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Total Party Kill
aka: Total Party Wipe

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Share victory. Share defeat.

"But if tomorrow, it turns out we got smacked down
If we're dead, our hit points worn away,
Then sorry dude, you won't be coming back now;
One death sucks, but six spells T-P-K."
Elan (to the tune of "O Danny Boy"), The Order of the Stick, strip #445

The entire adventuring party dies in an epic blaze of glory!

... wait, no, that's not quite right. The party was trying to quietly and discreetly 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 (abbreviated “TPK” among many roleplaying gamers) 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. A Leeroy Jenkins is likely to be 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.

Compare Redshirt Army. See also the "Everybody Dies" Ending. For incredibly stupid ways you can do this to yourself in in video games, see Yet Another Stupid Death. Game Over is a supertrope to this one.

Since this is a death trope, expect spoilers throughout.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • In the beginning of Delicious in Dungeon, the party loses all their supplies, is hungry, and is not in the best condition to fight a red dragon. Said dragon would have wiped them all if not for Falin's sacrifice to distract the monster and cast a teleportation spell on the rest of the party.
    • Prevented again by Falin shortly after she was resurrected. Senshi accidentally detonated the Red Dragon's fuel sacs, and Falin's quick reflexes and new-found powers saved the party yet again.
    • Subverted when the party fights the Lunatic Magician. She defeats Laios's party and throws them into a pitfall trap; however, they are rescued before the trap crushes them.
    • This happens twice to Kabru's party, first after being paralyzed by treasure bugs (venomous insects that resemble coins and jewels), and secondly after being killed by a pack of mermen, showing their utter inexperience fighting monsters versus Laios' party. They're ready to give up after that, since they used up most of their money paying the people that revive them.
  • Very nearly averted early in Dragon Ball Z against Nappa. From a gaming perspective, the entire party didn't even make it to the main enemy, instead getting stomped by an Elite Mook. This was before that particular set of characters descended into Redshirt Army status, back when their strong characterization and comparatively superhuman abilities made them very much fan-favorite secondary characters. In fact, this complete and utter defeat (and their subsequent absence from the next arc, which ended up taking more than half of the anime's airtime) is partly what caused their descent into Redshirt Army status.
  • The Lilim (low-level Succubi) almost cause this to happen to the main cast of Interspecies Reviewers. As they are almost insatiable, they nearly fuck them to death, with the Reviewers only saved by the timely arrival of a one-hundred Orc "Raid Party", who demand a "rematch" with the Lilim.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • Stardust Crusaders: Averted. When the whole gang opens DIO's casket, he uses The World to swap places with Nukesaku instead of taking the opportunity to inflict an easy Total Party Kill. Although, this might be justified, since his time limit was still very short at the time.
    • Stone Ocean: Played straight in the climax when Enrico Pucci's awakens Made In Heaven and utilizing it to Speed Blitz through all the heroes, killing them instantly, with the exception of Emporio, who survives after Jolyne performs a Heroic Sacrifice to make sure he gets to safety.
  • One Piece:
    • One of the major turning points of the series wherein the Straw Hats use up all of their energy to destroy one Pacifista, only for Admiral Kizaru and ANOTHER Pacifista to show up just as they're recovering. Kuma fortunately shows up and saves the crew, but at the cost of sending them all flying to the far corners of the earth and separating them for two years. It's the first time in the series that the crew as a whole had been totally defeated.
    • Narrowly averted in the Whole Cake Island arc, where the 900th chapter ends with it looking like Luffy and the Straw Hats that had accompanied him to Totland had been obliterated by the Big Mom Pirates just when it looked like they were going to escape. Then, after a gruesome break, the cliffhanger resolves where it's revealed that the Sun Pirates had swapped out the Thousand Sunny for their own ship at the last minute.
  • In Sword Art Online, Kirito watches this happen to his friends in a guild of low-level players he joined when they wander into a trap room while exploring a high-level dungeon. Kirito was the Sole Survivor, being of a high enough level to fend for himself, but every other member of the party was killed one by one (save for the guild's leader, who was away at the time and was Driven to Suicide after Kirito relayed their fate).
  • The Bull from Tower of God has done this to a previous batch of Regulars. Even a Regular can get in on this: when we first meet Yiwha Yeon, she has the dubious honour of being infamous for totalling the parties she's on with her powerful, uncontrollable flames.
  • Johnson from Yu-Gi-Oh! during with Joey uses his deck master, Judge Man's, ability fittingly known as "Clear the Court Room" which destroys all monsters on Joey's field and inflicts 500 points of damage for each monster.

    Comic Books 
  • In Astro City: Most of the Jayhawks were killed in battle against The Master; Rally survived only because he was away getting help for the others.
  • Curse of the Mutants: This happens very early during the event when Blade assembles a vampire hunter team to investigate the deaths of several colleagues around the world. They are given enough characterization and personality that they feel like their own characters. Then they are attacked completely off-guard by an vampire army in plain daylight, who proceeds to slaughter them nearly effortlessly. Blade is the Sole Survivor, and that is because he is presumed dead by the vampires when his plane crashes.
  • The Ur-Example of this trope for comic books was the original Doom Patrol—small fishing town, enemy with a nuke, and DC canceling the title.
  • While most superheroes who fall prey to this eventually came back from the dead, an exception was in the early issues of DC Comics' Eclipso comic, after the titular villain had conquered a Banana Republic. A rag-tag group of C-listers flew south to try and oust him. He TPK'd them, then left them to rot in the sun. (Several of them are classic examples of Affirmative-Action Legacy turning into C-List Fodder—DC has been doing that since the early '90s.)
  • Justice League of America:
    • It has actually happened to the League more than once. The one that best fits the trope would be when the alien Despero comes to Earth with Superman-level strength and invulnerability, wipes out the entire JLI-era League, and leaves...at which point it's revealed to the reader that the actual TPK part of the fight had taken place entirely in Despero's mind thanks to the Martian Manhunter's mental powers. Think of it as an RPG with Despero as unwitting Game Master.
    • During the Obsidian Age storyline, the League travels back to the distant past and encounters an ancient equivalent of itself made up of superhuman representatives of ... very roughly era-appropriate cultures with a much less "enlightened" take on their role as the world's protectors. All the Leaguers are killed (except Plastic Man, who's shattered into tiny pieces and strewn across the ocean floor, which he technically survives). Thanks to a spell cast before the fight, the Leaguers are brought back to life in the modern era from their fossilized remains (and track down the pieces of Plastic Man to reassemble them).
  • The first issue of Justice Society of America (2022) ends with Huntress' new Justice Society being almost completely wiped out by Per Degaton.
  • All of Alpha Flight, which, granted, are mostly C-list by fame, got killed in a Bendis-penned New Avengers in a Worf Barrage moment. After that, two of them were shown to be Not Quite Dead and those that weren't have apparently come back anyway.
  • In Seven Soldiers, Greg Saunder's team (mostly comprised of wannabes and knock-offs) took out the giant spider that they were originally hunting, but didn't consider the possibility that it might have had company and got swiftly wiped out by the Sheeda invasion force.
  • Transformers: Lost Light: Due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, the finale begins with the entirety of Team Rodimus getting killed by a Negative Space Wedgie and winding up in the afterlife. Naturally, most of them spend the first issue after realizing this complaining.

    Comic Strips 
  • Happens frequently in Knights of the Dinner Table, usually as a result of the players deciding to undertake some blindingly stupid (and obviously suicidal) course of action combined with a total inability to realize when they are outclassed. Always hilarious.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Die Hard series:
    • Die Hard 2: McClane blows up the plane that Stuart, Esperanza and all the other terrorists are on as it takes off.
    • Die Hard with a Vengeance: McClane uses two shots to crash Simon's helicopter, taking down him and whoever else was in it in the process.
  • Occurred in 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.
  • The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. Within the first 5 minutes, the entire party dies, forcing the players to restart the module again. It's quickly revealed that this is second time the party has completely wiped, as they try to beat Lodge's new homebrew campaign module.
    • Mark from the first film turns out to have survived the above mentioned TPK. Apparently, he hasn't participated in another campaign since "The Incident" and doesn't like being reminded about it.
      Lodge: (With a raised eyebrow) Total party wipeout?
      Mark: Like you can't even imagine... (suddenly has a Thousand-Yard Stare, with him hearing the screams of his former gaming group in his head)
  • Jumanji: The Next Level has the whole party losing a life when a bad guy fires an RPG at them.
  • The Mask of Zorro: Montero and Love both die at once when the former is pulled off the cliff by a runaway cart of gold and said cart crushes the latter.
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark: Belloq, Dietrich, Toht and all the other Nazis (sans the two who ran away and Indy and Marion who close their eyes the whole time) are all vaporized and wiped out not long after the Ark is opened.
  • Rogue One: Every last one of the principal characters is killed off in the final battle. The second to last scene of the film are the last two characters staring out at the World-Wrecking Wave fired from the Death Star and stoically facing an end they won't be able to escape.
  • True Lies: Harry finishes off the rest of Crimson Jihad with a Harrier missile that Aziz is hanging from.
  • The Wild Bunch almost begins with one as most of the bandits are killed when they try to rob a bank and instead ride right into a trap. The survivors flee to Mexico where they end up taking on an entire army garrison fully aware that they will probably not make it out alive. They don't. The bounty hunters chasing them are so thrilled to grab the bodies for the bounties that they ride right into a rebel ambush and are wiped out.

    Literature 
  • In the book Ready Player One, at the end of the book there is a massive battle between tens of thousands of "gunter" avatars (the game is mostly set in a futuristic virtual reality called the OASIS) and the avatars of the IOI, the main enemies of the book, as the main characters try to reach the crystal gate which holds the ultimate objective of the story. Upon realizing that the three remaining main characters were about to enter this gate, the IOI activate their Chekhov's gun: the Catalyst, an artifact which kills the avatars of absolutely every player in the entire sector of space. Permanently. It is earlier stated that a very large percentage of the entire population of the OASIS was present at this fight. Considering that the OASIS is pretty much used by every single person in the world, that's one heck of a TPK. The only reason the story doesn't end there is due to another Chekhov's gun—a magical Quarter found earlier in the book by the protagonist, which turned out to grant an extra life—and IOI having some backup troops hanging around just outside the sector of space that got nuked. There goes the neighborhood.
  • The Wandering Inn: Several Silver-ranked adventurer parties team up to enter the new found dungeon near Liscor. It doesn't go well, as everybody is killed by a horde of the undead. With the exception of Ceria and Olesm, who hid inside of a coffin.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Blake's 7: The final episode ends with all the regular characters getting ambushed and killed by the forces of The Empire. Extra points for the team's second leader bloodily slaughtering the returning original leader out of paranoia.
  • Standard for the last episode of nearly every series of Black Adder, but most poignantly in Series 4.
  • Community: The study group are forced to play a video game created as a competition for Conelius Hawthorne's inheritance. While the group sticks together, Gilbert Lawson goes against them. He manages to pull this trope twice against them, and would have succeeded a third time if it weren't for Britta accidentally creating a poison instead of a strength potion. That said, the entire group manages to be killed by the hippies immediately after respawning from Gilbert's second party kill.
  • Game of Thrones: In "The Long Night", Arya kills the Night King and in doing so, wipes out all the White Walkers and the like in turn.
  • In the final episode of the first season of Sledge Hammer!, Sledge unsuccessfully tried to disarm a nuclear bomb, blowing up himself and the rest of the cast. Then, much to the surprise of the show's producers, it was renewed for a second season. Fans wondered how the writers would resolve the unplanned cliffhanger. The first episode of the second series repeated the last scene of the previous season then put up a title card: "Sledge Hammer, The Early Years".
  • In the Stargate SG-1 first-season episode "The Nox", SG-1 attempts to ambush Apophis but he surprises them with a Deflector Shield and kills 3 of the 4 person team and would have got the 4th if not for local aliens intervening. Said locals happen to have the necessary technology to revive the dead, on both sides.
  • Supernatural: 2014!Dean's run against Sam!Lucifer in "The End" leads to everyone except 2009!Dean—who was from an earlier point in the timeline and kept alive mainly to be taught a lesson—dying, one way or another.

    Music 

    New Media 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Almost all tabletops have a critical and/or a critical fail type of system that can result in TPK, hence being the Trope Namer. Of course, the most hilarious methods of TPK generally involve the "exploding" rule, a common variation of the critical where if you roll maximum on a die, you get to roll that die again and add that number to the result, and this can continue indefinitely if you keep rolling well. Let's just say that in more than a few Legend of the Five Rings games, people die from 3-foot falls because the dice exploded on them a little too often...
  • This is an unfortunate reality of just about every Arkham Horror session. A card is drawn, players aren't equipped to deal with it, things begin falling apart, nobody can control the monster numbers, encounters go exceedingly poorly, and then you're up against the ancient one with little more than your starting equipment, a pocket of dreams, and a matchstick. There's little one can do to maintain avoiding this scenario, the game is built around card draws that can go terribly wrong with no control. Of course the difficulty of the ancient one can dictate how poorly this will go, with AO's like Azathoth killing everyone instantly but otherwise not affecting the game, Glaaki outright screwing the board and killing you in battle if the Terror is 10, or Quachil Uttaus devouring a player from a card draw and instant-killing one player per turn during the final battle.
  • In-universe in Blood Bowl, it is apparently not uncommon for a Halfling team to be wiped out to the last man by the end of a game. The Greenfield Grasshuggers for instance once suffered seventy five casualties in one match, which resulted in a consequential ruling that limited the number of players a team can field at once to sixteen. In game mechanic terms, halfling players are quite notorious for their technical deficiencies - they're just too short to throw or catch effectively, they run at half-pace, and when you see what other teams they have to block against, it's no wonder they often die horribly in trying to play.
  • 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.
  • Common in Dark Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay games; although player characters have Fate Points that let them escape death, given how lethal the setting is, they can easily run out.
  • So much expected in Dark Sun that players are advised to have three backup characters handy at any given time.
  • 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. Dead Presidents actually uses the phrase "total party kill" to describe what happens if the party, given an opportunity to escape from their impending executions, don't take it'.
  • Can happen entirely as a result of one magical fumble in F.A.T.A.L., 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.
  • Forsooth!: It's not uncommon for games to end with the remaining protagonists dying in the last scene à la Titus Andronicus. Forsooth! games only end when all characters are either married or dead. In Tragedy games it is likely that more of them will die than marry.
  • According to an anecdote by the late, great 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.
  • Can potentially happen fairly easily in GURPS due to its general emphasis on "realism". Characters (of the human persuasion, at least) don't have many hit points, weapons can do sizable amounts of damage relative to HP totals, simply getting hurt at all brings various temporary penalties with it that make it easier for an enemy to slip another hit in before the character recovers, and while dropping to zero hit points only risks unconsciousness instead of death (rolls for that only start at fully negative HP), an unconscious character is still out of the fight and makes taking out the rest of the group as well that much easier.
  • A TPK is more than common in the Indie Game The Mountain Witch. One notable session ended with one character committing seppuku, one character being killed by another character (who was in turn killed by an enemy), and one character giving up and going back home.
  • The Ninja Burger RPG is built on the assumption that your character will die frequently. The average player is expected to go through three or four ninja per game since simply being seen by any NPC forces the player to roll on a random table of punishments...a good chunk of which are instant death.
  • 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.
  • Pathfinder: In-Universe, the first chapter of the Tyrant's Grasp adventure path takes place in the aftermath of a TPK. The Player Characters wake up in the Boneyard after being killed by the Whispering Tyrant's Fantastic Nuke, to find that the psychopomps are very confused about their unscheduled arrival and are willing to let them earn resurrection.
  • The Infamous Feast can easily end this way in Pendragon campaigns using the Great Pendragon Campaign. If all the player knights attend, and none of them manage a critical success on a Temperance roll, they are all going to die messily. It's less devastating in Pendragon than usual, at least - as a generational game, the players of any knight to end up coming off second-best in a battle with Saxons or killed by a stray lance or, yes, poisoned horribly at a victory feast gone horribly awry, can just roll up their character's son or brother or niece or something and rejoin the plot.
  • Stars Without Number: This is why you should be really careful when using a spike drive, and is why piracy is not necessarily a viable way of making a living.
  • This is an expected result of Tomb of Horrors and several other early D&D modules, which were designed for tournaments where the winning party was the one who lasted the longest before the dungeon wiped them out.
  • Combat in most versions of Traveller can be very deadly, but the original Traveller is probably the only RPG where it's possible to have a total party kill during character generation.

    Video Games 

In General:

  • In Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games like League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients or Dota 2, a properly-equipped-and-upgraded "carry" hero (in the sense of "being able to carry the whole team to victory") is intended to pull one of these on the enemy team. In practice, of course, things rarely work this way, and the carry still has to coordinate with the rest of the team to accomplish their goals.
  • Anyone who is a Griefer for online games. Their goal is to piss off the other team members and they usually accomplish this by killing everyone via friendly fire.

By Studio:

  • 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 (literally, every demon in the books, several times over) 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... Incidentally, that sword was called the Daikatana. And yes, that's where the name came from originally. Perhaps it should have been taken as an omen.

By Series:

  • As far as Armada Online is concerned, a common occurrence 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.
  • Baldur's Gate II
    • If you attack Irenicus in Spellhold without recruiting the other inmates to help you, he will simply call you a fool and kill the entire party with a single spell.
    • Later in the game, you can subcontract out a lesser quest to some level one NPCs, who then decide to try to murder their employer. The main character wipes the floor with all of them, at which point the game reloads and they redo the scene and actually hand over the item they were paid to retrieve.
  • Fulfilled in Battlefield 2142 when:
    1. Friendly Fire is on.
    2. A Titan assault force breaks into the reactor chamber.
    3. Someone loses track of how many demopacks they have. (The game automatically switches to your detonator, activated by the same key for dropping packs.)
  • Because of how Bloodborne works, its possible to die in early dungeons by just getting mobbed after opening a door or when rushing a single enemy and not noticing his ten buddies behind him who proceed to stunlock you with hit after hit until you die. Bosses aren't much better, with bosses like Amygdala easily killing a whole unaware party just by jumping on them, or the area effect attacks of enemies like the Orphan of Kos reaching further than one would anticipate, the intended target dodging to avoid the attack while your buddy behind you misjudges the placenta and gets struck across the face, dying instantly.
  • In Borderlands 2, the entire party of four can be loaded into a single Bandit Technical. If the player behind the wheel is a bad enough driver, this can occur quite quickly.
  • Dariusburst Another Chronicle uses a shared lives system; players who join or get killed subtract a life from the total stock. In a 3- or 4-player game, everyone has only one life, which means a single boss attack can wipe out the entire party in an instant even if no one has died up to that point.
  • Dragon Quest has a few of these:
    • The Thwack (or Defeat) spell can kill your whole party in one go if you're unlucky. The Kamikazee (or Sacrifice) spell will kill your whole party in one go; no saving throw for you. Kamikazee even gives the Nightmare Fuel message "Character Name explodes into a thousand fragments!" instead of the typical "Character Name dies!" But the caster can still be resurrected somehow...
    • If your party is confused but has high defense stats, they will ineffectively bash each other with their weapons—but magic attacks don't undo confusion, so the enemy can still Frizz you to death!
    • Dragon Quest II: The Batmandrills/Gold Batboons and their equivalents in the remakes are a late game random encounter enemy that can cast the spell Kamikazee/Sacrifice. They rarely cast it, but if they do, your entire party will be instantly killed no matter what. You can't do anything to safeguard against it, and you don't get a saving throw. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200. The enemy technically dies too, but even if the last enemy casts it and the whole field on both sides is wiped out as a result, you still lose.
    • Dragon Quest XI: Überkilling Machines get bumped up a level in difficulty in this entry. They're restricted to a couple of dungeons; but can attack twice, reflect spells, use rapidfire beams at random, and bring one of their allies back from death. If you face more than one and your levels are still low for the post-game, this may well be a total massacre.
  • Certain dumb actions in Drakensang may result in this. Usually by casting powerful A.O.E. spells like fireball when the enemy's engaged in melee, which will result in tons of damage to the players. In certain crowded areas, trying to outrun a large amount of enemies engaged in battle may result in one as well.
  • Unusually for an arcade game, this shows up in Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. At one point, the players are given the choice to stay overnight in some city or other (the exact details are not presently recalled), or to press on with their quest immediately. If you stay, the whole party gets wiped out when a dragon (that you would have fought had you gone on) annihilates the city that night. Game Over, no continuing. Sounds harsh, but the option to stay inverts But Thou Must! so hard that anyone who doesn't take the hint frankly deserves it. It's also difficult enough to find (requiring specific party members and specific choices having been made up to that point) that it probably counts as a malicious Easter Egg. It's also possible to get a TPK from the final boss's Breath Weapon attack if you fail to hide behind the rocks that appear just before she unleashes it, since the attack hits the entire screen (except for characters behind the rocks) and instantly kills anyone caught in it regardless of their hitpoints.
  • This is the expected ending in Dwarf Fortress for both Fortress Mode and Adventure Mode. One way to achieve TPK in Adventure Mode is trying to ford a river in the fall; if the freeze happens while you and your party (if you have one) are in the river, everyone is instantly frozen and killed. Traveling at night when explicitly warned about boogeymen is another easy way to tempt fate. In Fortress Mode, there are as many stupid/accidental/avoidable ways to destroy your own fortress as there are fortresses. There's a reason why the game's motto is "Losing is Fun!".
  • EarthBound Series:
    • EarthBound Beginnings: The R703x robots, a trio of robot enemies—each of which are the upgraded version of the previous—that appear at certain points in the story to block your way. A normal battle with these guys is a guaranteed Total Party Kill. Two of them, R7037 and R7038XX, can only be defeated in specific ways by borrowing a guy's tank (which breaks right after, oops) and the Heroic Sacrifice of your Robot Buddy EVE respectively. The middle of these, the R7038, can't be defeated at all and will always wipe out your party. (People have hacked the game to discover that even if you somehow manage to lower its HP to 0, it still won't be defeated.) However, right after the party is wiped out, a friend of yours will appear in the newly rebuilt tank that was used to defeat the R7037 and obliterate it.
    • EarthBound (1994) has the spell PK Flash, which can cause various status effects. It hits everyone, and the higher levels have instant death as a possible result. It's rather unlikely, but your entire party can be instantly killed by a monster casting this spell if the Random Number God hates you enough.
  • Quite easy to invoke in Evolve if one of the hunter players is incompetent. Since each class has a specific role in combat, going up against a skilled monster player with even one missing teammate can get you all killed.
  • In Fallout 4, the Sole Survivor can come across a raid party that was killed off in its entirety by the pack of feral ghouls infesting the former town of Jamaica Plain. Said raid party was put together in an attempt to retrieve the mythical "Treasures of Jamaica Plain", whose prewar advertisements remain scattered across the Commonwealth; due to the combination of the feral infestation and the heavy-duty automated security protecting the Treasures, nobody's ever gotten to them. Of course, when the Sole Survivor gets to the Treasures, it's discovered that they're actually the contents of a Time Capsule, and not the kind of valuables that everybody expected.
  • Far Cry Primal starts off with one of these in the Action Prologue. Takkar and his hunting party are tracking woolly mammoths to try and get some food, but as soon as they reach their chosen quarry, it all goes pear-shaped: two of them get killed by said quarry, and even after the remaining four bring it down, they don't get to savour their triumph before the Bloodfang Tiger shows up and kills two more of them, forcing Takkar's mentor Dalso to dive off a cliff, taking Takkar with him, saving Takkar's life at the cost of his own.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy: The final floor of the Floating Fortress. WarMECH/Death Machine shows up thanks to the RNG not landing on the 63/64 chance of a standard encounter. WarMECH casts NUKE/Flare. Assuming you haven't been doing any hardcore grinding: "TRPR party perished." And unless you're playing a version that allows on-the-spot saving, back to the beginning of the Mirage Tower for you!
    • Final Fantasy V has Neo Exdeath, who has not one, not two, but three methods of wiping out the entire party in one turn.
      • Firstly, he has the ability to cast 'Almagest', a spell that inflicts the Sap status (constantly draining the party's health), and often casts 'Maelstrom' shortly after, which reduces the party's health to single digits. Of course, he can also cast them the other way round, which is just as deadly, as 'Almagest' deals around 1600 magic damage to the entire party.
      • Secondly, he has the spell 'Grand Cross', which can inflict Death on the entire party. Or Petrify. Or Zombie. Or a combination of all three.
      • Thirdly, he has the spell 'Meteor', which hits the party with four highly damaging meteors, with a random target being chosen for each one. As any of Neo Exdeath's parts is capable of casting Meteor once two parts have been destroyed, Neo Exdeath can potentally cast a Meteo + Almagest/Grand Cross 'wombo combo' at your party if you don't kill the parts that casts Almagest and Grand Cross first.
    • Final Fantasy VI Advance had the bonus version of the Holy Dragon in the Dragon's Den, which can counter any attack with a chance at Heartless Angel, an unblockable move that sets everyone's HP to 1. Keep in mind that counters don't interrupt the boss's action gauge, so it can take a turn normally RIGHT AFTER, which means it can use Searing Beam, an equally unblockable group targeting holy-elemental move on everyone. Oh, and holy element is the hardest one to null in the game, with only one single equipment that requires painful amount of effort to obtain), and the Rage skill that can be used by two specific party members out of fourteen. If you're not prepared for it one way or another.
    • The Superbosses of Final Fantasy VII have ways of accomplishing this.
      • Emerald Weapon has an attack called Aire Tam Storm that does an unblockable 1111 HP of damage to every member of your party for each materia they had equipped. And since each character's HP maxes out at 9999, if you made the honest mistake of going into the fight with ten or more materia on each character, they get annihilated on the spot. Furthermore, the battle takes place with a twenty minute timer; if you didn't get the secret item to disable the countdown and the clock hits zero, the party automatically dies.
      • Ruby WEAPON is even worse. The first thing he does is banish the two of the party members on the sides completely from the battle with no way to bring them back, then digs his fingers into the ground to surround the third person with Ruby WEAPON on one side and two towering finger-tentacles on the other side (both of which can inflict all of the status ailments). The only way to avoid losing the party members is to go into the battle with them KO'd and wait for Ruby to implant his fingers, then revive them. Also, if you use Knights of the Round on Ruby, he counterattacks with Ultima, hitting the entire party hard.
    • Final Fantasy VIII:
      • Junctioning 100 Death or Break spells to Attack-J allows you to OHKO any non-boss enemy susceptible to those spells. If Confuse is not junctioned to Status Defense, confused characters can easily destroy the entire party in a few turns. Multiple confused characters (say from Bad Breath or what have you) wielding 100 Death or Break spells in the Attack-J slot is a great example of this trope.
      • Omega Weapon has an attack that hits ten times, each attack targeting a random party member and hitting for over 3000 HP. Needless to say, it's TPK unless you had the foresight to bring items that make you invincible, equip the Defend command and use it just before the attack, summon a GF to tank it, or get saved by Phoenix.
      • Fighting Odin and the timer runs out? You're about to find out what it's like to be on the receiving end of Zantetsuken for once.
    • Final Fantasy IX:
      • It's possible to do this to yourself. Doomsday casts Darkness damage on everything on the field, both your party and the enemies, and being the most powerful spell in your arsenal, it's more than capable of wiping out your entire party along with the enemies. There are two ways around this: you can either merge the attack with Steiner's sword to focus it on a single enemy, or you can equip gear that will negate or absorb darkness spells to each of your party members.
      • Ozma. If you're unlucky enough, Ozma may cast Meteor at the beginning of the battle, and it will kill your entire party before your first turn.
      • Climbing up the vines within Gizamaluke's Grotto leads you to a part of the world map that contain monsters that are at least 50 levels above your party's levels and you won't actually see them on a regular basis until disc 3 or 4. You face off against dragons that can cast Thundaga on your party and wipe them out in one shot or cause the Venom status that immobilizes the victim and has their HP and MP slowly drain. The other kind of monster in the area are large birds that can cast Firaga and Stop on your party. You're given a fair warning by a Moogle in the area you're about to leave not to climb up due to the extremely deadly monsters at your supposed current low levelled party members, so continuing anyway puts the whole blame on you. You can have at least one party member survive Grand Dragon's commonly-used "Thundaga" attack by equipping a Coral Ring you can acquire by letting Freya win the Festival of the Hunt, but you'll still be weak against its hard-hitting Venom Claw melee attack as well said bird enemies' hard-hitting attacks, at which point you shouldn't have an effective piece of equipment at that point for said bird enemies, unlike the Grand Dragons.
    • Final Fantasy X:
      • There's a surprisingly low number of storyline bosses that have a one-shot party kill move. The Monster Arena, on the other hand... In there it's actually easier to list which ones don't have a one-hit party kill move. Thank God for Auto-Life. But then there's Th'uban in the Arena who likes to counterattack with a total status-remover, removing even Auto-Life. From your whole party. This counterattack might be a party kill unless you've trained a lot.
      • One of the storyline bosses likes to Totally Annihilate your party with ONE move. But at least you get a fair warning before he unleashes the hurt.
      • One storyline boss has a party-wide spell that inflicts the death status without warning. Fortunately, this is a multi-stage boss who only unleashes this attack in the final stage while earlier stages will inflict the "zombie" status ailment (which applies Revive Kills Zombie to player characters). In this case, the door swings both ways, and any character who still has the zombie effect on them will be immune to "death". It's possible to beat this boss without using that little trick, but it's much much harder.
      • Your party can also be wiped out by a Great Malboro, not only if you're under-leveled, but as a result of being over-leveled (specifically in Evasion) and not protected from its immediate status effects. Having the whole party rendered confused, blind and poisoned results in an excruciatingly slow death as each member constantly successfully dodges the others' attacks, while slowly dying from the poison. It's possible that the Malboro will attack you and break confusion, giving you a chance to escape—but if you're not lucky, all you can do is sit there and watch, because there's literally nothing you can do about it. And Great Malboros always get to attack first, and always opens with Bad Breath.
      • Most notably, there's Sin's Giga-Gravitron, which doesn't just wipe your party, but the entire airship that the party is on for a Non-Standard Game Over.
      • Dark Aeons and Penance from No Export for You, resp. Updated Re-release versions. All their Overdrives are TPK unless you have Auto-Life or maximum possible HP... But even then, Dark Yojimbo's Zanmato and Dark Magus Sister's Delta Attack will still kill your party and both also dispel all buffs. Penance's Judgment Day does not dispel effects, but her arms will finish any revived members off, since she can perform that attack only if both of her arms are alive in the first place.
    • 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 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). Unfortunately, not everyone remembers to train the reserves, since Leaked Experience in the game doesn't work that way.
      • The most infamous instance of this trope is Zodiark, who has Darkja, an attack which not only does high magic damage to the entire party that cannot be avoided, but it also has a chance to inflict Instant Death. That doesn't sound so bad, except XII is one of the very few games in the series where this is no form of equipment that grants protection from One-Hit Kill attacks. Ergo, Zodiark has the potential to instantly kill off your entire active party regardless of their HP or level, and all you can do is cast the Shell protection spell to at least halve the insta-death chance.
    • Final Fantasy XIII:
      • Climax Boss Barthandelus and his Destrudo. If you don't do a certain (fairly low) amount of damage during the charge time, it's a guaranteed party wipe.
      • Snow in the Coliseum DLC has a Tension gauge that builds up when he attacks the same target consecutively. Let it reach 500% and he'll wipe the party with Sovereign Fist.
    • Final Fantasy XIV:
      • Multiple bosses are capable of unleashing total party kills if specific requirements aren't met. Some examples being Ultima Weapon, Ultima Beast and Odin who will charge their ultimate attacks (Ultima, Demi-Ultima and Zantetsuken respectively) when low on HP and must be defeated before they can use them. Midgardsormr will attempt two during the battle against him and a shield must be erected with the correct timing to block it. All primals ultimates will also cause a total party kill unless the correct requirements are met.
      • A few enemies whose ultimate attack became possible to survive due to new gear will proceed to spam their ultimate until no one is left standing.
      • Many bosses in late game content, particularly in the expansions, have attacks that take time to charge up, necessitating the players to accomplish certain tasks (more often than not killing all of the mooks present) before the attack finishes charging, or else get wiped.
      • You don't even need a boss for a wipe in some dungeons - all that is required is an undergeared and overconfident tank (specifically, one trying to wall to wall pull before they have the gear and skills for doing so - most tanks under level 60 and 150-200+ ilvl should not even be trying anything beyond double pulls with very few exceptions), a DPS that charges ahead and overpulls more than the tank and healer can handle, or an undergeared or underperforming healer.
      • Specifically bad dungeons for this tend to the the ones at the beginnings and ends of level tiers/with difficulty spikes or new mechanics and no higher ilvl requirement demanding upgrade before queuing. Haukke Manor is probably the first in ARR: it's one of the first level 30-35 duties, meaning tanks who have been coasting on their low ilvl or who haven't made the necessary vendor visit can roll up severely undergeared. Unfortunately, it's also before any healer gets effective partywide heals or regenerating heals. Combine this with overconfidence and the first introductions of boss fight and pull mechanics (AOEs that actually hit hard/cause status effects, the void lamps on the final boss) and that many players are truly *new* sprouts doing it for the very first time rather than leveling a new job.
      • Luring traps in Palace of the Dead and Heaven-On-High are often almost guaranteed party wipes if hit during a pull or in later levels, unless the party has a fully-leveled 90/90 aetherpool tank and either/both a white mage with Holy or a machinist with Spread Shot. If the party is lacking any of the above - the only other ideal option is to pop a Pomander of Witching and hope for the best as whatever party you do have tries to cut down the numbers.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War pulls one off during a cutscene. After killing the Disc-One Final Boss, Arvis invites Sigurd to Belhalla to clear his name, only to incinerate his entire army with Meteor spells and personally execute Sigurd with Valflame. Hope you've paired up the Generation 1 characters, because we're only halfway through the game.
  • The Dullahan, the Superboss of Golden Sun: The Lost Age and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, is notorious for this, mostly because he spams a move that renders all your Djinn useless—meaning your stats take a dive, your most useful spells (like multi-person heals and revives) are no longer usable, and your high-damage summon spells are no longer available. Oh, and he also can summon Charon, the ultimate Venus summon, which has a chance of auto-killing all targets.
  • Emelious on Grandia III will unleash total party kill if his God Killer sword is allowed to use it's attack. The game gives you an ample amount of time to interrupt the attack however so it's unlikely you will actually ever see the attack unless you actually try to do so.
  • In Halo: Reach, this can sometimes occur in Firefight mode, which pits up to four players against increasingly difficult waves of covenant enemies. One of the most frequent ways this can happen is actually pretty surprising, the detonation of loose plasma grenades. Nearly all enemies have two plasma grenades on them, but most can't or won't use them and when they die the grenades are dropped on the ground. These tend to aggregate in certain places where there are ideal kill zones. When one grenade is hit, it will start a chain reaction that can easily kill all the players if they are unlucky enough to be caught in it. Can also easily happen if someone messes up with the target-designator and calls an artillery strike on their own heads.
  • Heavy Weapon's Updated Re-release for the Xbox 360 has the War Party Survival mode, in which players have infinite lives, but get a respawn timer that gets longer for each time they die. The game only ends once all player tanks are dead and have yet to respawn. This trope comes into play once the Havanski Atomic Bomber appears—it drops A-bombs that will destroy every player on the screen regardless of shielding should one of them even touch the ground before being destroyed.
  • I=MGCM: Downplayed. Any wrong moves in difficult stages can result this. However, it's heavily implied that magical heroines get non-lethal K.O.s. Unfortunately plays straight at Chapter 6 Episode 5 cutscene of the main story. At the last "Groundhog Day" Loop, all 6 heroinesnote  are brutally killed in that unwinnable battle against demons. Complete with a CG shot of their dead bodies that are fully shown onscreen with opened eyes and pink blood dripping out from their bodies and splattered around them. Don't worry, they get better.
  • Left 4 Dead:
    • This is the point in VS mode in both games, where the zombie players' objective is to kill all the survivor players. The trope also occurs if there is a player who is Too Dumb to Live or is a Leeroy Jenkins and causes the whole team to be killed due to his stupidity. Or worse, a Griefer.
      "Hey guys! Check out my grenade launcher!"
    • Normally, when playing single player, if your character dies, it's Game Over, no matter how many bots are left, as Valve presumed the player wants to play the game and not be relegated to a "watcher" role. It made sense for some, but others weren't content with it, and those others coded a number of Game Mods that allow the bots to proceed (and possibly rescue the player survivor from a closet), and just like in multiplayer, the only way to restart the current scenario is for the whole survivor quartet to end up incapped or dead.
  • The Legend of Heroes - Trails has a variety of Hopeless Boss Fights throughout the series that end with the main opponent unleashing an attack that takes down the entire party.
  • In Mabinogi, finishing the Generation 9 mainstream allows players the ability to summon the gold dragon Adniel to use his Meteor attack on a specific spot (not targeted by enemy) in the Shadow Realm. Keep in mind that many Shadow Missions involve hitting an orb that seals off the surrounding area and spawns monsters inside for the players to fight. Commanding Adniel to center his meteors on the center of the room can potentially kill EVERYTHING within the room, player and monster alike. There is no IF to a bunch of rocks pummeling the ground.
  • Mass Effect:
    • In the series as a whole, thresher maws tend to be this for NPCs (in fact, one backstory you can choose involves being the Sole Survivor of a group that ran afoul of one). For you, thresher maws just tend to be a battle which isn't so much a challenge as it is a trial of patience.
    • It's one possible outcome of the last mission in Mass Effect 2, although you probably have to be trying to foul it up that badly. It's arguably a really extended Non-Standard Game Over, as it's the only ending you can't import to Mass Effect 3.
  • Might and Magic:
    • In VII this would be the result of encounter with Necromancers and Liches when you visited places where you really shouldn't be such as Vine Cellar or Watchtower in Deyja. This is mostly because their highest tier has Dragon Breath in their arsenal, which would kill weaker parties with single cast. Of course, you can, depending on your choices, to learn said spell as well ... and get yourself killed with it when you cast it on target that is too close to you, because you can't have any resistance to it ever.
    • The above applies to some area-of-effect spells in general in VI-VIII, such as Starburst or Meteor Shower. Cast it too close to you and you get killed yourself as well. Searing Rune from X that is exclusive to Rune Priest, can do this as well, if you cast it while you have enemies right in front of you.
    • In X the second boss is fought at top of a lighthouse. The boss can push you around. Since the lighthouse was not built with OSHA in mind, guess what happens when you have your back to edge of the roof and boss pushes you back?
  • In Monster Hunter, a party of three or four can instantly go from "Defeats: 0/3" to QUEST FAILED if the entire party gets knocked out at once, as the three-KO limit is shared amongst the entire party. In a more specific example, Behemoth, Safi'jiiva and Alatreon in Monster Hunter: World WILL inflict this on the party should they not do enough damage within five minutes as the former two will not create rocks that allow the party to hide, while the latter will deal enough damage over time to outdamage any practical healing attempts.
  • In Bungie's Myth series, your explosive-chucking dwarves have incredible TPK potential, as you can tell in this video.
  • At the end of the second chapter of Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, Mephistopheles kills the player and his/her companions are all killed in the imminent diabolical invasion. The third chapter is set in Hell (specifically Cania, the eighth layer, reserved for traitors), in which your entire party is technically dead.
  • In The Oregon Trail, this will probably happen if you try to ford the Green River or hit a rock while rafting down the Columbia River. "Everyone in your party has died." In the sequel, your entire party can be wiped out at once by freezing or starving to death in a blizzard (especially if you can't hunt or don't have winter clothing), a contagious disease, thirst (if you don't have canteens or water kegs), etc. The sequel also lets you cross the Black Rock and Great Salt Lake Deserts. If you decide to travel during the day instead of waiting for nightfall, everyone dies one-by-one in an instant.
  • The Oregon Trail (2021): In Ka-Boom, running out of water causes the bullets the party's transporting to overheat. Obviously, neither the party nor the wagon survive the explosion.
  • Overwatch calls this a Team Kill, where one team kills all the opposing heroes.
  • Some fusion spells in Persona 2 instantaneously kill any enemy that can't void a specific element. There are spells for Earth, Fire, Water and Wind. Another ridiculously specific Fusion Spell not only kills every enemy, but also kills two of your party members as well.
  • In Planescape: Torment, the Nameless One is separated from his companions when they enter the Fortress of Regrets. The Transcendent One kills them all, one by one, but the Nameless One resurrects them at the end.
  • The primary cause of mission failure in Rainbow Six. "Mission failed, your team was wiped out". Can instantly result from grenade mishaps.
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider has the trope name as an achievement by having Lara use the Berserk Arrow to make enemies go into a wild fit and shoot their own comrades before dying. It has to be five people killed consecutively for the achievement to pop.
  • In Shadowverse, this applies to the concept of boardwipes, allowing a player to defend against an opposing large army of followers and punish overextending. Themis's Decree is a classic among boardwipes.
  • Shin Megami Tensei:
    • If you have played one of these games, you have probably seen an enemy cast Mahamaon or Mamudoon, realized that nobody in your party is immune, and seen everyone drop simultaneously. Or, worse, Megidolaon.
    • Samsara and Die For Me!, are Mahamaon and Mamudoon with 80% of party-wide instant-death. But even these two don't compare much to the next example (as they are usually traditionally in possession of certain boss or secret demons), as is, the even more extreme, Megidoladyne, unique to Lucifer, as Superboss of Devil Survivor; it deals ridiculously high unblockable Almighty damage to every single member of ALL of your parties. And every time he uses it? It gets a 50% power boost. Never mind the fact that you'd need to be in the high 90s in level and have a maxed or nearly-maxed magic stat to even survive one hit and not be put near death by it, this spell eventually becomes powerful enough to induce a guaranteed Total Party Kill if you can't kill him fast enough...or figure out a way to get him to get the least possible amount of turns he can. Only a fool would attempt to take this boss on without preparing specially for Megidoladyne.
    • Digital Devil Saga's ultimate Superboss, the Demi-Fiend, has their Gaea Rage skill, which inflicts at least 5,000 HP of damage to each of your party members in a game where each party member's HP caps at 999. Since it's an Almighty-elemental attack, it cannot be resisted in any way. There are a few flags that cause them to use this skill, the most notorious one being to have elemental immunities at any point in the battle, and yes, they will cast this skill at the start of the battle before you can even issue commands if anyone in your party comes into battle with an immunity. The only way to survive it is to have Cielo be sleeping while equipped with the "Null Sleep" skill (an oddly-named skill that, rather than negating Sleep, guarantees evasion of all attacks while asleep); otherwise, the skill may as well turn off your PS2.
    • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey has the Almighty skill "Horn of Fate", which effectively means the aforementioned Mamudoon or Mahamaon on both parties, having a high chance of wiping out everyone. The worst of all? Israfel, Heimdall, and Trumpeter can use it, and this very last one can appear as one of the unidentified demons in the very last dungeon, at a level of 83, pretty much ensuring your party is wiped if you don't kill him before he toots his horn.
  • Sonic Mania Plus: In Encore mode, Video-Game Lives are replaced with a system where two characters are active at a time, while up to three characters are kept on standby, jumping into action if one of the controlled characters dies. If the player's character dies without a partner or any other characters on standby, it's Game Over.
  • Splatoon isn't an RPG, but the team-based multiplayer mechanics means that it's not at all uncommon for an uncoordinated team to be completely wiped out in short order, with the game referring to this as... well, a "Wipeout"note . It's even more pronounced in the ranked modes, especially in Tower Control mode: the entire team is likely to be clustered around the eponymous tower, meaning that a single well-placed or timed special can take out everybody in one hit.
  • Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has this in spades if you get struck by an attack called Ether Strike while fighting the final Superboss, Freya, who makes a parody appearance from a sister game called Valkyrie Profile. Despite being a huge bitch in that game, she manages to be entirely worse in this one. Much worse. There is no way to survive a direct Ether Strike on the easiest difficulty without actively trying to break your defense to do anything but a straight Freya fight, and even then you're still likely to die unless you learn her pattern and bring lots of bombs.
  • It's pretty much guaranteed to happen at least once or twice in Sunless Sea, and there's an almost hilarious amount of ways to get you and your crew killed.
  • After the events of Chapter 6 in Super Paper Mario, Dimentio unexpectedly appears in Flipside to take advantage of the chaos and send them all to the Underwhere. This is subverted with the reveal that Dimentio didn't actually murder the heroes, merely teleported them there to find the last Pure Heart.
  • In the Tales Series, a boss's Hi-Ougi/Mystic Arte can easily lead to this if everyone gets caught up in it, especially on higher difficulties.
    • In the PS2 remake of Tales of Destiny, Barbatos Goetia's aptly named World Destroyer arte will most likely cause this if you fail to interrupt it in time, as it nukes the entire battlefield for damage well over the HP cap.
    • The PS3 version of Tales of Vesperia has a particularly nasty example of this with the last boss and his Big Bang mystic arte on difficulties above Normal, as it can't be avoided, and deals enough damage to OHKO anyone who doesn't have an invincibility buff and/or isn't Flynn.
      • Clint's mystic arte can be even worse, as it performs a One-Hit KO on every single character who's had their fatal strike gauge depleted by him or his allies, with an obvious result if everyone is in that situation. Removing your ability to get hit entirely with Repede's Gale Dog or Estelle's Force Field is the only way to avoid it, and having an Auto-Revive effect active is the only way to (Technically) survive a hit from it.
    • In Tales of Arise, in the DLC bonus boss fight against Kirito and Asuna, Shoot the Medic First is enforced: if you take Kirito down first, Asuna will respond by using her Mystic Arte, Unlimited Terrain Manipulation, which causes this.
  • An occasionally embarrassing but not uncommon event in Team Fortress 2, especially in competitive matches where teams are usually limited to the standard format of six players in a specific lineup or the one-of-each-class-per-team Highlander arrangement. An uncoordinated or unlucky team can get wiped out in short order by The Medic and his healing buddy, or by an inconveniently placed Sticky Bomb trap. Due to respawns taking up to 20 seconds, this means that a series of rapid losses can leave an entire team out of action and unable to prepare a defense.
  • Total War: Warhammer and its sequel have Subterrainian Intercept Battles. If an army is trying to use the Underway/Worldroots/Beast-paths to bypass an enemy army, they may be detected and drawn into battle anyway. The travelling army has no chance to retreat and if defeated, it's wiped out to a man. The understanding is a full retreat back into the labyrinthine travel systems results in the army being separated, permanently lost Beneath the Earth, and declared KIA.
  • Town of Salem has two roles that can end the game with this: the Arsonist who can douse individual players in gasoline and choose to ignite at any time, and the Hex Master who hexes a player at night (and dealing a weak attack if they have the Necronomicon) before dealing an unstoppable attack to every hexed player if every non-Coven player is hexed and the Hex Master is still alive. The second game adds the Soul Collector, who will kill every player at the end of the day if they are not lynched when they turn into Death.
  • Comes in three main flavors 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 ammunition begins flying.
    • A Deathbellows hurls a gobbet of flesh-devouring bees 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 defense mission and winding up with everyone being ganged up on by aliens with rapid-firing laser cannons.
  • The Tower Raid level is infamous for this in Warface, where it requires amazing teamwork and communication among several experienced players with high-level weaponry to even attempt to avoid this trope.
  • In Wasteland 2, if every Ranger in your party is killed, you receive a Game Over, regardless of whether you have Recruits in your party.
  • Wizardry:
    • In the Nintendo Hard early 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. The later games added the option to load and save, making this trope less bad.
    • The Dark Savant trilogy had what was known as the "Boffo" endings; where, if you took a particular path, everyone died. In Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, the "Boffo" was giving the wrong answer to one of the final bosses. Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant had the "Boffo" as taking the totally selfish/unchivalric option at the end of the game (taking the GLOBE instead of the GIRL). Wizardry 8 pulled the stops out on the "Boffo" which resulted in not only your party, but the whole world exploding, if you neglected to disarm a certain bomb before heading off to the endgame...
    • Teleporting into a rock perma-kills your entire party.
    • In Bane of the Cosmic Forge, you can walk off a tower near the start of the game, resulting in an instant Game Over.
  • Gnomeregan, one of the low to mid-level instances in World of Warcraft, in addition to its other qualifications as That One 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.
    • The original Leeroy Jenkins incident involved a raid on the Upper Blackrock Spire which had lots of eggs that hatched into dragon whelps if one got too close, with Leeroy's actions resulting in a mass aggro situation similar to that of Gnomeregan above. The video of the incident was a staged joke, but there are actually people who play this way.
    • The game also makes its raid bosses examples of this in that many of them utilize area-of-effect attacks that can obliterate entire raid groups if not dealt with or otherwise physically avoided. Many of them are particularly forgiving in regards to performing the action necessary in time, others not. In addition, many bosses are actually timed in that they either possess a "hard enrage" (typically giving the boss a multiplier to damage dealt that means a One-Hit Kill for anyone involved, even tanks, if not dealt with within X minutes), or a "soft enrage" (aka Boss Arena Urgency).
    • In the final battle against the Lich King, this WILL happen as a cutscene. Arthas raises his sword and smashes it into the ground, doing well over 800,000 damage. What's even worse? You cannot resurrect from this. The Release Spirit button will state "Your soul belongs to the Lich King now". Fortunately, though, Tirion breaks the sword that captured everyone's souls, and the released souls completely encircle and restrain the Lich King, turning the final 10% of the fight into a Curb-Stomp Battle.
      • His Defile ability plays this trope straight. He targets a random player and makes a dark puddle appear under his feet. Every tick of damage made against any player makes it grow a yard larger. It only takes one inattentive player or two players who keep trying to hang around the edge too close (and "leapfrog" the puddle growth, so to speak) and the raid wipe is guaranteed. This single ability has caused more Lich King wipes than any other.
  • In X-COM and similar strategic/tactical games, a single berserked or mind-controlled agent with explosive weaponry can easily result in this, whether because everyone got blown up, or because of the spiral of panicking and berserking that results. Also, Chryssalids (and Tentaculats in the sequel Terror From the Deep) transform your teammates into zombies with just a single bite, and when the zombies are killed their infested corpses hatch another Chryssalid! In this way your whole team can be wiped out as an effective fighting force in just one or two turns. There's also the much-dreaded 'grenade thrown into the Skyranger on first turn'. XCOM: Enemy Unknown has a special term for this occurrence: "Code Black". It is displayed prominently in the mission debriefing if the entire squad you sent perishes on it.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, Yaldabaoth's ultimate attack in the final encounter with Egil has the same effect as a total party kill if Egil's Mechon is able to use it. The attack itself, Bionis Slash X, is more Apocalypse How in attack form and gives a two-minute timer to stop it after its Vision concludes, temporarily making the battle into a sort of Time-Limit Boss. If you're unable to destroy the three devices around the boss before the Vision time limit expires, it's game over as the Mechonis destroys Bionis in a single downward stroke.
    • In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, several attacks from superbosses, such as Artifice Ophion's Ouroboros Drive and Falak Buster, as well as the final boss, Artifice Aion's ultimate attack, Prometheous, have this sort of effect. Also worth mentioning is the status effect called Doom, which will instantly kill the afflicted character after a few seconds, and is usually inflicted on the entire party by attacks such as Tyrannotitan Kurodil's Murder Ray.
  • In Xenogears this is generally unlikely but there's a few ways it can happen.
    • The very first is That One Boss, Calamity. While most modern players know to upgrade your Gears and use Bart's Wild Smile to lower its accuracy, anyone who doesn't/didn't do this will have a very bad time.
    • When chasing the battleship Dora after the Kislev Cliffs, do NOT engage every enemy you can. Doing so will drain Weltall's fuel as well of the two NPC companions, making the fight against the Dora itself this.
    • The Tears enemy in Shevat's underground, if not taken out immediately and close together.
    • Deus in Mahanon on Disc 2 in two ways: the first being the infamous glitch in almost all non-PSN versions, the second being if you don't pay attention to the mechanic and wait out your turns for it to sap its own HP. If you just hit him with everything you have from the beginning you will wipe.
    • Similarly, Opiomorph/Miang: resist the temptation to pile on as much damage as soon as possible, because her attack is powered by yours. You have to build damage with triangle attacks, then time your usage of your strongest Hyper Mode Gear deathblows to the window right after she's fired off the attack powered by how much damage she's taken.
  • Yggdra Union: If you got the attack order wrong, misplaced a character or screwed by the weapon disadvantage, or the RNG hates you, there's a good chance that your whole union will go head over heels over the enemy.
  • The rules of the Death Game in Your Turn to Die makes the scenario a possibility - should the Keymaster obtain the majority vote in the Main Game, everyone will be killed off and the game ends with no winner. Worse still, in the event of a tie for first, the Keymaster takes priority.

    Web Comics 
  • In Absurd Notions, it takes a while to convince the designers of "Traps and Treasures" that they shouldn't make all the traps result in TPKs.
  • Discussed in Darths & Droids:
    Corey: Since roleplaying is kind of cooperative storytelling, the party should never fail, right?
    Pete: Ohhhh... my sweet summer child.
    Sally: You should have seen the sessions we played to get the Peace Moon plans before you joined the game.
    Pete: T.P.K.
    Corey: What?
    Jim: Total Party Kill.
    Corey: No, what does it really stand for?
    Pete: What he said. In the good old days, T.P.K.s were an even bet for any given adventure.
    Jim: Tomb of Horrors, man...
    Pete: At least the Tomb only claimed one of our characters each.
    • Sure enough, when we actually do see them play out Rogue One, it ends with the whole party dying, mainly because of their own incompetence. It's implied that TPKs are actually quite common for the group, with the main games we see them playing being the exception rather than the rule.
  • Referenced in Erfworld.
    Charlie: What am I looking at here, Parson?
    Parson: TPK. Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
  • Some campaigns in Full Frontal Nerdity ends like this.
  • Homestuck:
    • Meenah does this intentionally to her own party with a massive bomb. This allows them to live on as ghosts, as opposed to being obliterated by the Scratch, which would have meant absolute death.
    • And then again when Her Imperious Condescension and a Caliborn-possessed Jack Noir obliterate the moons of Prospit and Derse in the human post-Scratch session. And yet, all four Nobles were on their quest beds in the moons' cores, and thus all four god-tiered instantly.
    • Again in [S] GAME OVER, when Her Imperious Condescension arrives on LOFAF and starts going on a rampage. In the ensuing battle, seven members of the main cast die. Karkat is stabbed in the chest by Gamzee and falls into the Lava Pit. Kanaya cuts Gamzee in half with her chainsaw, but is then immediately disintegrated by the Condesce's Eye Beam. Jane is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on the Unbreakable Katana along with Jake, who dies trying to save her from Aranea. Dave fights to defend Jade's corpse from Bec Noir and Bec!PM, but Bec and PM attack at the same time and stab Dave in the chest with their swords. Rose is stabbed in the chest by the Condesce's trident, but Roxy manages to grab Rose at the last second and teleport away. Aranea attempts to throw the rest of the planets at the Condesce to kill her, but Terezi breaks her concentration. Aranea mind-controls Terezi into stabbing herself in the chest with her cane before being flung to the ground like a rag doll, but Terezi manages to survive. The Condesce then grabs Aranea by the throat, forces the Ring of Life off her finger, and snaps Aranea's neck before dropping her body into the flames. Even worse, everyone who was at God Tier died either Heroically or Justly, which means they can't revive on their own. The wounds Rose and Terezi receive are both eventually fatal as well.
  • Housepets!: Heckraiser's climactic finale ends with everybody in Tarot and Keene's team being killed by Eudoant's Eye Beams. Between pouring focus on protecting Craig and Draig and Marion distracting him, they survive long enough to reincarnate Pete and Dragon just before kicking it. As it turns out, Death is Cheap in Dragon's temple, and all who died reincarnated outside.
  • This happens to the party in the Fantasy storyline of Irregular Webcomic! on occasion. It's why you never let your party's Fire Mage put all of his skill points into that Fireball spell. Fortunately, Death is Cheap and Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs is woefully incompetent.
  • Knights of Buena Vista is a Campaign Comic covering Frozen (2013). Instead of the king and queen dying tragically in a storm, they and all the other player characters die in a battle against pirates and sea monsters. The new characters the players draw up after this are the film's main cast.
  • Lackadaisy: The pig farmers (who are also a gang of moonshiners and speakeasy runners) round up their friend Benjy and try to get revenge on Rocky at the Lackadaisy. They're all killed in short order despite the Lackadaisy arsenal having been wiped out with Victor beating Benjy to death and Calvin shooting the others with one of their own guns.
  • In Leftover Soup, Lily forces her players to try 4th edition this way.
  • The end of the Ruby arc of the original Nuzlocke Comics had this occur to the last remnants of Ruby's team against Steven, thus setting up his Failure Knight status for the FireRed arc.
  • In The Order of the Stick, La Résistance of Azure City, bar one survivor, ends up like this after being ambushed by Redcloak.
    • This is also what Elan dreads, if his requiem for Roy is anything to go by.
  • This strip of RP Generic shows us what happen when the players insist on having heavy-armored dwarf characters in a high-seas adventure.
  • Sometimes one idiot can ruin an entire session of Call of Cthulhu, as proved by The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom).

    Web Original 
  • Happens regularly in Binder of Shame. The record is three TPKs in a single night—the narrator left when someone suggested they start playing for a fourth time, and apparently they managed several more without him.
  • Critical Role: The cast generally starts mentioning this trope, sometimes chanting "TPK! TPK!" whenever the party is in a dangerous situation. Matthew Mercer is a good enough sport to warn the party of potential TPK, but sometimes he will threaten this (and/or adding hit points to their future encounters) if his players misbehave (making fun of his names, etc.) Several one-shots have ended with a TPK, including one (based on Doom Eternal) in which the players got TPK'd but still won the scenario.
  • Dimension 20: Episode 3 of Season 15, Neverafter, ends with every single player dying whilst fighting the Fairy Godmother and her army of partially transformed furniture.
  • In the Freelance Astronauts' Let's Play of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, one of their attempts at level 9-7 ended up as this when all four of them make the same jump into a Piranha Plant.
  • In the Noob webseries and comics, this happens quite frequently to the titular guild (the name is no accident).
  • This is repeatedly joked about by the cast of Oxventure before their live shows, where they'll put their hands together and chant "Total Party Wipe!". Despite this, the gang haven't come close to a real TPK. In a rarity for the show, the One Shot Wonders episode for You Awaken In a Strange Place played this straight, with all player characters dead.
  • Pretending to Be People features a number of these.
    • The teenagers in the Contention Woods are all wiped out. The guy who got shot by his uncle was the lucky one.
    • Every player character in the Old Contention story arc either died or got banished to a void outside of time. This includes the GMPC.
  • Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG gives a guide on what's an appropriate TPK:
    1430. If the party goes out like 300, that's cool. Thelma & Louise not so much.

    Western Animation 
  • The Legend of Vox Machina: At the beginning of the series, a group of brave warriors chosen by the Tal'Dorei Council stand up to a terrifying menace that has been causing much destruction... and they all die in seconds. It's mentioned by the council after their deaths that at least three parties attempted to attack this monster, and none of them made it. The council got desperate enough that they just put out a notice hoping some decent group could be up for it. Some group who calls themselves Vox Machina picked it up.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Party Wipe, Total Party Wipe

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Splatoon 3 Wipeout

While this trope wasn't an uncommon occurrence in previous games, Splatoon 3 displays the word "WIPEOUT!" over the screen when all players on a team are splatted.

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