Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 116 - The Total Party Kill (TPK)

Episode Date: March 13, 2022

By nature of any role playing game where dice are involved, death is a real possibility.  There is a huge difference, however, between one of your PCs dying and all of them.  In this episode I talk about how TPKs happen and what GMs can do before, during, and after the TPK to keep the campaign going using lessons learned from my TPK experiences in the past.

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Challenging player characters is always a balancing act. You want it to be difficult enough that the PCs feel like they've earned a victory. You want to make sure you have enough leeway, though, in case you underestimated how powerful a beast will be. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 116 of the Taking20 podcast. This week, all about that dreaded TPK. This week's sponsor, Bread Dough. I think I may be addicted to it.

I don't just want it, I need it. As a reminder, episode 120 will be the listener mailbag episode. If you have any questions you'd like to ask me about gaming, podcasting, me, my spoiled rotten dog, feel free. Send it to feedback at taking20podcast.com or reach out to me on social media. Also, we have a ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast. If you're interested in supporting the show,

please consider donating one time or becoming a regular donor. It does cost money to produce the podcast, and I can get my hosting fees paid for each year. I'd greatly appreciate the support. So I notice I keep making episodes that are a touch too long. I haven't been under 20 minutes since I think episode 111, which would be like six weeks ago. I'm going to work on being more succinct, and my apologies if the longer episodes were an annoyance. Except for the interview with Shane, that was gold.

So as I said, this episode's about TPKs. What are TPKs, and why do they merit an episode all their own? TPK stands for Total Party Kill, sometimes referred to as a total party wipe. It's an encounter that kills all of the characters around your table. Most often, this is a combat encounter, but it doesn't have to be. It could be a trap. It could be some strange outcome from player choices. It could even be a cutscene because the players decide they're not going to run from the avalanche but attack it for some reason. Don't laugh. I've seen it. Why are TPKs bad? TPKs can end a campaign. It's the death of

all of the characters. Your players who are running those characters may decide they don't want to be in that campaign world anymore and want to play new characters in a new world or adventure. TPKs can also upset your players. Even worse, your players may decide that they don't want to play in any campaign world where you are the DM. Now there are three different types of TPKs. The first type of TPK I want to address is when the party does something stupid. They fought when they should run or negotiate. They stick with a fight longer than they should have. They tried to punch a god in the wedding tackle. They didn't recognize the obvious hints and suggestions that you were giving to them that this was an unwinnable fight.

They blew right past the sign that said, Cliff ahead and mash the gas pedal anyway. These type of TPKs I usually don't feel that bad about. I've DM'd one of these. I think some of these players listen to my podcast, so if so, my friends, I am so sorry to tell this story, but I have to tell it from my perspective. Back in the D&D 3.0 days, I was DMing the world's largest dungeon. It's this massive interconnection of 16 different

dungeons with a different theme for each section. One section had a tribe of hobgoblins that lived close to a young white dragon. The PCs interacted with the hobgoblins exactly once, who told them of danger and the great lizard in the hallway of death. They didn't hear any of it. They made it through the hallway of death and entered the large dragon lair, cleric first. The cleric got picked off very quickly. Now when I say the cleric got picked off, I guess a better way to phrase it is the cleric got picked up. The dragon grappled the cleric, took it to the top of the roof 80 to 100 feet up, and him. That, plus the claw attacks, plus the bite, plus the breath weapon, equaled one dead cleric. The PCs stuck it out. They said, surely to goodness this won't be an

unwinnable encounter. When they were down to two characters, they finally ran. The paladin blocked a door to save the other character who failed a saving throw in the hallway of death, and that was the end of the party. I had more warning signs available, but they never got a chance to see them. The party just made a beeline for the boss room and paid the price for it. Now, I probably should have done more, provided more hints, made sure things got rearranged so that the party did not die that way. Which brings me to the second cause of a TPK, the DM made a mistake. This is when you behind the screen mess up and it causes the party to die. You didn't scale an encounter correctly.

You made a monster more deadly than it should have been. You made a trap worse and longer than maybe it should have been. You didn't make it obvious enough to the PCs that the encounter was going to be this bad. You didn't convey enough information about the environment so that death was a real risk. Look, we're human. Defecation occurs sometimes. We expect a monster to be easier to kill than it actually is. Sometimes we trust the challenge rating spelled out in the monster's stat block and it turns out to be a little, well, incorrect. We're going to make mistakes behind the screen, and you have to forgive yourself for that. The example I gave earlier when I mentioned

it was the player's fault they fought the white dragon? Not exactly completely true. It was a little bit of the player's making a mistake, and a lot of my making a mistake. I didn't have to roll out the encounter exactly the way it was printed, if the strategy's written for the white dragon. But I did, and the party wasn't ready for it. So I should have adjusted the encounter behind the scenes more on that in a bit. Challenging player characters is always a balancing act. You want it to be difficult enough that the PCs feel like they've earned a victory. You want to make sure you have enough leeway, though, in case you underestimated how powerful a beast will be. If you feel comfortable doing so,

adjust the encounter behind the screen. Take this advice from an old GM who's made nearly every mistake you can make. Do what you can to try to keep your mistakes from killing the player characters. That white dragon fight was years ago. It was D&D 3.0 and I still regret how it unfolded. I know it ticked off a couple of the players, and I apologized to them later on. I also took a break from running the campaign for a bit, and we started a different campaign with a different DM. There's so much I could have and should have done, and I'll give you those tips coming up soon.

The third reason for a TPK is that the DICE choose this session to absolutely screw the players over in every way possible. Sometimes you prepare the encounter properly. The players have a modicum of tactics. They're smart about how they behave in combat, and the two sides should be pretty even. Then, without warning, the dice go completely against the party. Almost certain hits become misses. Natural ones come out way too often. Behind the screen, you start rolling rocks. 18, natural 20, 17, 15, ooh, a bad roll, 14, another natural 20. Because of one or a combination of situations, a combat that the PCs should have won after taking a little bit of damage becomes lethal. The death of one character

puts undue strain on the others, and the failures begin to cascade upon each other, and everything falls. The god or goddess of luck in your game has hid their face from the characters, and one by one the lights of their lives are snuffed out like candles. Before you know it, the last PC falls. The players look to you, some hurt, some accusatory, some inquisitive, some pleading for good news from you. And you don't have it. They're dead. The campaign now has to make a huge pivot one direction or another.

While we're on the subject, though, if the reverse happens and the dice are against the bad guys, who fucking cares? I ran a fight the other night where I didn't even roll over a five. A five! My bad guys folded like an omelet and oh well, congratulations, the panman guard are dead and now the ambassador lies cowering at your feet, defecating all over his ceremonial robes as you take him hostage. If the PCs just curb stomp fights that you anticipated being tougher, take him hostage. If the PCs just curb stomp fights that you anticipated being tougher, say nothing except congratulations and move on to the next encounter, set piece, cutscene, or die roll. But what if we're talking about the PCs? What can you do? What you can do does depend on where you stand on two main philosophies of dungeon mastering. One, the dice should decide everything.

of dungeon mastering. One, the dice should decide everything. The DM should pull no punches, the randomness of the game is sacred. Two, making sure the players have a good time, even sometimes at the expense of the numbers that you roll behind the screen. In other words, dice fudging is okay. These two stances aren't completely mutually exclusive, and I'd argue that 99% of DMs mix the two, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes within the same combat. First of all, if the party's going down the road towards a TPK, you could always just let it happen. Your DM philosophy is that the dice are sacrosanct, and if the rolls result in a party dying, who are you to take away the randomness of the game? If so, you and I may have different thoughts on the matter, but I'm not going to yuck your yum. If your players enjoy it and you enjoy it, knock yourself

out. The dice say the character died, so the character is dead. End of story. Well, okay, end of that character's story. Until they get resurrected or someone casts Raise Dead or other magic that brings things back from the great beyond. Once you reach a certain level, that magic becomes common like milkweed pollen. And to quote the mummy, death is only the beginning. Not that Tom Cruise abomination of a movie. I mean the Brendan Fraser one with Rachel Weisz and Arnold Vosloo. By god, that was a good-looking cast. Every time Oded Fair would show up on screen, my wife's panties would hit the TV and she'd have a glass of wine in her hand.

I don't even know where the wine came from. Or how she threw the same pair of underwear four times. You know, I think my wife may be a wizard. A sexy, sexy wizard who would probably leave... You know what? I'll prove it to you. Honey? What do you think of Oded Fair? Hmm. Oded Fair.

Honey, have you ever considered taking up skydiving? See? My wife wants me to take up a dangerous hobby of the mere mention of Odette- No. No, I'm not going to start juggling chainsaws. Get those things out of here. No. No! Maybe the character deaths, though, would have a dramatic effect on the story. You've prepared for this, and you're in a good place to incorporate secondary characters in the game and retire the old guard PCs for the new ones. It could even be that the players are interested in playing different characters.

The players have made new characters, and you can use the TPK to seamlessly integrate these deaths into the campaign. Second thing you could do, you could always make the TPK a dream or vision sequence. I know, I know, it's trite, it's overdone. Movies and TV shows do this as a kind of fake out. It cheapens nearly any death that happens. I mean, if I'm being honest, that's one of my concerns with the Marvel opening up the multiverse. Death doesn't mean as much anymore if they can just reach into a universe and pull out another Iron Man or Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Quicksilver, whomever, wherever they can bring that character back and say, ha ha, this is Nick Fury from another

dimension, or recast a character with a hand-waved notion that this is an alternate universe Gamora. Sorry, that opinion came out of nowhere. This is not the uninformed opinions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Oh god, that'd be a fun podcast to run. That being said, I've used the vision or dream sequence trick before. A group I was DMing was skipping along carefree, not doing any kind of planning for combat. They expected to roll up, crush everything, because they always had. But they got ambushed. Surprised. Caught on the back foot. to roll up, crush everything, because they always had. But they got ambushed, surprised,

caught on the back foot. The dice were not kind, and they were picked off, one by one. It just so happened that one of the characters in my campaign had told me they were planning on taking a level of Cleric. What happened that session was a divine message from the god that character was going to worship, warning them of danger ahead and asking the character to be the god's representative on Galarian. I knew the players wanted to continue with these characters, so I ad-libbed a communication from the god and gave the players a reset on the day. Because of the dream, they knew where the ambush would take place and it made them better

prepare in advance. The god may also have said that the party should not just charge ahead like lemmings in the future and the DM may have said that this is their only freebie, and the next time they wipe, the characters are gone to be judged in the afterlife. Another thing you can do if you see the characters charging headlong into a TPK is one of the most important things we DMs do, provide more and better information to the players. The entire world is ours to command and control. Let's say you have a group of players that aren't the best planners in the players. The entire world is ours to command and control. Let's say you have a group of players that aren't the best planners in the world. They charge headlong and

depend on their wit and weapons to get them out of trouble. They don't research monsters. They never ask around about big bad guys. They never try to find out information that might make future adventures easier. But you, my beloved DMs, you have the power. If the characters don't go to where the information is, you need to bring the information to them. Maybe someone overhears the party talking about going to the Otharian Peninsula, the Tizer Keep, or the ruins of Kettlewood, and butts into the conversation. Are you going to the Kettlewood? The dead rule that town. They roam unchecked throughout the woods,

but they are drawn to those buildings like moths to a flame. Cursed that place is, cursed. Like a weapon that the GM describes as it gives off a strange aura. The curse that runs out of that abandoned village is like going to the bathroom after eating Taco Bell late at night. Another solution to the TPK is to have the enemies capture the PCs instead of killing them. Instead of the enemies slaughtering the PCs, they capture them for some reason. Ransom. Taunting. Want to prove their power. Want to demoralize the people that sent the party. Whatever the reason happens to be.

It's not like this is done in media often. I mean, just off the top of my head head I know it's happened in, let's see The TV show Dallas, Daredevil, Farscape Game of Thrones, Star Trek, Star Wars When they were on Endor The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mask Discworld, Simmerillion

Cutting out 90 seconds of bullshit later Paul, The World's End, Spaceballs Blazing Saddles, and Beach Babes from Beyond. What? Yeah, okay, yeah, it's a god-awful movie. Here's how bad that movie is, by the way. It starred a lot of famous people's relatives. Joe Estevez, brother of Martin Sheen. Don Swayze, brother of Patrick Swayze.

Joey Travolta, brother of John Travolta. But no famous people were actually in it. I mean, it's not even a good idea on paper. Someone should have figured that out by the time they're hitting people up tangentially connected to famous people. It truly is atrocious from concept to execution and everything in between. But it came out at a time when I was a young single man and it was on cable TV. All it was was a thinly veiled excuse to watch gorgeous women in bikinis for an hour or so. I'm not proud of my past, but I admit to the stupid shit that I've done.

God, it seems like we wander to a weird place every episode. Anyway, have the PCs wake up in prison, a dungeon tied to a chair and being interrogated, or any other appropriate situation where they've been stripped of their gear and all seems bleak. But at least they're not dead. Breathing always means that there's a chance to make tomorrow better. Another thing you can do for a TPK is you can just full-on deus ex machina. For those of you who aren't familiar with the phrase, deus ex machina literally means God from the machine. It's when a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence.

Instead of facing the killing blow, suddenly help arrives over the horizon. The baddies' gun jams, an earthquake hits, preventing the killing blow. A powerful monster or antagonist arrives to pull the baddies away from the PCs. Any solution you can come up with that is an unexpected way to give the PCs another chance. If somehow you can tie this event to groups of people the party have helped out in your world because the party helped solve that group's problems or allied with them during downtime activities, even better. The crime group the Crimson Rascals happen to come charging over the hill and keep the PCs from dying. Of course, it's a crime group, and they may ask the PCs for a small favor in the future,

but that's neither here nor there. Allied wizards were scrying on the party, and they send magical aid at just the right time. The elves of Lothlorien slay the orcs hounding the party after the death of their 11,000-year-old wizard. If you do have to pull a deus ex machina out of your DM's prison wallet, an even better situation would be if the Miracle Rescue comes about because the players had been securing resources to assist at some point in the future. Besides just allying with a group, maybe the party's been investing in training the formerly disgraced Maple Rangers and they happen to be there at the right time.

The final deus ex machina I'd recommend that you use would be a singular, very powerful NPC arrives to help the characters. This works best when there was going to be an NPC you'd planned on having the party meet later. You can introduce them a little earlier and use this event to build more of a connection between the party and this NPC. Oleana the druid summons bears to join the fight just in time. The sorcerer Anheim drops a perfectly timed flame strike to take out a key baddie. Now I can hear you rolling your eyes at me over a deus ex machina like this, but I want to counter with two examples. One, Captain Marvel's arrival at Endgame is out of nowhere. In the fight at the Avengers compound, she takes out an entire freaking spaceship.

Two, in season one of Critical Role, Pike Trickfoot returns to the party surrounded by the undead in Whiterun by, quote, astral projection, end quote, and saves the day. Sure, these two things may have made sense in story setting, but it kept the party from a huge loss. So these types of things can be done, and done in ways that have even been very popular inside of two very popular franchises. My last word on deus ex machina is whatever you do, do not overuse this. If the party thinks they'll always be rescued at the last minute by some random development out of nowhere, they won't fear failure. They'll grow to expect these last second miracle saves, so use sparingly and with caution. The last thing you can do for a TPK and the most controversial solution is to fudge the

dice rolls. If all else fails, you lie about what you rolled. Some of you will dismiss this out of hand because you don't believe in fudging die rolls ever and I completely understand that belief. I just happen to believe differently. I don't do this often but occasionally I will spare a PC behind the screen. The attack roll is made by the Pathfinder 1E Hobgoblin General, and she gets a natural 20 on the attack, against a Cleric who has taken a Daredevil-level beating and is limping along with hit points somewhere in the teens. The crit is with the scythe will be a x4 crit, meaning 4 times the damage.

Instead of 2d4 plus 4, this hit is going to do 8d4 plus 16 damage, undoubtedly killing the cleric where he stands. Staring at the 20, though, I announce that the general hit an AC25, like I'd rolled a 19 instead of a 20. The cleric says it's a hit against him. I tell him that it did 11 points of damage, giving the cleric another round.

I will admit I fudge die rolls more for newer role players than crusty old veterans. If you've been gaming for a long time, you've lost a character, or two, or ten, or however many I've had that's died, or very nearly so. New players may not be used to character death though, and losing a beloved character, especially all of them around the table, could put them off the hobby entirely. I'd rather fudge a die roll or two than lose players to a TPK. The longer you're behind the screen, the more likely you'll have a situation unfold that it looks like it could kill every character at your table.

You made a mistake and made the encounter too deadly. The party did something silly, or the dice are choosing this moment to just laugh at the players and never roll anything over an 8. TPKs can be very dramatic moments for veteran and new players alike. Even if they happen, they don't have to be the end of your campaign. A new group of heroes could rise to face the threat. The players could be resurrected. The enemies could capture them instead of killing them. It could be a dream or vision that serves as a warning to the players.

A deus ex machina could rescue the characters. You could fudge your die rolls, or you could just let the TPK happen and deal with the aftermath. You know your table better than I do, so just be prepared for the eventual possibility of a TPK so you and your players can have fun doing it. And by doing it, I mean possibly killing their characters. And I failed to keep it under 20 minutes again. All right, well, if you like this podcast, please give me a like, rating, review, and subscribe wherever you happen

to find it. These reviews really help improve the visibility of the podcast. Tune in next week when the topic is, ooh, this is a tough one, from Devin in Flint, Michigan. How to get your players to care. Before I go, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Bread Dough. Did the pun at the beginning of the episode annoy you? I'll be honest, that's the yeast of my concerns. This has been episode 116, all about the TPK. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.