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Honestly, by the time he's done explaining it, you'd probably prefer being eaten by the dragon.
"You and your group of nerds fall into a pit and it's full of dynamite and you blow up. The end."

This is what happens in Tabletop RPGs when the Game Master gets utterly fed up with the players: he kills them all spectacularly. It is essentially the GM deciding to take his ball and go home.

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, let somebody else GM, or just 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, 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 provides the Trope Namer in this strip. The underlying concept stretches back to the beginning of Tabletop RPGs, 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 "Everybody Dies" Ending 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." Compare to Dropped a Bridge on Him for generally abrupt, unceremonious deaths.

Not to be confused with Big Rock Ending.

Referenced on 1d4chan, the wiki for 4chan's /tg/ board on this page.

NOTE: This is not just a trope for everyone in a story dying. That is "Everybody Dies" Ending.

Also, do not add examples about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Although their extinction likely involved literal rocks falling from space, they are not a part of this trope. They too fall under "Everybody Dies" Ending.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Early in Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yami Bakura was an evil dungeon master whose goal was to steal his players' souls. When the series' protagonist managed to nearly beat him, he attempted to self-destruct and kill EVERYBODY. (The RPG allowed less freedom of rock-falling since it's played on a set game board.)

    Comic Books 
  • 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.
    • 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. Actually subverted when they play the Temple of Horrendous Doom - everyone dies, yes, but that's just the start of the adventure.
    • 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."
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): In the Farasian Shores arc, there's a flashback where Zecora tried to play Ogres & Oubliettes with her friends, but they wouldn't stop arguing, so she ended the game by saying that their characters all died in the desert.

    Comic Strips 
  • Jason does this to Paige in one FoxTrot 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.
    Jason: Your bodies will remain undiscovered for... *roll roll roll*... 82 centuries!
    • 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.
  • In a Calvin and Hobbes strip Calvin initiates a Derailed Fairy Tale in the story his father is reading, so Dad just has the tiger eat everybody to end the story.
    • In another strip, Dad gets sick of always reading the same story to Calvin at bedtime, so he decides to tweak it a bit. One Gilligan Cut later, and Hobbes is wondering if the villagers will ever find Hamster Huey's head...

    Fanfiction 
  • A deliciously silly Dragon Age: Origins fic on the now closed BioWare boards had Alistair as DM resort to this after a staggering amount of player stupidity from Morrigan, Sten, Wynne, and Oghren. "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" was actually the title.
  • In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fic Ponies Play D&D, Spike gets fed up with the group's constant arguing over every decision they come across. When Rainbow Dash attempts to slaughter the archangel NPC about to spell out the party's next objective, his patience snaps and he traps the party in a cave with a massively overpowered Stone Ogre. Applejack unwittingly averts a Total Party Kill by rolling a timely nat 20 and decapitating the Ogre in one blow.
  • River mentions this trope by name in the Firefly fic, Forward, when she's captured on Persephone and brought before Ornstintz, after intending to kill him. During her interrogation, when he comments on her foolishness for thinking she could come alone and kill him, she casually rattles off the names of several asteroids in unstable orbits she could have very easily destabilized and targeted him with.
    River: Rocks fall, everyone dies.
  • Knowledge is Power: This is literally how the author kills off the cast in the original timeline.
  • Amastroph's Nuzlocke Comics spinoff ends with his sociopathic Kricketune slaughtering the entire cast ("which went well, by the way") and becoming a God of Evil Genosect, explicitly due to boredom with the story.
  • How Bajoran ex-NCO Kanril Eleya's run at the Kobayashi Maru scenario turns out in "The Universe Doesn't Cheat". Eleya attempted Xanatos Speed Chess against the computer, initially looking like she was going to try to talk her way out but instead planning to shoot her way clear, and then repeatedly changing her tactics when the computer tried to compensate. The computer finally gave up all pretense of pretending to be a fair test and spawned a Klingon battleship in a weapons blind spot to "kill" her (which just got her mad at the instructors).

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Towards the end of The Fall, Roy tries to end the story he's telling by killing off the characters in brutal ways. Alexandria objects and starts taking control of the story by stepping into it.
  • Mission Control attempts to do this in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over by spawning a powerful lava monster when they realize that the Big Bad is Railroading the party. It doesn't work because falling into the lava is harmless.

    Folklore 
  • A story passed around since the 1980s 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." note 
    • The story appeared in a mid-1980s Mensa Bulletin newsletter, so it's at least Older Than the NES.
    • 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.
    • Also referenced in Dungeons & Dragons Online.
  • 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."
  • One story tells of a player who was annoyed by the DM, the Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend, the DM's and his girlfriend's characters and possibly the whole campaign and contrived to covertly gather massive quantities of explosives using innocuous ingredients including barrels of stale urine. Using some advanced chemistry and geometry knowledge, the player managed to turn the city in the valley where the player party as well as every NPC of note stood into a crater, forcing the DM to say "Rocks fall, everyone dies."
  • One story that gained some fame tells about a campaign focusing on a group of heroes trying to find and defeat a Lich before he can raise an undead army. They arrive at a kingdom and decide to prode on anything they can, including their stance on homosexuality. The DM says that, while homosexuality isn't forbidden, gay marriage isn't allowed. The group suddenly decides they want to change the direction of the story into overthrowing the ruler of the kingdom and establishing a democracy and they finally convince the DM to follow this thread. When the group finally overthrows the goverment, the Lich arrives with his now massive undead army and proceeds to destroy the kingdom and everyone in it. The end.

    Literature 
  • Used as a plot point in Bimbos of the Death Sun. After Appin Dungannonnote  is murdered at a sci-fi convention, protagonist Jay Omega (another guest author) takes over the "Celebrity D&D" and uses it as part of a plan to expose the murderer. During the game, he hits Runewind with a Humiliation Conga that ends with his getting curb-stomped and killed; this causes the Loony Fan to flip out and attack Jay. He confesses that he's trying to save Runewind "again" — he broke into Dungannon's hotel room, saw a chapter where he was planning on killing off Runewind (only not really), and shot the author in order to "save" the character.
  • 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?"
  • Happens in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, where Susan forces Greg to play Magicik and Monsters with Rodrick. (Long story.) Greg is prepared for the worst game-session of all time, when Rodrick, 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. Greg is relieved.
  • In "How to Write Good," a humorous essay by Michael O'Donoghue of Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon Magazine fame, the author advises the aspiring writer that if he is having trouble finding a suitable way to close out his story, he should simply end it with "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck. -the end-". There are a few caveats: If writing a story set in England, it should end with "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a lorry. -the end-". If set in France, "Soudainement, tout le monde etait écrasé par un camion. -finis-". If writing a story about ants, "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a centipede. -the end-". "In fact," O'Donoghue says, "this is the only ending you need ever use." In a footnote, he cautions: "If you are writing a story about trucks, do not have the trucks run over by a truck. Have the trucks run over by a mammoth truck." And the entire essay ends in a Call-Back, with "There are many more writing tips I could share with you, but suddenly I am run over by a truck. -the end-".
  • The Years of Rice and Salt: This happens regularly to the main characters, since they are reincarnated throughout the centuries following their original deaths.
  • The William S. Burroughs short story "Ali's Smile" ends with a slag heap collapsing on the town, killing everyone.
  • In the Star Trek Expanded Universe, Montgomery Scott dealt with the Kobayashi Maru scenario by attempting a technobabble trick that worked on paper and therefore apparently so within the simulator, but not in reality. The computer retaliated by spawning more Klingon warships than existed in the entire Empire at the time. As for Starfleet Academy, they pretty much went "ha ha, very funny" and transferred Scotty away from command track to engineering, which was what he wanted all along.
  • Games Night by Johnny Nexus (about a TTRPG played by a group of gods and how this affects the lives of the mortal characters) ends this way quite literally. The Allfather announces the end by having rocks fall on all the mortal characters because the other gods are getting restless, bored or just hate his out of nowhere twist about the world the mortals live in.
  • In The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce relates the story of a pair of writers working together on a Round Robin, only to begin suffering from severe Creative Differences and squabbling incessantly. Eventually, one of the writers gets fed up with it all and writes a chapter in which the entire cast dies horribly in a shipwreck then quits, leaving his former partner to sort the mess out alone.

    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 McCallister 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.

    Manhua 
  • The previous DM in Infinity Game did this to his world by wiping out everybody except D.D./Trishia, an NPC, but mostly because he was insane and bored. This killed the players, who were in the game at the same time, in real life.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Deliberately invoked, and summoned by name, in "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies", a one-shot by creator Friv Yeti: "a game that is likely to be 95% character creation and 5% actual play time", for people who like character creation and worldbuilding better than actually playing.
  • Steve Jackson Games's Toon actually has a table of 'Apocalyptic Big Finishes' in the back of the Toon Ace Catalog sourcebook, 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 Apocalypse Stone was a Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons module deliberately designed for DMs that wanted to do this, in preparation for starting over with Third Edition. 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…)
  • 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, which is difficult but (sometimes) possible to win. If the Great Old One threatening to awaken is Azathoth, however, the players automatically and instantly lose if he awakens, as his first "attack" is to destroy the world.
  • F.A.T.A.L. has for the highest level caster job the spell F.A.T.A.L., which kills everything on whichever planet the game is set... obviously including the caster and his fellow party members. It's also possible to cast this by accident if you make a bad roll on the spell-fumble chart. Considering the rest of the game, this is arguably the Golden Ending.
  • 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.
  • Cheating in Pinball. This causes the TILT message to appear, ends the current chance immediately, and permits the ball to drain without further play. Some machines even take this to the next step by completely locking down and requiring the owner to manually restart the machine with a code or specialized key before playing can resume; others simply have the game lock down for a set amount of time, after which it will reset. OF course, this is not always a retaliation to cheating attempts; for more advanced pinball machines that have delicate mechanics and electronics, the TILT function also serves to protect said mechanics by locking them into a safe position in the event that the machine were inadvertently toppled or bumped by an impact.
  • TSR's Tomb of Horrors ran with this trope with a vengeance. Of the potential entrances into the Tomb, at least one will drop a ceiling on you and your party. Before even actually getting into the dungeon proper. And it's not even the worst trap by a long shot.
  • In Werewolf (1997), a merciful moderator will usually have himself be the first night's victim just to keep the game going for the players. However, if they choose, they will be part of the game, with the "Moderator" card. Per the rules of the game, their card is kept hidden just like everyone else. Should a majority vote be cast to lynch the moderator, it is within the moderator's authority to kill off everyone who voted to lynch him.
  • In Planescape, this is actually one of the purposes of the Lady of Pain. As her in-universe "job" is essentially keeping Sigil ticking along by rendering anyone who screws over the city as a whole Deader than Dead, dungeon masters are told to go right ahead and use her to kill off any players they feel are being campaign-wreckingly disruptive. A willingness to abuse this aspect of her is one of the reasons why Planescape players tend to feel less fondly of her than dungeon masters do.
  • Dark Heresy and its sister games, given the nature of its universe, when the events of campaign aren't already trying to cause a Total Party Kill, has a particularly long list of ways the Game Master can plausibly deal with player characters/parties/entire planets that have screwed up in spectacular fashion. This also includes having "(Ork) Roks fall, Ork Waaaaagh!, Everyone Dies".
  • If you stand in the way of the The God-Machine from Demon: The Descent, it will start taking actions against you. If you successfully resist its attempts on your life, it will consider you not worth its resources and move on. If you keep on causing troubles for it and actually becoming a threat, it will pull all the stops and dump this trope on your head.
  • In the Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook Elder Evils, a group of wizards tried summoning Pandorym, an Eldritch Abomination, so they could threaten the gods themselves. The gods smote them for their insolence.

    Video Games 
  • The AI in AI Dungeon 2 can be quite the temperamental GM at times, with seemingly random actions leading to the player characters' death. Notably, this rarely ever results in an actual Game Over, with the story sometimes continuing onward as if the player dying never happened.
  • PlanetSide was shut down with this trope, with the final moments before the servers were taken offline highlighted by meteor showers killing everyone still connected.
  • 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 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 player's death, for "trickery".
  • The above example can be found in Crypt Of The Necrodancer: Some characters have exclusive weapons that prevent you from picking up any other type of weapon, and attempting to ditch them by certain exploits in hopes of obtaining a more convenient one will have you instantly die for "cowardice".
  • 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.
  • In Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, the game summons Arkanis Gath to immediately One-Hit Kill 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. In the original, of course, doing that causes them to be replaced by Biff the Understudy.
  • In the 550-point and 580-point versions of Colossal Cave, you are warned not to use a particular magic word near water. If you ignore that warning, the most likely result is that you will turn into a jellyfish and die; but there's a small chance that the entire dungeon will collapse on you, your extra lives will be revoked, and you'll be summarily ejected from the game.
  • Shin Megami Tensei:
    • Persona 3's Superboss has some very specific (if unwritten) rules about the kinds of Persona and attacks you can and can't use. If any of these rules are broken, the boss will heal themselves back to maximum, then use Megidolaon to hit you for 9999 damage, killing you instantly.
    • Later games in the series aren't as strict with the rules for the bonus boss, but they all share one: don't use the Omnipotent Orb, an accessory which nulls all damage except for Almighty. Megidolaon does Almighty damage. Guess what your punishment for using the Orb is.
    • Persona 5:
      • The Bonus Boss in Persona 5 does not punish you from using the Omnipotent Orb, but if you take too much turns to reasonably hurt them, they will All-out attack you and end the battle instantly without fail.
      • In Royal, during January, the Bonus Boss, which is the complete form of the aforementioned bonus boss, will do the same if you don't damage her by 5000 HP within 9 turns, with her second and third trials also requiring Technical Damage and Critical Damage every turn. And yes, she can All-out attack even if she's just one enemy. Furthermore, if you drop her HP to 25% or below, every 6 turns she will use Concentrate, then cast a Megidolaon doing around 2700 damage on average, unguarded. It's survivable if you are lucky, however.
      • While it's fairly difficult to trigger, the True Final Boss of Royal will cast a Megidolaon doing around 1300 damage (Which almost always equates to instant death) if you take too much turns trying to kill them. A similar instance happens during Cognitive Wakaba's battle much earlier on.
      • A non-gameplay example happens when the Big Bad starts rolling his control plan out for real. It starts by Tokyo begins to merge with Mementos to form the Qliphoth World, followed by your entire party being wiped out from existence while writhing in pain. It turns out that the Big Bad, also known as the Holy Grail, had manipulated the public so they think that the Phantom Thieves do not exist. And not only the Holy Grail is the kickstarter of everything, your whole journey up to this point is a game for him...and a game that only he can win.
    • The ultimate bonus boss of Digital Devil Saga will instant-kill your entire party with a Gaea Rage that does at least 4 digits of damage if you go into battle with any immunities or throw up any immunities in mid-battle. A boss of similar class in Digital Devil Saga 2 does the same, but with the slight mercy of simply removing immunities instead of ending the battle before it even starts if you start the battle with immunities.
  • The Star Wars-based MUD Legends of the Jedi once used a Chiss invasion to kill off the galaxy during its annual timeline reset. In this case, though, the admins did it because they wanted to do something interesting instead of just having everyone's characters vanish into the night.
    • Note that a Chiss invasion is something just as logical as rocks falling out of the blue and killing everything. This race practices martial pacifism according to all canon sources.
  • The ending to the original campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2 seems to be a sort of homage to this trope; after you kill the Final Boss, the temple collapses, killing over half your party (Casavir, Elanee, Grobnar, the Construct, Bishop, Qara, and maybe Zhjaeve, for those curious, though before the expansions it was implied to be a Total Party Kill) and causing the Player Character to disappear, never to be seen again. (In this case, "never" lasted as long as it took the developers to make an expansion pack.) Being a Dungeons & Dragons game, it's exactly the kind of ending a Trolling Creator would design.
  • In Borderlands 2, the beginning of the D&D-themed DLC Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep has Tina doing this at the beginning of her campaign, where she introduces a dragon that can't be damaged and downs you with a single attack. She's then told by Lilith that killing the party is bad DM etiquette, at which point Tina revives the player and replaces the dragon with a random skeleton.
  • Piss off the Kami of Ryzom by harvesting materials from an area for too long, and you and everyone around you will get hit (and killed) by the full brunt of their wrath.
  • Although the trope is usually averted in the Dragon Age series, it's invoked by name in the first story DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition. In Jaws of Hakkon, it's possible for resident author Varric to meet an Avvar fan of his books. The Avvar claims he has read all the versions of Varric's Hard in Hightown crime serial, including the banned version. Varric, who is already incredulous to encounter a reader in an otherwise mostly illiterate mountain settlement, takes this in stride.
    "Nice to know the 'rock falls, everyone dies' version found its audience."
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War:
  • Dead by Daylight has the Endgame Collapse. When a gate opens, or the killer shuts the hatch, the Entity notices and a timer starts counting down. The timer is two minutes by default, but slows down if a survivor is in a Dying state or hooked. Once time runs out, if any survivors are still on the map, the Entity personally kills them. This isn't particularly subtle - massive spiky tendrils erupt from the ground and impale any survivor still present.
  • Hades: After Persephone moves back into the underworld, your run through the game continues as usual; but since there's no reason for Zagreus to stay in the surface and he has to die somehow so that he can return to the Underworld, the narrator makes up an explanation for how Zagreus died after reaching the surface in a variety of ways. Or doesn't. (This was also what happened after beating the game during Early Access, before the ending was added).
  • In X Com Enemy Unknown, in the Long War mod, if you take too much before launching the final mission the game spawns a horde of alien battleships that immediately start tearing down your satellite network and can't be defeated by your air forces. The reason? During the early versions of the mod, the streamer Beaglerush managed to exploit the travel time of the shuttle to the alien base and back (you can cancel the mission before starting it) to make your headquarters finish anything that was queued (production, research). Normally, when you unlock the final mission, time advance is disabled and thus you shouldn't be able to complete whatever you forgot to finish.
  • In Inscryption, Leshy has a very particular story in mind for your playthrough, which includes you dying at certain points so he can reset the map and introduce a new mechanic. If you manage to progress further than expected by beating the first phase of the Angler on your first run or the first phase of the Trapper in your first two runs, Leshy will declare "TOO FAST, TOO SOON" and glitch the game. This replaces the Angler's/Trapper's second phase with a nearly-unbeatable wall of Grizzly Bears, forcing the player to die.
  • When you're at Zee in Fallen London and your Troubled Waters menace reaches 8, but you don't have a more plausible cause for your unfortunate demise, this is what the game picks for you. Glim falls, everyone dies. It even comes with a hefty stack of glim as a consolation prize. And in case you start thinking this might be a viable way to grind glim, the developers later added another failure state after the first seven Glim-falls where your character gets sent to the State of Some Confusion (i.e. goes insane with paranoia trying to predict the next Glim-fall) instead.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • In the "Dungeon Master" episode of A Crap Guide to D&D, JoCrap gets fed up when none of his players will listen to him as the DM, so JoCrap rejects all of their actions and then kills them all by having the Big Bad drop a mountain on top of them. This causes all of his players to leave the table.
  • The Spoony One, in his Counter Monkey series of videos, tells of a Shadowrun campaign that had gone so far Off the Rails, that he was forced to do a Total Party Kill to bring everyone back down. Spoony even suggests doing this once the party gets too rebellious, if only to remind them who's in charge. To give the reader the reason why it went so bad, the PCs brutally murdered a few museum guards and janitors all because they were too stupid to wear masks after bungling through an easy heist at a public museum. Spoony was so disgusted by them he had to bring in "falling rocks" from a completely different game note  and kill them as they tried to escape in the sewers.
  • In Avatar Adventures, the first time the gang decided to restart the RP they ended the current one by having everyone killed by a god of reality in one strike.
  • LoadingReadyRun 's Desert Bus for Hope 4: A New Hope. After raising $1,000 for the specific purpose, viewers were treated to Jer Petter's Temple of the Lava Bears. For an indicator of just how this went, Wil Wheaton personally called in and advised any remaining party members to cast "Don't be a Dick" on the GM.
  • In the French audio webseries Reflets d'Acide, one character has a nightmare of the GM punishing him with the French equivalent, the falling necropolis. The advantage of the necropolis over rocks is that if the character(s) somehow survive the falling damage from the necropolis, then they have to survive the zombies inside, then the lich lord...
  • Darwin's Soldiers features a mild version of this the end of the second RP when Crimson Base levels Pelvanida with a massive airstrike. Word of God states this was done because the GM wanted the RP to end and it was starting to drag on.
  • Al Bruno III'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.
  • Non-RPG example: Paul Twister uses this word-for-word to describe a nasty trap involving boulders levitated by magic, hovering over some treasure that he needs to retrieve, but if he does, his Anti-Magic will disrupt the spells...
    Paul: Thus placing me in right the middle of the room when the rocks start to fall, and everyone dies. Got it.
  • Door Monster featured a sketch showing a group of adventurers in a fight in a forest, speaking the lines of their players, and getting in an argument with the Big Bad who's speaking as the DM. After mounting frustration, all the adventurers are crushed by falling rocks that appear out of nowhere. From below the rubble, one of the adventurers still tries to rule-lawyer that since he has the Rock Catching Feat...
  • Critical Role DM Matthew Mercer jokingly threatened this by name when the group spent too long making jokes about NPC Captain Santy of the Shore Shanty in Episode 107 - "Does he sell sea shells by the sea shore?" It would have been an impressive end considering they were in the middle of the ocean at the time.
  • The Ballad of Edgardo: Initially attempted by the mods on both Edgardo and A Guy Called Squid, swarming them with dangerous monsters at the behest of the rest of the playerbase who wanted them dead. Once they survived, the mods became apathetic about the whole matter and didn't try again... right until the end of the tale, when the most powerful player in the setting has taken an unstoppable infinite power punch to the face and refused to keep playing after that; every player except the three rioted on the forums until the ultimate version of the trope was called and the forum was shut down.
  • TFS at the Table had an interesting take on this. hbi2k=, one of the players, decided to leave Team Four Star at the end of 2018 when the campaign was on holiday break. DM Chris Zito had to do a lot of rewriting to keep the plot going without one of the most important characters, which lead to the very next session starting with a Time Skip of two months, during which time the party failed its mission and was seemingly killed when the city of Eburkal exploded. The players picked up from that point with Lanipator returning to his original character Wake Scaleboundnote  while Grant and Brian rolled up new brand-new characters. Unlike most examples, the players agreed to this in order to keep the story going.
  • According to TierZoo, which discusses various zoology topics in terms of tier lists in a fictional MMORPG called "Outside", this is why the dinosaurs were wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous period (though the extinction event itself, as noted in the introduction, is not to be confused with this trope). Specifically, the Serial Escalation of the overall top-tier status of the various dinosaur builds, to the point where they out-competed most if not all the other players all over the world, reached its peak during the Late Cretaceous, and the developers realized that there was only one way to restore balance to the metagame: implementing a balance patch that would render the top-tier dinosaur builds unviable.

    Western Animation 
  • Non-game example: the Celebrity Deathmatch bout between Hanson and The Spice Girls suddenly ended when Marilyn Manson severed the bank of lights above the ring, causing it to fall on the two opponents and killing them. His reason was simply because the music of both bands suck. The real Hanson and Spice Girls were reportedly quite upset about this.

    Other 


 
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Alternative Title(s): Rocks Fall Everybody Dies, Rock Falls Everyone Dies, Rock Falls Everybody Dies

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Killing players

As DM, JP kills the players routinely for a rush of power.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (12 votes)

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Main / RocksFallEveryoneDies

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