My first TPK.

[YossarianLives]

Last night my group had our first ever TPK in our 3.5 game.

Our group: my rogue, a monk and a half-ogre barbarian were walking through a forest. We were level 3. The DM calls for a round of listen checks. None of roll above 10. A group of 5 monstrous ants burst out of the bushes and devour the monk before any of us can act. The barbarian takes his turn and crushes one of the ants but is soon overcome and eaten. My rogue runs for it but the ants are two fast. He stops one with a wand of sleep and kills another with his bow but is eventually devoured.

I'm not looking for advice or anything, I'm just a bit confused about what happened. I've never had a character die before.

What has been the playgrounds experience with TPKs and what are your thoughts about mine?

[Lord Loss]

I tend to DM, and seldom every play. I have yet to kill a character or TPK a party. In my experience though, killing a character is justified if they make a decision that has little possible outcome save death (seeking out the most powerful army in the realm and attacking it outright at, say, third level, leaping from the steepest of chasms, etc.). Also, if a fair encounter leads to the death of a character, I won't necessarily fudge to save PCs, especially if the rolls are made out in the open (I often roll in the open).

Is this a DM you usually play with? Because the lethality of that combat seems a little wonky, things like this can happen, but should be rare situations, not haphazard occurrences. Of course, it also depends on the game - some people enjoy playing high lethality games, in which case this could simply be a case of you and the DM having different expectations of the game - which in itself is reason enough for discussion.

Did you try talking it out? How did the DM and players respond to the occurrence?

[Geddy2112]

Sounds like it was just bad dice. Sometimes the dice gods have decided that the party for one reason or another has to die, and so it goes.

I have only had one TPK- the DM threw a CR7 against a level 3 party with crazy abilities like "hyptonize and grapple the party without the party realizing they are being attacked" and could grapple/swallow us when our damage output was based almost entirely on 2 handed weapons.

[YossarianLives]

We talked it out afterwards and decided we're happy with the outcome. It was a bit disappointing because the campaign was just getting exciting and the plot was starting to make sense but we, as a group are glad the DM did not fudge to save us. We rolled horribly the whole encounter.

[Segev]

If you do not want to retcon the fight, remember that raise dead and resurrection are things in D&D. You could have some third party use them (and now hold it over you), or you could make new characters who are in some way looking for the old ones and come across whatever it was that made the campaign exciting.

[Maglubiyet]

Was it just a random encounter gone bad?

It's kind of fun(ny) when this kind of thing happens because it means that success or even survival are not guaranteed.

Roll up your characters' brothers, sisters, cousins, widows, etc. and have them carry on in their place. Vengeance awaits!

[BayardSPSR]

Personally, I've been waiting for a TPK to happen to my players so that I (GMing) can spring a "you are now in the Land of the Dead" on them and carry on without breaking stride. If you're all into your characters, that's a viable alternative to rolling up new ones to pick up the plot - except that your GM may need to abandon the D&D afterlife to do that, since it doesn't seem very well-suited to me...

Congratulations on being the last one standing, though - dramatic way to go, especially since you managed to take out 40% of the monsters by yourself.

[Lord Loss]

We talked it out afterwards and decided we're happy with the outcome. It was a bit disappointing because the campaign was just getting exciting and the plot was starting to make sense but we, as a group are glad the DM did not fudge to save us. We rolled horribly the whole encounter.

Don't want silly little barriers like ''death'' or ''mortality'' to stand between your character and fat piles of loot? Want to continue your campaign even in the face of cursed dice and spree-killing murder ants? Then have I got the supplement for you!

Quips aside, continuing your campaign in Ghostwalk, if only temporarily, is a pretty nifty solution to unexpected TPKs that leave the players and DM unsatisfied. A climactic TPK can provide a dark, but satisfying end to a campaign if it's properly timed. But Ghostwalk can transform a random encounter gone wrong into a truly memorable campaign.

[Mr Beer]

I haven't ever TPK'd a party I think.

Closest I came was running Vault of The Drow using GURPS 3e. The party was knocking over the noble houses by summoning squads of demonic assassins. The Drow responded by scrying them and teleporting in murder squads until the party fled to regroup. They hid from scrying by draining mana out of an area and camping in it but when one of them left that circle for whatever reason the Drow found them and teleported in. There were 6 of them, heavy on the magic use (clerics and wizards built on 800 points each, about the same as the party members), so they knew they couldn't kill the party while they were in the magic dead zone.

So the Drow suggested a truce and all but one of the players agreed to come out, sit down and parlay. They couldn't persuade the hold out to come out to 'talk'*, so they attacked the rest of the party and killed them. There were 2 Drow left after the bloodbath and they had to leave the last guy alive...he was too strong to beat without using magic and he wasn't coming out of the safe zone, so they teleported away. Then the sole surviving party member constructed a raft out of the numerous corpses and sailed away on the sunless underground river.

Come to think of it, all but one of the characters died when I ran Return to Tomb of Horrors as well.

* It was quite funny, the other players were practically yelling at him and he was saying "I'm not coming out, they're <censored> Drow and will attack us!". For whatever reason they didn't believe him.

[Slipperychicken]

We talked it out afterwards and decided we're happy with the outcome. It was a bit disappointing because the campaign was just getting exciting and the plot was starting to make sense but we, as a group are glad the DM did not fudge to save us. We rolled horribly the whole encounter.

You can just keep playing the same campaign with new characters. Hell, you can even have the new group sent in to find out what happened to the dead ones. It's a good idea to have players make backup characters for this purpose.

[Umberhulk]

Be glad it was with level three characters, and not ones you have been playing for much longer. Make new charcaters and move on to a new adventure. You'll get over it when you start playing again. Maybe the GM will devise a way to continue this story, or to recycle ideas into a new one.

[YossarianLives]

You can just keep playing the same campaign with new characters. Hell, you can even have the new group sent in to find out what happened to the dead ones. It's a good idea to have players make backup characters for this purpose.

In the end we decided to do just this. The DM hasn't quite explained the details yet but we know we're going to be starting in a different part of the world.