When the climax fails

[Korgoth]

Actually, a good TPK (Total Party Kill) now and then is a learning experience. It also establishes the mood of danger in the fantasy world! PC and whole party kills have been part of the game since day one, and it's all the better for it.

If their band of heroes does not return from the Keep (or wherever), have new adventurers come into town. They hear tales of the previous group and their bravery! The townsfolk may even be sad that they have not seen the heroes return.

Then send the new group into the Keep. Some of the rooms that the previous group cleared have stayed cleared. Others have been repopulated. Any treasure and other swag that the previous group had can be found in a hoard someplace, probably by whatever took the original boys down.

If you've got young'uns just learning the game, now is the perfect time to help them get used to the fact that, while nobody "loses" D&D, characters are not invincible and have to earn their levels. And that survival constitutes a reward!

And if the second group fails... well, the darkness never seems to run out of monsters, so neither should the light run out of heroes. If you're worried about an XP disparity (i.e. that cleared rooms will reduce the XP available for them to level up sufficiently) just hand out a quest card for "Find the Lost Heroes" and give them a big chunk of bonus XP for getting back to the point where the previous group shuffled off the ol' mortal coil.

 

[LowSpine]

I think what some have said is a good idea. My take on their suggestions is this - tell them their characters ARE going to die right from the start of making them.

Tell them the try out adventure is just to teach the way it works and to try out a character. If they like the classes they are playing they can make new ones the same - but if they decide they want to try another they can.

This way they will not be gutted when the characters die. They will try out anything they feel like. Plus if for some miracle some survive, give them a little present for their next character as a medal. I'd make it small though, because you don't want to annoy the ones who died too much.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Also, if feasable, you could always just capture them instead of killing them and then ad-lib a jailbreak.

 

[Andur]

I think we ran B1 for at least a score before we had a single PC hit level 3... Lessons learned that each "successive generation of adventurers" then brought to the table:

1) Everyone carries 50' of rope.
2) Everyone carries and uses a 10' pole.
3) Tap, pound, and test everything, taking 2 hours to go 50' is better than dying 45' in 30 seconds.
4) Hire Torchbearers, use them as human shields for the cleric and magic user.
5) Always be diligant and tithe the dice gods appropriately.

I'm sure there are more, but since I still get together with some of those folks from 20 years ago and play RPG, we still bring out some old habits, though I must admitit is always funny when "I listen at the door" gets trumped by "I throw open the door and charge in".

Course there was that one time when my sorcerer "smoked" the FNG who the DM was trying to introduce after a prolonged battle with Assassin Vines. "You hear rustling in the bushes over there..." Me, "Empowered Fireball", think I almost rolled max damage, poor ranger failed his save and then the cleric animated him afterwards, ahh the "bleeding over" of one edition to another...

 

[Jer]

So what would you do with a inexperienced group of players to take them through an adventure like KOSF without making it too easy so that there was no real challenge.

If things went really bad (i.e. got to critical stage in adventure) and you ended up with a TPK how would you let the consequences play out and how would you bring the 'new' players back into the game carrying on where the last players failed???

I'm just trying to work out worst case scenarios before heading in so thanks for the help.

Start with a capture instead of a kill. I've found this works well for novice players. Depending on who captures them you can either run a "jailbreak" scenario as suggested above or - and I've had this work out really well in the past - have their captors let one of their number (at random) go free with ransom demands. Then have the rest of the players roll up new characters for a "rescue mission." Once nice thing about this option is that it gives everyone some experience with making new characters, and lets them try out something different without permanently losing a character that someone might have really liked. When I've done this in the past on the threat of a TPK in a new campaign I've had players decide they like their new character better than their original one.

Another tactic that can work - though I tend to use it mainly with younger players that I'm teaching the game to - is to have one of them survive what should be a TPK (left for dead by their attackers) and have a priest with "Raise Dead" available in town. I usually have some kind of side quest that they have to perform in exchange, though they can do it "after the fact".

There's also the "let them die and roll up new characters" tactic that was mentioned above. That can work (that's certainly how I learned the game in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth), but it depends on the personalities involved and the complexity of character creation. I've found that the more involved the character creation process the more frustrating new players find making a new character. If I'm really trying to convince someone that the game is fun (as I did with my wife years ago) then I try pretty hard to keep them from getting frustrated until I'm sure I've made my case