Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7337047" data-attributes="member: 6779196">My first TPK was in 4th Edition, and was also the first game I DMed. I was running a weird hodgepodge custom campaign using individual encounters from a whole bunch of different sources. I only had two players and was running a friendly NPC for them to help them a bit, but I guess I just didn’t account for the party size well enough.I had my first 5e TPK on Friday with Lost Mines of Phandelver. Our first session of the campaign, my players defeated the goblins at the ambush sight with no damage and two of their 5 first level spell slots used between them, one of which was a warlock spell slot. So far so good, but since they hadn’t taken any damage, they decided to pursue the tracks to the goblin cave without stopping to rest and get the warlock’s Spell slot back. They avoided the traps, and when they got to the cave, they snuck past the goblins keeping guard outside. Calmed the wolves in the first alcove. Sent a scout up the chimney, saw Klarg without being spotted, and decided to leave him since they didn’t see Sildar or Gundren in the room, so they turned around and continued up the tunnel. One-shorted the goblin on the bridge in the surprise round. Continued up the tunnel around towards Klarg’s room. And that’s where everything went pear shaped. They killed one of the three goblins in the room with the flood pools, and the other two ran off to get reinforcements - one towards Klarg and his wolf, the other towards the sleeping quarters. Klarg came in and knocked their warlock out with one good hit. Luckily the Bard got him back up to full with a Cure Wounds, but at that point they had decided they were not going to stand a chance in a fight and tried to run. With eight goblins, a bugbear, and a wolf pursuing them and another two goblins they had snuck past still at the entrance, they stood absolutely no chance. I even tried to give them the chance to try negotiating, as the goblins came out with Sildar and said to stop or they’d kill him... but, my PCs decided they didn’t know Sildar well enough to risk being captured by goblins for him, so they continued to try to run. It didn’t work.Kind of a bummer on the first session. Two of my players had never played D&D before, one had only played in online games before, and the other has tried a few times but usually been too intimidated by the other players, so I felt kind of bad about TPKimgbthem in our first session. But they all said they had a ton of fun anyway, so I’m not too worried about giving them a bad first impression. And I had a contingency plan - I had been planning to follow up Lost Mine with Out of the Abyss anyway, so I figured if they got TPKed at any point during LMoP, they’d be turned over to Neznar who would sell them to the drow group in OOTA and just start that campaign. I didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon, so I’m kind of scrambling to prepare as much as I can of that I’m time for next session, but I am glad I had that backup plan.</blockquote>

Verification