D&D 5E Your very first TPK?

[Jer]

You're making me feel old. My first TPK as a DM was a Basic set game. If I'm remembering the first one right (and I may not be, because we had a few TPKs before we really figured things out), I believe it was when I was running a session of "The Keep on the Borderlands" for some of my friends and my little brother. That was a TPK because they stumbled into the [SBLOCK] minotaur maze and got brutally killed by some bad die rolls fighting the minotaur [/SBLOCK] (do I need spoiler tags around a 30+ year module event? eh - I'll put them in anyway.)

My first TPK as a player happened a year or so before that - that one I definitely remember. The DM was the older brother of a friend of mine and he was running a few of us through "The Lost City". We all died on what I think might have been the very first level. [SBLOCK] We had a bad set of die rolls against some stirges that picked off one of us, then we encountered some giant lizards (I think?) that killed two more of us. I was the last one alive so I ran from the lizards and ended up running into a room with green slime in it that took my last hit point. I don't have my copy handy to see if it was all "by the book" - I wouldn't be surprised if the DM ran me into a slime room just to wrap up the game so we could go join the other two playing on the Atari.[/SBLOCK]

It's funny how back when we first started, TPKs weren't a big deal. In a lot of ways we didn't play "characters" so much as we moved pieces around an imaginary gameboard, and when they died it wasn't much worse than when your pawn in a game of Sorry got sent back to the start. Heck most of us would just take the same character, change his name (or scribble a "2" next to his name) and come in again at the next opportunity. I don't know if it was youth or just how the game was played in our area back then (I think probably a mix), but that's just what it was like.

 

[Nevvur]

It's funny how back when we first started, TPKs weren't a big deal. In a lot of ways we didn't play "characters" so much as we moved pieces around an imaginary gameboard, and when they died it wasn't much worse than when your pawn in a game of Sorry got sent back to the start. Heck most of us would just take the same character, change his name (or scribble a "2" next to his name) and come in again at the next opportunity. I don't know if it was youth or just how the game was played in our area back then (I think probably a mix), but that's just what it was like.

I missed out on those days for the most part, but it was apparently common enough to inspire numerous tropes.

I sometimes run 1 on 1 games with a buddy, and he's really into the old school vibe. I've obliged him by severely stacking the odds against his PC(s) on several occasions, and death ensued. He always seems so crestfallen when it happens despite getting exactly what he asked for. It's like slapping a masochist.

Which would be fine if I were a sadist, but I'm not, so I end up feeling bad, too.

 

[Imaculata]

I've never had a TPK as a DM, nor experienced one as a player. I think my players are simply too cautious, since they know I don't hold any punches. Closest we've gotten was the party getting seriously beaten up during our biggest battle not so long ago, and one player barely made his save against a spell worse than death (it would have erased all his memories, and basically rewritten his personality and all that he knows). That was in fact the battle that I described in this thread. But I have steadily been increasing the difficulty as they approach epic level.

 

[transtemporal]

As a player, it was back in 1e. Our 1st and 2nd level characters were camping in the wilderness. During the night, the DM rolled an encounter and the encounter was an ogre. I think we thought we could take it but instead it got lucky with some crits and wiped the party.