AGH! GRARGH! And... he died somehow.
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, or a torrent of
tarrasques
.
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:
- The trope namer is a wonderful Something*Positive strip that illustrates a proper usage of the idea. She had it coming.
- 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).
- 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. 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.
- 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.
- Jason does this to Paige in one Fox Trot strip, purely to annoy her. After a week's worth of strips setting up the game, Jason causes the cave to collapse and kill the entire party after Paige's very first turn.
- This could also be a reference to the classical adventure "Tomb of Horrors" where yes, the very first door in the beginning paragraph has a collapsing trap that can kill you.
- The ending to Neverwinter Nights 2, not counting the expansion pack. I Am Not Making This Up - the game really ends this way!
- 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 afterwards.)
- 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.
- In the VG Cats comic Skittles, a game-mastering Aeris, frustrated with her players' attempts to tie rats to sticks, astound the monsters with nudity, play Pokémon cards in combat, and eat the dice, declares "The dead rat gives you plague and you DIE!", followed by "You all DROP DEAD!", and storms out. Shortly afterward, the player who was eating dice passes out ...
- 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.
- 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.
- The Dungeon Master decides that Rocks Fall Everyone Dies in this strip of The DM of the Rings. He apparently changes his mind though, as they're all fine in the next page.
- "Rocks fall, everyone dies" has become GM shorthand for "stop whatever it is you're doing before I lose my last shred of patience and kill you all" over the years.
- 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.
- Used as a response to criticism of 4th edition D&D in this strip of Ctrl Alt Del (though he only kills one guy).
- 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.
- The first time this troper ever encountered this phrase, it was on an animated signature on a Harry Potter forum... lightheartedly predicting this as the end to the series. The characters were not amused.
- This troper considered at length what this sort of ending would do to the world, and kept coming up with answers involving pitchforks and torches.
- This troper had this happen in her second "Call of Chtulhu" game ever, several years ago. One of the players, who was RP-ing as a powerful psychic, had his character grabbing a summoning artifact and *placing it on his forehead*. Cue to the Dungeon Master literally screaming in horror because that threw off his whole plotline and quickly deciding it was payback time - by bringing a sort of The End Of The World As We Know It and killing everyone in the game off. The culprit was given the derisive "World Destroyer" nickname and we still call him that.
- This troper once did this to her enemy NP Cs when she got sick of a storyline and had no excuse to do it to the players.
- If Nethack encounters a fatal bug, the last message it gives you is "Suddenly, the dungeon collapses..."
