooks and stuff. The survivors and replacement characters then went on to different areas of the gameworld where they started new adventures, and I think everyone benefited from that shift. It also felt pretty reasonable at a characterological level. I'm pretty sure an actual TPK would have produced the same result: continuing to play in the gameworld, but abandoning that corner of it.

But yeah... I can't really answer the question in the poll, because I've never really been there, let alone enough to have a sense of what "normal" would mean.

 

[rogueattorney]

I put "other." Generally start up in the same general area of the same setting, but whether they go back to the same mission/quest/adventure is largely up to the players.

 

[The Ghost]

I voted "Other".

In my current campaign we have experienced one effective TPK (three PCs died, one retired), a partial TPK (two PCs died, one retired, one continued to adventure), and one sort-of TPK (three PCs died, one continued to adventure and had the other three resurrected). In addition, there have been four other PC deaths and one PC retirement. The campaign continues with the same NPCs, the same BBEGs, and the same situations occurring. The only difference is the new PC's goals and relationships with the NPCs and other PCs.

This has been the norm for all of our campaigns.

 

[Odhanan]

Rolling up new characters, going back to the dungeon. The new characters could have known the old ones, or not. They would probably get to know about the old PCs at some point, with a chance ot pick up where they left (via NPCs, friends of the old PCs, enemies revealing their existence, so on, so forth).