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.
- Happens regularly in Call of Cthulhu; backup character parties are the norm in some games.
- 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.
- 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.
- One of the mid-level instances, Gnomereagan in World Of Warcraft is notorious for buggy monster AI in sections with two paths, one of them elevated. If the party isn't careful, a monster on the other path will "aggro" them, leading half of the paths monsters to them at once. Less an epic blaze of glory than getting zerged by several times the enemies the party could possibly handle at once. You could consider it an accidental Leeroy, except it was around way before Leeroy's rise to fame.
- Amazingly, this troper managed to, with a fresh level 70, fight every last enemy from an instance of this at once. Even given the monsters were half his level at best, and he had a few buddies (who were on-level, this being a runthrough), that is not supposed to be possible.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The nicer Dark Heresy games end like this. The bad ones don't bear thinking about.
Video Game Examples:
- Does...Does Leeroy Jenkins count?
- 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.
