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alt title(s): Rocks Fall Everybody Dies 
AGH! GRARGH! And... he died somehow.
"It basically means you completely screw yourself and your entire party by overreaching."
What happens in Tabletop RPGs when the Game Master gets utterly fed up with the players: he kills them all spectacularly and briefly, in a rain of rocks, a deluge of dragons, a torrent of tarrasques , or a gaggle of gazebos.
Precisely what drives a GM to this extreme varies. Perhaps somebody was a Rules Lawyer once too often. Perhaps the gaming group mocked your plotting skills a bit too much. The players might spend all their time going anywhere except where the plot is going. Maybe the group consists entirely of Munchkins. Maybe they didn't like that "totally awesome" GMPC as much as the GM did and tried to kill him in his sleep. Or maybe the players are just Too Dumb To Live.
Or maybe, just maybe, the GM is a sadistic bastard who's determined to see the players fail at any cost.
Regardless of the cause, if the GM goes as far as Rocks Fall Everyone Dies, the campaign has failed on a grand scale. Maybe it's time to stop the metagaming, or to let somebody else GM, or just to find a new gaming group.
A lesser form of this trope can target just one particularly annoying player, often with a bolt of lightning. Since the GM is the local god, this works even if the target character is underground, in a Faraday cage and wearing a static discharge bracelet. Merely threatening players with lightning can also be effective in controlling players. The first edition Advanced Dungeons And Dragons Dungeon Masters' Guide even suggested, in a roundabout sort of way, using "blue bolts from the heavens" in order to keep players in line.
Named after its appearance in a Something Positive strip, but this trope predates it by a number of years. May have actually originated in Tomb of Horrors, where this can actually happen if you use the wrong entrance.
This ending is a Tabletop Games form of Shoot The Shaggy Dog, or Kill Em All when premeditated. Compare and contrast with Total Party Kill. When the players decide to detonate the game instead of the GM, it's Off The Rails.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Averted in Yu-Gi-Oh!... kinda. Killer Game Master Bakura springs a collapsing spike trap on the party but proclaims that it's not instant death, saying that that is "a tactic of weak DMs". So it's not instant death... unless they fail to roll a specific number on two ten-sided dice within four rolls (specifically, 33), which makes it a 25-to-one chance.
Comic Books
- Comic book example: B.A. from Knights Of The Dinner Table finds himself forced to do this to his players constantly, just to keep them in line — two are dedicated Hack And Slash types, another is a Rules Lawyer. (All the same, this may be only an outgrowth of his philosophy that the players and the GM are inherently enemies).
- Every GM who isn't Patty Gauzwieler will pull this at one point or another in the comic. The most infamous is Weird Pete's Temple of Horrendous Doom, an obvious jab at the Tomb of Horrors.
- One nice storyline, after the group pulled off some particularly annoying feat of munchkinry, rather than declaring a RFED, B.A. manipulates the characters that the same players play in his other, science fiction campaign, into nuking his fantasy world (and thus, their fantasy characters) into oblivion.
- Averted in Knights Of The Dinner Table when Weird Pete gets into a battle of wills with Sara over whether he can manage to kill off her player-character. After he arbitrarily declares the entire dungeon falls on her PC, Sara simply invokes a magical debt to survive it and then uses class level skills to begin digging her way out. When Bob asks Brian, "So who's losing?", Brian answers, "The architecture."
Film
- Dracula 3000 abruptly ends when the spaceship just explodes for no apparent reason, just as you're fooled into expecting a sex-scene. Yes, it's So Bad Its Horrible, why do you ask?
Folk Lore
- A story passed around the Internet for about two decades now about a GM who killed a player character because of his player's architectural ignorance: Not knowing what a "gazebo" was, the player decided to attack it rather than, say, ask what it was. After numerous attacks with no effect, the player decided to leave, at which point the GM announced, "It's too late. You have awakened the gazebo. It catches you and eats you."
- This story was widely popularized in the gaming community by the comic Knights of the Dinner Table.
- Referenced in the Steve Jackson card game Munchkin, where a Gazebo really is an enemy monster that players may encounter. A rather scary one, too. And if you try to run away from it and fail, it really will pounce and kill you.
- "You must face the Gazebo — ALONE."
- I wonder if that's what they were referencing in Unforgotten Realms
- Also referenced in Nodwick at one point; in one of the last few issues, a gazebo was the location of a fault in space-time which an evil god planned to exploit.
- The comical D&D supplement Portable Hole Full of Beer actually includes monster stats for "The Dread Gazebo".
- As well as in the Order Of The Stick board game, where you can accidentally land on the Gazebo and wake it up, if you're not careful.
- This troper once ran a game of Changeling The Dreaming where the motley went into an area of the Dreaming created by D&D tropes. No one touched the Gazebo.
Literature
- Used as a plot point in Bimbos of the Death Sun, where the main character, a guest of honor at a sci-fi convention, uses a rigged Dungeons And Dragons campaign to expose the murderer of the other author/guest of honor by killing off the author's most famous character in-game, enraging said character's biggest fan into confessing to the murder, done to "save" the hero from being killed off by his creator.
- Robert Fulghum describes telling a story to his children. He thought he had finished conclusively and the kids were asleep, only to hear them ask for "the rest of the story." He would resort to apocalypse. "Suddenly a comet hit the earth and blew everything to pieces." A moment of silence, and someone would ask "What happened to the pieces?"
- The Stephen King short story "Graduation Afternoon" (included in the Just After Sunset anthology) is only six pages long. The first four pages introduce us to Janice, a graduating high-schooler who is spending the day at the suburban New York estate owned by the family of her rich boyfriend, even as she calmly realizes that their relationship is likely soon coming to an end. On the fifth page, an enormous nuclear bomb goes off in Manhattan, obliterating the city; the rocks are still falling as the story ends.
- In the children's-book series Diary of a wimpy kid the mother of the protagonist, Gregory, forces his big brother Roderick to play "Dungeons&Dragons" with Gregory.(Long story) Gregory is prepared for the worst game-session of all time, when Roderick, who happens to be player AND GM in this session, just decides that all the adventurers fall into a hole filled with dynamite and die in the very first turn. Gregory is relieved.
Live Action TV
- The short-lived, live-action Mortal Kombat: Conquest ended its tale with a group of godly hooded priests up and slaughtering the heroes, and Shao Kahn is allowed to gloat over a list of the dead to the last remaining good guy. Evil wins. Had the series continued, some save would likely have been made, but due to the series' cancellation, it instead comes over as a falling rocks scenario.
- Played for laughs in the French Canadian Series Le Coeur A Ses Raisons (The Heart Has Its Reasons)'s first season finale. When the main character Brett curses God for allowing his beloved Criquette to die, a terrible earthquake hits the town, causing beams to fall and kill every single character... even the ones outside. Even Becky, who was on the hospital's roof. To add to the absurdity, an alarm clock goes off moments later, awakening Criquette. Her chirpy mood turns to horror when she realizes that everyone died. And then a beam falls on her. They (almost) all got better.
- The first-season finale of Supernatural. Unfortunately, death is not cheap, but fortunately the show does have four more seasons.
Music
New Media
- Ab3's "Binder of Shame" includes an anecdote entitled "The Day I Killed The Entire Party Before The First Combat Encounter", involving an incident with a character's motorcycle.
Newspaper Comics
Tabletop Games
- Steve Jackson Games's Toon actually has a table of 'Apocalyptic Big Finishes', for when the characters don't quite make it to the end and you need a quick way to end things. Of course, no-one dies, but the principle's the same.
- Years ago, TSR (then-owner of D&D) published The Apocalypse Stone, a module deliberately designed for DMs that want to do this. In it, the players steal a MacGuffin that triggers the end of the world. They can undertake quests to prove they are worthy to die heroically, but in the canonical ending, can't really do anything to prevent the world from imploding. However, the book included several cop-out scenarios to save things at the last minute in case the DM gets cold feet (or is being threatened with death himself...)
- The express purpose of this was to clean up everybody's campaigns for Third Edition. Likewise the wonderfully named Die Vecna Die.
- Tomb Of Horrors! This can happen when you first open the door to enter the tomb!
- In the Call Of Cthulhu boardgame Arkham Horror, the players race to seal gates opening in the town of Arkham before a Great Old One (randomly decided at the start of the game) awakens and they have to fight it. If the Great Old One threatening to awaken is Azathoth, however, the players automatically and instantly lose if he awakens.
- The magnificently awful (except without the "magnificent") tabletop RPG F.A.T.A.L. has for the highest level caster
class job the spell F.A.T.A.L., which kills everything on whichever horrible planet the game is set... obviously including the caster and his fellow party members. Now, if only all their campaigns started that way...
- This is the typical ending of many Paranoia missions where the players have somehow managed against all odds to squeak through with some of their backup clones intact. Actually, speaking of those clones, sometimes this is how the mission starts.
- Board Game example: Risk. With its complicated rules, long playtime, and quirky mechanics, more often than not the players will get fed up and put the game up, possibly to never be attempted again. Nick-named "Arm-ageddon" since this usually involves one particularly irate player sweeping the pieces off the board in anger.
Video Games
- The NES game Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance. It can happen randomly to whatever character you're playing (except Tasslehoff, who can disarm the rock traps). Also, after you defeat the final boss, well... it turns out that it was a Load Bearing Boss, and instead of a single rock trap, there are enough giant hunks of stone falling from the ceiling to easily invoke this trope.
- The ending to Neverwinter Nights 2, not counting the expansion pack.
- At least the expansion explained that some of the party survived... But alas, not the best one, Grobnar. Not for his combat skills (minimal) or his spellcasting (minimal) or even his charming, oblivious humor, (abundant). No, he earns the title of best for one reason: He dies because he tries to save a seven-and-a-half foot tall solid iron Blade Golem from a falling pillar by shielding it with his own 4-foot tall body. BEST. DEATH. EVER.
- Likewise Gothic I. On defeating the Load Bearing Demon, the underground temple collapses on top of you. The magical shield around the valley vanishes and everyone is free - but you don't care, because you're lying dead under a pile of rocks! (Of course, in the sequel it's revealed that a combination of magical armour and a helpful necromancer fixed this for you shortly afterward.)
- Icewind Dale 1 starts the game this way (although a bit subverted): The characters are traveling in a caravan. Then Rocks Fall Everyone Dies - except for the characters.
- If NetHack encounters a fatal bug, the last message it gives you is "Suddenly, the dungeon collapses..."
- This is also used in (if memory serves) the "screen" terminal emulator. [[{{}} Try it next time you boot Slackware.]]
- In a straightforward example, attempting to exploit now fixed bugs (such as item duping) will result in the players death, for "trickery".
- The ending to Mega Man 3. Sorta.
- When people first starting raiding Gruul the Dragonkiller in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, the most commonly repeated strategy in regards to the fight was "Rocks fall, everyone dies," which many discovered was a surprisingly accurate descriptor whilst still learning the encounter.
- Guild Wars: Eye of the North: In some places in the Far Shiverpeaks, avalanches can happen that can kill your whole party. Luckily, you don't get Death Penalty for death by environment.
Webcomics
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