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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DRF" data-source="post: 7336743" data-attributes="member: 6910474">Hi,DM's, what brought about your first total party kill? Players, what lead to your first TPK?I am asking because I DM'ed a one-shot this Saturday and I had my first TPK. I've only DM'ed for about a year, and I have killed one character in a one-shot and had several unconscious ones in my LMoP group, but never anything like this.I am in the process of preparing Curse of Strahd for my regular group, and I decided to play part of it as a one-shot (for random players) to get practice and try some things. It was a great game, but also dramatic. Long story short, a new player inadvertently brought about the death of an 8 year old child while trying to rescue him. The group (and the child’s mother) was understandably upset. They kept trying to figure out ways of bringing back the child, and wanted to visit the local priest in hopes he was a cleric who could resurrect the kid. As a random improvisation (because this particular priest was useless), I had the group meet Strahd himself who offered to bring back the child “for a price”. They sort of panicked and thought (reasonably though incorrectly) that Strahd wanted to make the child a vampire. They declined the offer, and as Strahd was leaving in his horse wagon, the new player decided to fireball the back of Strahd’s wagon. Fireball. To Strahd’s wagon. They were four level 5 characters. I am sure I don’t have to spell out what happened next. This even happened after the group had seen the ghostly procession of dead adventures killed by Strahd who every night wander to his castle pointlessly. It was good fun and the players had a great game; the new player was excited and kept asking about being invited again, so despite the fact that he killed a child and murdered all his friends, he had a good time. Please, share your stories! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ps: the players were just supposed to fight a vampire spawn in the church's basement.</blockquote>

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