How do you feel about TPKs?

How do you feel about TPKs?

Should you just play it out? Or should the DM try to avoid it happening?

Once it happens, is that the end of the campaign, or do you start with a new party in the same story, a few weeks later?

My general litmus test for mitigating a TPK or not is this: if I were following this story in a linear medium like a book or movie, then is there any way I would swallow these guys escaping certain death? If the answer is no, and the only way to salvage the situation is an asspull or Deus Ex Machina, then I let the dice fall where they fall.

I'm a fairly easy GM, so if someone dies it's either because of poor planning on their part or the dice just suck. Either way, I consider those key to the "game" part of roleplaying games so I don't like mitigating them too much.

I usually incorporate it into the story somehow. Sometimes I have the party have to do a quest in the afterlife to return this usually only works if all the players end up going to heaven or hell, or I have the new party come across the corpses of the old party, or a funny misunderstanding happens like they get a free resurrection from a practicing necromancer. My stories are usually on a smaller scale and aren't the kind of "the BBEG is going to blow up the world" games, so I usually don't have my players be the chosen ones or anything like that.

Depends entirely on the style of the GM and the preferences of the group. Personally, I just never have TPK's occur. Battles are about what victory costs or what other objectives are achieved, rather than it just always being a battle to the death. Death is a powerful narrative tool, but overusing it, or the threat of it, just makes it trite and boring.

I suppose I should add to this, a bit of clarification and context.

Character death in general is rare in my games. It can't happen at random, and even in narratively appropriate moments it'll depend more on player consent and decision making than the luck of the dice.

However, I've never experienced the fear a lot of people discuss when you say games lack death, that there'll be no tension, or that players will just go around being reckless assholes.

Knowing your characters will last lets a player get emotionally invested in them, wholly and completely, caring a lot about their story, their goals, motivations and connections with the world.

When players know their characters aren't generally at risk, suddenly threatening the things their characters care about in universe, putting them in situations where they might fail at a long term goal, lose a friend or suffer a significant setback become even more meaningful, in my experience, than the thread of character death.

In a way, those story consequences are more permanent and significant than death. When a character dies, especially if you're used to it and don't tend to get very invested, then the actual consequences of the death are minimal for the player, you just roll a new character. When it's a character you really care about, you can't just go back and give their story a do over. If part of it goes bad, that bad chapter is part of their story forever, and you need to work even harder to make up for it in future.

Of course, this relies on having players who aren't just murderhobos, who actually get invested in their characters, the setting, the story and so on, but I'm lucky enough to have those in abundance.

What about cases where the players keep pushing their luck or putting themselves in situations that by all rights they SHOULD die? If you keep magically saving them wouldn't it get too contrived?

I wouldn't say stop them happening, but if they do, ask yourself if it serves the story.
If they've had a valiant final battle, sacrificing themselves for their comrades or their beliefs, then that's a good death.
If they've had a bitter death, where despite their best efforts, they all eventually fall, then (if your players enjoy that kind of tone), that's a good death.

Most importantly: Would your players be okay with the story ending there, and in that way?
If yes to both, all is well. If yes to the former but not the latter, let them get back up, powered by pure force of will, and let them go out the way they want to go out. If the latter but not the former, or if neither, then have something happen that means they're not dead (at least not permanently). I'm personally a fan of the "Your HP doesn't mean you're dead dead unless you get obliterated", so you can have your players be captured and wake up somewhere else, potentially even moving the plot along - or as another user said, maybe they're resurrected by someone or have to go on a quest in the afterlife, if that's their thing.

In my experience, a single player death gets the party afraid, and creates great moments of drama; a TPK feels a lot more gamey.
TL;DR: It all depends on if your players would be cool with it, and if it would be a good end to the story you're all telling.

>If they've had a valiant final battle, sacrificing themselves for their comrades or their beliefs, then that's a good death.
>be me
>running dark fantasy game in homebrew setting
>players are tasked with finding the Seven MacGuffins to find a way to destroy the Big Bad
>one is hidden in a sunken Elven observatory
>players go there
>I look for enemies, throw in a Giant Crab for filler and because large crabs guarding treasure is a group inside joke
>Players encounter crab, after some awful rolls it kills all three of them
>world is doomed because of a giant enemy crab

I'm tempted to run a Midnight-style game in the same setting but a hundred years later, when the evil forces have taken over. The new characters will find a tapestry showing how this all happened, with looming, stylized claws in the background.

I don't usually ran a campaign for more than half a dozen sessions anyway, so it doesn't really matter if a TPK happens.

Generally if a combat encounter happens the DM should have a good idea of the potential outcome before it starts. If you intend for the players to fight it, it's best to keep it in a range where characters are in actual danger of dying but a TPK is unlikely. Of course you can still end up in situations where bad rolls snowball into a TPK, but you shouldn't be employing combat scenarios that have a high likelihood of wiping out the whole party unless combat is the "wrong" solution to the problem you're putting before the characters.

Play it out. have them roll a new party.

Without the risk of death players tend to have their characters do stupid things. For example going on murdering sprees of any NPC that happens to rub them the wrong way.
Or they will simply walk up to the main villain (who is a high ranking and respected member of society) and laugh at them before telling them "oh by the way we're here to kill you, bad guy. best give up now" in the middle of a banquet .

Or they solve everything with violence - no stealth or care needed. They just barrel through everything and expect no resistance because there has never been any before.

This is usually where a TPK comes into play - the players push their luck and then refuse to pull out of the fight even though its obviously going wrong.

But, what I'm saying is, if you normally pull your punches, aren't you training them to do this? And then all of a sudden you pull the rug out from under them by making it be "real shit" THIS time, even though all the other times you bailed them out.

Avoid it as much as possible. There are exceptions. It can for example work in a horror game like CoC as long as you make sure that the PCs have regular contact with other characters in the setting. Make sure that they send letters detailing what they have found to colleagues or friends or family members. When the party dies there's a new group of PCs with very natural motives to continue the investigation and also find out what happened to their friends.

But, in most cases a TPK is just a dead end that doesn't add anything but frustration to the table. If one character dies, sure, go with it, but try to make it so that his death actually has some meaning to it. Perhaps his heroic sacrifice ensures that the rest of the party can get out of there alive.

Depends on how much I'm invested in the character, but I'd rather take a TPK than accept a shitty asspull that disrespect my character, but when death happens, I like to visit my character corpse later and give him a proper burial, I don't like when the party just disappears after its death.

In my GMing experience, this just hasn't happened. Players are invested enough in their characters to not take that kind of monumentally stupid risk, or to double down on it if they're already in deep.

>Without the risk of death players tend to have their characters do stupid things.

I keep hearing this repeated, and I straight up don't believe it. This is a sign of shitty players, not a lack of threat of death.

sometimes i deliberately fudge rolls to TPK the party.

If it happens, it's best to just run with it. One game we had ended with the entire party fighting the villain, and the sequel picked up 20 years later.

I don't avoid TPK but if it happens it happens. I've only had a few TPK, my players got stupid unlucky with their rolls or were just being pants on head retarded. I've only had both situations.

Healer couldn't make it to the game, players got constant low rolls and everyone got a nat 1 on death saves. That was a rough night but the players were cool with it. We still laugh about that game today.

Different group all around level 3 or 4. Playing in a sandbox concept. They find out the location of the lich castle. "Let's go kill the lich!" Describe the area a few times with roving undead, corpses of armies either rotting or being turned to undead. They decide to charge the gate and died before stepping foot into the castle.

Over all I leave the continuation up to the players. If they do great, if not save the notes we didn't get to and recycle them if I get the chance.

In my expirence a DM should try to avoid a TPK, but if one is starting then it should be allowed to run it’s course.
After a tpk my group generally lets the campaign die, and set it back on the shelf of games to be played at a later date.

They happen, it sucks but sometimes it is just the way the story unfolds. I normally try to avoid it, anytime a tpk situation does come up I run through what led up to it. Mostly I think back on what I said and how I conveyed the threat, if I feel like I accidentally mislead the party then I'll come up with an easy pretty much guaranteed out and play it off as a "to show you what you're up against" moment. If what led up to it is the players themselves for whatever reason reason then I let it ride.

Depends on how the party feels about it, do they want just an epilogue of what happened and then start fresh in something new or do they want to play in the setting and see what the consequences were. Also normally it's years not weeks.

>How do you feel about TPKs?

You rolls your dice, you takes your chances. As a DM, I never intentionally set up a TPK, but I'm not going to intentionally save my players from one, either.

>is that the end of the campaign

The one time it happened to my group, it was, although I was not DM'ing at the time (and the DM actually WAS trying to TPK us). If it ever happens again, I'm planning on what you described - a new party a few weeks later.

it depends on how much they like their characters. If I really don't like how I made my character then I'm probably going into battle head on.

Isn't that a problem better solved by talking it over with the GM than just getting them killed and potentially fucking over the rest of the party?

Also true, but I've had GMs that told me "this is your character background and personality" it really sucks to have no agency over the character I play.

That just sounds like really shitty GMing

You're not wrong, but that's the most extreme case that's happened to me. I've made characters that I ended up not liking the play style. Making a new character wouldn't work IC because of the setting so I was stuck with a character I wasn't fond of.

I have come across that as a GM before. What I tend to do is try and figure out an IC reason for the character to go through a change, if you want to do something very different, or otherwise just rework the mechanics to be more fun or interesting while keeping the same general theme and focus.

Yeah, I tried but the UA Artificer class is pretty bad. I likes the background but both the alchemist and gunsmith were really lack luster and the GM and I weren't sure how to radically change the class

Ahh, that is a trouble. When you try all the options and none work particularly well. At that point it's a matter of changing tack or veering heavily into homebrew territory.

You sound like an awful DM without the chops to create an actually-engaging campaign, so you need to end it before what little material you have runs out.
>muh arc
>muh story
>muh long campaigns are boring
Only when you run then, fuckhead.

I never TPK a party. Never. TPKing is the truest mark of a shit GM, and only 'realism' apologists can disagree.

I always leave one alive. Just one, to serve as a warning to others.

Unless you are running a low story dungeon crawler game where a lot of death is expected, or you are in a major boss fight at the end of a campaign of its midpoint, a TPK means you have failed as a GM. I have actually never seen one that wasn't intentional on the part of either the GM or the players, and you really shouldn't see them, unless high lethality is the main purpose of your game.

I'm pretty lenient when I DM, admittedly, but as a rule I'll try to intervene whenever a character or party is about to die from something that's just outside of their control. If a mob gets several crits, I might just downgrade them to hits if the player has acted and positioned reasonably. If a random encounter looks to hard, I might veto it. Someone fucked their decision making, though? Kill 'em. Same applies to whole parties. Basically, I try to go by the golden rule of player agency.

I'd say TPK should be fine, if players and DM agree to it. Usually I'm with you on this, but playing a game with higher stakes has it's own charm.

Almost always bad in narrative-focused campaigns. There are ways to have the party lose without absolutely killing the momentum of the story because now you either asspull a way for them to come back to life or they make new characters

In a meatgrinder OSR type of game, it's the natural consequence of the party being stupid

Even if you were aiming for a gritty game, I would try to avoid it on any system where chargen takes more than 5 minutes, because rolling up new characters every 2-3 sessions is bound to get boring

Some games are designed like that (in M&M it's stated that enemies should never try to go for the kill because you're simulating superhero stories and superheroes very rarely die), actually, and it works. In the end it depends on the quality of your players.

That being said, the kind of players who would just say "whatever, we're immortal" and then fuck shit up are shitty players anyway, and the threat of death won't stop them from being shitty players, it's just a contention tool.

>and the threat of death won't stop them from being shitty players, it's just a contention tool.
In fact, wouldn't it even have less than no effect?
Because such players will then just stop caring about characters and just make stat blocks who they don't flesh out in the least

Exactly. It's why I never buy the whole 'The threat of death will stop players acting up' argument.

If you keep killing characters all you do is stop them caring about death anyway. Being sparing with it, letting them get invested in their characters and then threatening them in other ways, like losing things they care about or failing at/not progressing towards character goals is a much better paradigm for risk, in my experience, since it drives the narrative forward regardless of success or failure.

M&M is also really crunchy and unless you've done it many times before, filling a character sheet is going to take you like 20 minutes minimum even if you generate everything randomly with the tables in the book. Properly designing a character with powers more complex than "I must punch hard" can also easily take hours.

To top it off M&M characters are sturdy enough that a TPK takes a GM actively TRYING to fuck them up. Besides, there's nothing more "super hero comic book" than coming back to life because of stupid and convoluted reasons. It's a perfect example of a system that is simply not build for frequent character death.

Compare to something like Lamentations of the Flame Princess where the entire chargen process is rolling 3d6 down the line, rolling gold, a name and maybe allocating skill pips.

I disagree m8. If your party does something really stupid that would get them killed. They die.

"The king addresses his people an-"
>I roll to attack the king
"You sure? There are guards everywhere?"
>19 do I hit?
"As you attack the king, his Elite guard rush you to protect their king. Roll initiative."

The thing is, that would never happen with a player who wasn't a total shithead.

It's more so other people can have a go. It's fine to have long form campaigns but I just prefer a more succinct experience.

Players can be shit heads. You may be blessed with a really good group bit I've had a few shitty players and it's not my job to tell them they can't do XYZ I'm there to tell them what happens after their actions.

I didn't realize That Fucking Crab transcended systems.

It's a good opportunity if you're playing a game where death isn't necessarily the end. D&D for example has all the planes you can have the party's souls end up in. Fighting to comeback as revenants or embarking on a new mission as a petitioner leads to some really fun stuff. If you're playing a game where death is the end, it's also fun to advance time forward a few years and start a new game with new characters. Changing the world based on who is still around and who is meddling about without the PC's interference during that time adds an interesting consequence. The only way it feels cheap is if you bring in a new group immediately and the world remains unchanged. Like, a group of five dying and then being immediately replaced by a different group of five a week later is just stupid.

Why is it not your job to tell them that? You're the fucking GM. Setting expectations, making sure they make characters appropriate to the game and encouraging them not to be disruptive shitbags is part of the job. A PC consistently doing retarded shit because they can isn't something you can solve by killing the character, it's a problem with the player.

Either the player will get the message that actions have consequences or they will keep getting themselves killed. If a player wants to do something that's easily within in their means to do the most I will say is "Are you sure you want to?"

A shitty GM tells the players they physically can't do something they easily could

It's not about telling them they physically can't do it. It's about making sure that, beforehand, they understand the tone of the game and the kind of actions that are acceptable. If I'm running a game about good fantasy heroes, a character who will just randomly decide to attack the king without good reason is not a character who belongs in the game.

Alright that's a bit less retarded then.
I'm just sick of these reddit GMs who run a game for 10 sessions then post about it on their social media.
Then act like a skilled or talented GM.
While talking shit about longer campaigns because they think that they "lack focus" even though they can't even keep a game together for more than 2 weeks because they have horrible scheduling in their lives.

That's different, Making sure the players know what's going on and the setting is a session 0 thing.

Yeah. And if you do it right, you won't have an asshole just suddenly deciding to attack the king, because they'll know it's fucking stupid and not in genre to do so. Or you'll just have characters for whom doing so doesn't make sense.

We also don't get to meet up as much as we'd like so 10 sessions could be as much as 6 months for us, so we try and get as much done in as little time as possible. And for all the talk of TPK's it's only happened twice.

When my player did it it was his first game, he was in a video game mindset. I let him choose if he wanted a new character or if we would reset to the beginning of the speech. Thankfully he's really grown as a player since then

In my experience half a TPK is almost worse than a TPK

At least with a TPK you can all make new characters and start a new group together.

Half a TPK you have to find contrived reasons why Dave the Rogue here with no personal stake in the MacGuffin should join your party of bestfriend adventurers.

>How do you feel about TPKs?
If they happen as a result of PC action or lack there of then so be it.
>Should you just play it out? Or should the DM try to avoid it happening?
In keeping with my first statement let it play.
>Once it happens, is that the end of the campaign, or do you start with a new party in the same story, a few weeks later?
Depends. So long as the world/plane/etc. was not destroyed we could pick-up the game further down the timeline. Alternatively a TPK does make for a definitive ending point so I could just let it lie feeling fairly satisfied.

>How do you feel about TPKs?
Mixed bag honestly, sometimes shit happens and othertimes players can go maximum lemming and you're left wondering why they thought their actions wouldn't result in death

>Should you just play it out? Or should the DM try to avoid it happening?
That depends on aforementioned mixed bag. If they players should have a chance of winning, but no one can roll above base 10 on the dice to save their lives, then yeah ima throw em a bone and stave off a TPK since what should be a relatively even battle is just being fucked over by stacked probabilities. Meanwhile lemmings that attack a CR 17 dragon, in the open, with 0 ranged ability, at lvl 10. Yeah those fuckers can get nuked from orbit via the rocks falling.

>Once it happens, is that the end of the campaign, or do you start with a new party in the same story, a few weeks later?
That depends on where the party dies and their actions previously. If no one knows where the fuck they are, if they died, and haven't told anyone about their mission and/or the importance of their quests then yeah the book ends with everyone dies. Meanwhile the party that lets the NPC's know what the fuck is going on, where they're going and all that, those NPC's are probably gonna go out of their way to hire some "new" heroes to continue the quest. Unless the PC's were absolute ass-hats to the NPC's, then in that scenario book also ends.

This is the best policy. If you saw a movie where everyone agrees to do something suicidal like fight off an alien against which guns don't work, things are looking grim, nothing positive seems to be forthcoming, and, suddenly, guns start working because otherwise the crew would just die?

You'd call the story fucking dumb.

Don't write stories that people ought to call fucking dumb.

...Except a lot of movies do do that, except they find a more narratively appropriate method to turn the tables? Although even then, some just rely on outright deus ex machinas.

continue it on the afterworld as a quest to come back to life. maybe get some character alterations or items through their interactions or contracts with certain entities

>narratively appropriate

There's the key words, though, user. If they start using the guns creatively, or try a new approach, or something, sure, don't TPK them.

But if the plan is "Die like a man" you let them die.

For us, depends on whats going on. If we're doing a premade adventure we usually just reset to a "save point" and try again. If everyone but one person died we still go on.
This was bad as we played one campaign with a revolving door cast.
One guy had to replace his character every other session it was fucking brutal.

In my opinion, a good DM should give the party a couple checkpoints to try again, but if the players are retarded and TPK over and over, then it's time to hand in sheets and the DM decides where to go from there.