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alt title(s): Party Wipe 
The entire adventuring party dies in an epic blaze of glory!
...wait, no, that's not quite right. The party was trying to quietly remove some guards, and Bob decided to use a tactical nuke in hand-to-hand combat. The remains of the group wouldn't fill a coffee can.
A Total Party Kill is often the result of complete player idiocy. Occasionally, the Game Master won't balance an encounter well, and the mooks are much bigger than he thought. And some days, the Random Number God just doesn't like you, and your dice collectively vote for the party's violent demise in the most embarrassing way possible.
When this happens in a MMORPG, it's called a Party Wipe. It happens disturbingly often when you enter a level-appropriate dungeon with a Pick Up Group. Generally a Leeroy Jenkins is involved.
Not the same as Rocks Fall Everyone Dies: in that trope, the Game Master deliberately kills everyone. Here, players die due to getting in over their heads. If the Game Master values the current plot or characters, he may save the group, but otherwise, it's time to roll up another party. Also differs from a game going Off The Rails (even if it causes the destruction of the party, or the whole world for that matter) in that the GM never actually loses control of the situation; rather, the players get hosed through either incompetence or bad luck, or most often, both.
See also Kill Em All. Note that as a tabletop roleplaying game trope, most of the examples which follow will be personal anecdotes.
Examples:
- This is an expected result of Tomb Of Horrors and several other early D&D modules. Back then, the Game Master was usually playing against the party, not with them.
- The dime novel "Night Train" for the early Deadlands is notorious for being a TPK, but a later adventure ("Canyon o' Doom") actually gives the Marshal permission to off a stupidly obstinate posse.
- Happens regularly in Call of Cthulhu; backup character parties are the norm in some games.
- To the point where Full Frontal Nerdity asked the world to finally let the joke die: "Got your backup characters? They're dead too! And insane!"
- This is expected to happen in Paranoia. Repeatedly. If the players don't kill each other or themselves, the GM will. It's oftentimes built into adventure modules. The players were given a number of backup "clones" of their character for precisely this reason.
- A good game of Paranoia will result in PC kills during the mission briefing.
- A really good game can result in at least one PC dying before the mission briefing.
- An absolutely awesome game will result in all the PCs dying before the mission briefing, and again during the mission briefing, then several times after the briefing...then the new character sheets are handed out, and the chaos continues.
- Webcomic example: This happens to the party in the Fantasy storyline of Irregular Webcomic on occasion. It's a reason never to let your party's Fire Mage put all of his skill points into that Fireball spell... good thing Death Is Cheap and Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs is woefully incompetent...
- iD Software's internal D&D campaign, as documented in David Kushner's 'Masters of Doom', ended when John Romero's character traded a demon-summoning tome for the sword his group had been after the whole game, after which the book was used to summon an army of demons to infest the realm, and the game ended when said demons wiped out humanity. It's not so much a Total Party Kill as it is a 'total world kill', though...
- In the early Wizardry computer games, the death of all party members was not uncommon. The developers set things up such that backup characters would have to go on a corpse-retrieval mission before the party could be resurrected. However, if the backup characters were no stronger than the main party, the retrieval mission might be suicidal.
- Not just in the early ones... Of course there is the option of load and save in the newer ones.
- Many fun stories of Total Party Kills caused by player stupidity can be found at The C.L.U.E. Foundation
 , a former feature of The Shadowrun Archive.
- I think my favorite of these stories is the one I refer to as "Somebody Killed Abdul", which can be found in case file 25.
- This thread in the Order Of The Stick forum is dedicated to TPKs.
- Literary example: In Game Night by Jonny Nexus, this occurs at the end of the book.
- "Fudge" has extremely nasty rules for people ganging up, to the point where the greatest swordsman in the world is most likely to lose when ganged up against by 6 untrained people, which is actually possible with some weapons. Due to most other games having kinder gang up rules a single person often manages to get their group surrounded by armies of "mooks", expecting it to be an easy fight. Said mooks typically have some training, the characters are typically not the greatest melee combatants in the world, and they have a tendency to use weapons allowing 6 people to gang up on them.
- Though to be fair, it's worth noting that of all the tabletop role-playing games out there Fudge kind of stands out by having very few really hard and fast rules; most chapters go out of their way to discuss multiple possible approaches to handling things. Even the section that introduces the 'default' multiple-opponent rules immediately reminds the reader that for more 'epic' games the penalties can be reduced or the members of the 'mob' given appropriately poor combat stats to balance things out.
- According to an anecdote by the late, great E. Gary Gygax, an adventuring party in a game he ran somehow screwed up royally and got killed by some kobolds. What makes this notable is that EGG decided to give experience points to the kobolds... who leveled up and killed the next party he sent up against them! They ended up becoming a sort of anti-adventuring party who kept killing group after group.
- So that's where the inspiration for the Goblins web comic came from!
- The nicer Dark Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay games end like this. The bad ones don't bear thinking about.
- And let's not forget The Gamers. Well...sort-of... The characters didn't die, but they did show up in the real world and kill all of their players, GM included.
- Can happen entirely as a result of one magical fumble in FATAL, if you roll "1351: accidentally casts FATAL". This spell goes significantly beyond being a Total Party Kill, and ends up a Total Planet Kill as everybody in the entire world dies.
Video Game Examples:
- Does...Does Leeroy Jenkins count?
- ... maaaaaybe. The original Leeroy Jenkins video was a staged joke, but there are a lot of people who really play that way...
- Gnomeregan, one of the low to mid-level instances in World Of Warcraft, in addition to its other qualifications as a Scrappy Level, is notorious for buggy monster AI in sections with two paths, one of them elevated. If the party isn't careful (or has members who are lower level than recommended for the dungeon), a monster on the other path will "aggro" them, leading half of the path's monsters to them at once. Less an epic blaze of glory than getting zerged by several times the enemies the party can possibly handle. You could consider it an accidental Leeroy, except it was around way before Leeroy's rise to fame. Higher level characters, of course, may trigger this deliberately to clear the dungeon faster.
- The entire hunter class is notorious for this, due to a pet that can potentially aggro huge numbers of enemies, and the fact that so, so many don't know how to play their class, either in a group situation or at all.
- As far as Armada Online is concerned, a common occurence on the Alliance side if Nomads are equal to or greater than your own side, due to the ghastly Runabout (structure building NPC) AI which causes him to run in circles around the designated area, launch into an assault against immensely more powerful opponent(s), run into a horde of Mooks guns blazing and die to the inevitable gangraping, or be stuck in a fight-or-flight cycle while low on health going back to base and returning over and over without building a damned thing. This happens most often when trying to take the middle of the three Sci Lab locations, and if you focus on the middle when one of these is occurring your team is pretty much baked. There is a reason Alliance takes the outer sci-labs first unless experience farming. There have even been instances of the runabout latching onto a group of NPC raiding ships and attempting to assault an enemy outpost with its pitiful mining gun. Needless to say with your builder constantly dying and respawning, this has the potential to lead to an agonizingly lengthy and unavoidable TPK through sheer attrition. Nomad rarely seem to have such problems.
- A fully-farmed carry hero (in the sense of "being able to carry the whole team to victory) in the (in)famous Warcraft III map Defense Of The Ancients is supposed to be able to single-handedly wipe the enemy team. In practice, of course, things rarely work that way.
- This is because if you are fully farmed, odds are so is the enemy. If you spent your whole time farming, odds are the enemy team spent the whole time killing your team and towers (because you were never there to help), which means they probably outfarmed (towers and players give gold) and outleveled (players give exp) you. Not to mention that the game discourages straight-farming by removing a portion of your money every time you're killed, which makes killing farmers a good method to make a farmer not merely worthless, but a cash-and-exp cow for the enemy team, which will quickly result in your own team wanting to remove you from the game. On the rare occasions that you do manage to farm yourself to shit without the enemy doing the same or worse, however, it is true that you can total party kill the enemy team. This Troper once played Dwarven Sniper built with Treads, Buriza, Butterfly, Divine Rapier, Divine Rapier, and Divine Rapier. (Everything in this list except Treads is a godly item in DotA, and Divine Rapier is the godliest - with the caveat of dropping whenever you die so the enemy team can grab it.) Take a wild guess what I did next.
- Fulfilled in Battlefield 2142 when:
- Friendly Fire is on.
- A Titan assault force breaks into the reactor chamber.
- Someone loses track of how many demopacks they have. (The game automatically switches to your detonator, activated by the same key for dropping packs.)
- Ever run into a Deathclaw? You won't again.
- Interesting variation in in Final Fantasy XII: Many, many, many bosses have abilities that can wipe out the entire party in one go if you don't know what you're doing. Unlike most games, however, FFXII expects you to put on your big girl panties and deal with it by calling in the reserves (if they get wiped out before the main party is rezzed, well...I hope you enjoy the gentle ambiance of the Game Over screen).
- Comes in three main flavours in UFO Aftermath:
- Alien rocket launchers and railguns explode in the midst of the party, who start out bunched and haven't had time to spread out before the ammmunition begins flying.
- A Deathbellows hurls a gobbet of flesh-devouring bees (my God) into the heart of your group.
- You foolishly move your entire group to open a door and a Balloon Fish comes out to say "Die."
- Of course, there are lesser versions including, for example, starting out separated in a base defence mission and winding up with everyone being ganged up on by aliens with rapid-firing laser cannons.
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