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alternative title(s): Rocks Fall Everybody Dies; Rock Falls Everyone Dies
Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies
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"Just for that, your entire party falls into hell. Roll to see how painfully you die."
This is what happens in role playing games when the game master gets utterly fed up with the players: he kills them all spectacularly.
Precisely what drives a GM to this extreme varies. Perhaps somebody was a Rules Lawyer once too often. Perhaps the gaming group mocked his plotting skills a bit too much. The players might have spent all their time going everywhere but where the plot wants them to. Maybe the group consisted 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, time to let somebody else GM, or just to find a new gaming group altogether.
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 & Dragons Dungeon Masters' Guide even suggested using "blue bolts from the heavens" and "ethereal mummies" on PCs to keep their players in line.
The webcomic Something Positive is generally credited with bringing the phrase to the public conciousness in this strip . The underlying concept is rather older, having been seen in the extremely deadly AD&D adventure Tomb Of Horrors in 1975 (and quite likely used by individual DMs even before that). This ending is a Tabletop Games form of Shoot the Shaggy Dog, or Kill 'Em All when premeditated. A subtrope of Total Party Kill. When the players decide to detonate the game instead of the GM, it's Off the Rails. A nigh-unbeatable Beef Gate used this way is sometimes referred to as a "Grudge Monster" or "Grudge NPC."
Usually the direct inverse of "Dice fall, everyone rocks." Not to be confused with Big Rock Ending. Or Rocks Fall, Party Splits. Or this Youtube Poop.
NOTE: This is not just a trope for everyone in a story dying. That is Kill 'Em All.
Examples
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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, or 99 in the anime), so each of the four rolls is a one-in-100 chance.
- Technically, he could also have rolled 00, 66, 88, or 99, but the odds are still pretty bad.
- Throwing a likely 20th-level villain at a 1st-level party isn't exactly nice, either. A 20th-level villain who shows up to take potshots at the party while they're stuck in the aforementioned death trap.
- It's not because it's a cheap trick that he says that, but because it still gives the players a chance of victory, even though it's impossibly thin.
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 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."
Fan Fiction
Film
- Towards the end of The Fall, after Alexandria fell trying to steal pills, Roy killed off all of the characters of the story in brutal ways. Fortunately, Alexandria stepped in and took over the story.
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."
- 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.
- A similar story◊ was provided by a demotivator: after a wizard forgot what a "gong" was and began hurling magic missiles at one (sample dialogue: "A sonic attack! Quick, everyone, cover your ears!"); the DM responds, "OK, while you're distracted the door sneaks up behind you and slits your throat."
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, goes Killer Game Master with a rigged Dungeons & Dragons game to expose the murderer of the other author/guest of honor. He kills off the dead author's most famous character in a humiliating fashion, 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?"
- 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
- Frasier. In a variation on this, Niles got so upset at Frasier's over-directing a radio play in Ham Radio, he decided to take action.
Niles: Okay, that's it. Never mind all that. I'm just going to take this gun off the table. (fake gunshot) Sorry about that, O'Toole; I guess we'll never hear your fascinating piece of the puzzle. (two fake gunshots) Or yours, Kragan and Peppo! Could the Mc Callister sisters stand back to back? I'm short on bullets. (fake gunshot) Thank you. (to Roz) What was your name again, dear?
Roz: Mithuth Thorndyke.
Niles: Thank you. (fake gunshot) Oh, and also Mr. Wing. (fake gunshot, and sound of muted bell on Mr. Wing's hat) And, of course, one final bullet for myself, so the mystery will die with me. (fake gunshot. Niles taunts Frasier) HA.
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
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.
- If NetHack encounters a fatal bug, the last messages it gives you are "Oops...", followed by "Suddenly, the dungeon collapses."
- “Suddenly The Dungeon Collapses” is an achievement in Dungeons Of Dredmor, obtained in the same way.
- This is also used in (if memory serves) the "screen" terminal emulator. Try it next time you boot Slackware.
- Here it is in screen - there's a whole pile of NetHack-inspired messages here, but the dungeon collapsing one is used even if the rest are not enabled. And here it is in NetHack. Isn't open source great?
- In a straightforward example, attempting to exploit now fixed bugs (such as item duping) will result in the players death, for "trickery".
- 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.
- The Halls of Reflection dungeon concludes with a subversion of this. Rocks fall, but the Lich King doesn't die.
- This is the preferred method among MMOs for closing up beta test servers, though generally with a bit more variety than rocks. This can range from giant demon invasions to UFO attacks to legions of fire-wielding little girls.
- The logical conclusion of any Sim game.
- In Neverwinter Nights 2, this happens when you win. Literally. A laughably bad narrator describes how the final dungeon collapses on the party's head, while playing a slideshow.
- Later expansions reveal that most of the party survived. Of course, this doesn't change the impression left by the original game.
- In the Baldur's Gate games, the game immediately One Hit Kills you if you attack any characters that are necessary to advance the plot. This is basically a way to prevent players from getting stuck if they kill someone who prevents them from advancing the plot.
Webcomics
Web Originals
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