T-P-K - has it happened to you?

[Stormwolf]

Total Party Kill... this reminded me of a few unfortunate incidents in my long D&D 'career'... so has it happened to you too? Was it the fault of an over-zealous or just plain evil DM, (were you that DM?) the players or just plain bad luck?

In one of my earliest games of 1st Ed. AD&D we had a DM who was simply out to wipe out the party by any means. Inescapable 'gotcha' (aka "WTF was that?" traps)... 15HD monsters in a 3rd level dungeon... safe to say nobody made it out alive. My 2nd level magic user was squashed by a descending ceiling block in a cage that appeared from nowhere without warning while the rest of the party looked on helplessly. Pretty shortly afterwards the rest of the party were attacked by about 200 stirges and then a purple worm ate what was left. Unsurprisingly we refused that guy's offers to DM again, but it was an important lesson for me on game balance that I always remembered when I was running campaigns later.

However despite all 'precautions' as a DM it's still possible for the players to get themselves into a mess that they can't extract themselves from without a deus ex machina exit. One of my best-written adventures that I devoted 3 months to designing and (solo) playtesting was almost entirely wasted as the party stumbled into a nest of giant spiders.

One of them got an unlucky (critical) fail on their poison save and then the rest of the party died (albeit heroically) one after the other trying to recover the body / bodies. Sometimes you just can't fudge things for them, as much as you want to... I really don't like telling my players what they should do and they just didn't have the experience (or just general meta-gaming knowledge) to simply torch the whole nest. The rest of the dungeon of which I was incredibly proud went unexplored :(

[Hinton]

I designed an adventure where the sole intention was to kill everyone in the party. It was designed for very high level characters to make it extremely challenging, but once in a while I'd come across "That Guy" (you know the type), so I would run him through this little adventure. It would either humble him (making gaming easier and more fun) or just make him mad (making him go away and swear to never return).

[Stormwolf]

I designed an adventure where the sole intention was to kill everyone in the party. It was designed for very high level characters to make it extremely challenging, but once in a while I'd come across "That Guy" (you know the type), so I would run him through this little adventure. It would either humble him (making gaming easier and more fun) or just make him mad (making him go away and swear to never return).

Funny you should mention that... I did the same thing once. We had a couple of guys joined our group on the understanding that they could bring their own characters to the table. I then discovered that they were a 29/30th level fighter/magic-user and a 30/30 fighter/cleric with between them about ever useful magic item in the original DMG in their Bags of Holding. They insisted that these were 'legitimate' characters but couldn't provide any references (i.e. another DM I could contact and find out what sort of Monty Haul campaign they'd been playing). I found out later that they'd been generating encounters for themselves.

"oh the encounter table says we find a sleeping ancient red dragon"
" I cut it's head off with my vorpal sword"
"yay treasure!"

These were the worst sort of D&D brats and they needed a lesson in humility. Anyway, I designed a fiendish dungeon that made the Tomb of Horrors look like a Sunday afternoon walk in the park. It made extensive use of many of the most deadly traps I'd ever devised and a few more from the Grimtooth's Traps books ...I'd recommend them to anyone :) Neither of them made it out.

[Aotrs Commander]

Only twice in 17 years. Both in 2nd Ed AD&D (heavily modified), and both under the same DM and not too far temporarily apart (and about, oh, 15-16 years ago).
The first was at low-level (first I think, actually) and we had a run of bad luck and got annhilated in an encounter (apparently, we just picked worst route to take).

The second was at slightly higher level (maybe abut 5-6th); it may even have been the second party in that campaign, actually, and we got into a fight with some trolls (random encounter). The DM genuinely believed we could take the encounter, but we actually couldn't and were wiped out.

Neither was done with any vitriole, just bad luck. Actually, it was so long ago that I was still young and inexperienced, but thinking on it now, I wonder how much DMing practise the DM had had. (He moved to Norway some years ago, so I've not seen him since.) It might be that he hadn't done a lot; or at least hadn't used his house-rules as much, I can't really say.

Still, his games were jolly fun while they lasted. Only time I've ever played a game of cricket with Kobolds...

[CDR Grendelwulf]

Yes...I was that evil DM...

...but it furthered the point of the greater story-arc.

A minor dark lord from his own demi-plain needed to be removed so as not to interfere with a greater dark lord's plans. The greater dark lord steered the adventurers into finding the minor dark lord. The minor dark lord was a 'harvester-of-souls' type (although the adventurers didn't know this). Most were slain in the confrontation with their souls being drawn into this demi-plain which had its own horrors for the spirit-adventurers to face as well as important pieces of information to discover. The ones who didn't die actually had their own parts to play, realizing which dark lord was the greater threat, keeping the soul-prison-demiplane-key containing their departed friends' souls away from said darker lord until finding a way to release them, getting the bodies resurrected (as best they could---they couldn't find a cleric--instead a druid---hilarity ensued for many games afterwards), etc...

My players realized that day that death is never the end in my games...only the beginning of a really exciting campaign...

Bwah-hah-ha!

Ciao,
CDR Grendelwulf

[TheAlmightyOne]

my mate is never allowed to DM again. He did once and placed some impossible to find traps in a 1st level dungeon killing 3/4s of the party before leaving the rest to be finished off by 20 kobolds and goblins. Later at level 4 we had to battle our way out of a group of 8 level 20 mages, albeit we did have 2 level 20 NPCs in the group with us for no reason.

[Threeshades]

Our DM killed almost the whole party with this Cards of destiny game thingie (where you draw a card andwhatever it says comes true). The Barbarian lost his soul, the wizard was caged but got 20.000 XP, my rogue changed his alignment to the opposite and tried to avenge the victims of our parties and got killed by the soulless barbarian who then tried to attack the guy who had us draw the cards and got killed and then the bard lost all her stuff, ran away and was killed by a Troll.
Only the wizard survived, gained a few levels and started with a new party from the next prison.

[Lord]

I had the exact opposite of the problem. My DM gave one of the party a Weapon of legacy at 4th level with no strings attached, and what did we use it for, to kill orcs. Not hard orcs minds you but utterly weak generic orcs. Not to mention the only possibly hard encounter was fighting about 16 orcs in ambush, but we were told ahead of time by some random npc dragon. I hated that game my character was always being made fun of by the other character with their ovepowered stats. We hardly even took a hit.

[UltimaGabe]

I've never been part of a TPK. In all honesty, none of the people I've played with (which really isn't that many) would have the heart to pull one off, since my group and those we play with tend to invest so much of ourselves into every character we make that we all see a TPK as such a waste. In the end, either the PCs pull through with a bit of luck and hints from the DM, and when that doesn't work, if absolutely necessary, there's occasionally a Deus Ex Machine in there somewhere.

...That being said, I don't want you to get the impression that our games are easy, or that there's a lack of danger. Let me put it this way: There have been a few games where, basically, a TPK happened- except instead of the party dying, something far, far worse happened.

One prime example- not quite a TPK, but a perfect example of how a couple of the DMs I know work things into their favor. Long story short, I was playing in a solo adventure with my human Barbarian Ichi, and an elven man came and pleaded with me to save some of his brethren who had been taken prisoner by some brigands who had taken over his home. I went in, bluffed my way around (with the help of a potion of Glibness), and found out that these guys were in league with a bunch of demons and whatnot. I managed to kill them all, and was cleaning up the loot when I noticed a hatch on the floor. I opened it, climbed down, and failed a Will Save.

Next thing I knew, the elven man who had hired me was dead, seemingly by my hands, and the two neighboring nations (one of which, that "elven man" was a prince) were at war, and I was on trial for regicide.

....I kinda would have taken a TPK over that.

[Stormwolf]

Our DM killed almost the whole party with this Cards of destiny game thingie (where you draw a card andwhatever it says comes true). The Barbarian lost his soul, the wizard was caged but got 20.000 XP, my rogue changed his alignment to the opposite and tried to avenge the victims of our parties and got killed by the soulless barbarian who then tried to attack the guy who had us draw the cards and got killed and then the bard lost all her stuff, ran away and was killed by a Troll.
Only the wizard survived, gained a few levels and started with a new party from the next prison.

Ahh the old 'Deck of Many Things' - those things should come with a Government Health Warning sticker :) Remember folks, if anyone draws a good card before you that shifts the odds that you'll get a bad one.

[Geilan]

We're actually in the middle of one now. Our druid was picked off by five mummies while I was trying to save them. Our rogue was taken out by a half-black dragon (We're in the middle of an assault on the fort/exploration of the fort belowground) I'm being attacked by waves of 1HD orcs, in groups of 3-4, both of our rangers are SURROUNDED by orcs, the other star elf is fighting guards and a sorcerer who is a little too fond of his touch spells, both monks are incapacitated by said sorcerer.

We've got a few players playing 2 characters.

EDIT: All of us are level 5

[Ralfarius]

Not any TPK in recent memory... Though when 3rd ed had just come out, we had a DM who had a thing for Ravenloft, and so was adapting an old sourcebook to make a Ravenloft campaign. He also had a thing for railroad plots to show us how spooooky he could write.

For instance, we were supposed to be like, staying at some abandoned (re: haunted) house overnight or something. Well, the group was looking for clues, and were getting nothing of use - he had a penchant for giving clues that had no meaning until the villain revealed itself - so two of us decided to go look somewhere else for something of importance.

A five-minute walk into the woods had us suddenly surrounded - and I mean suddenly, without any listen/spot checks - by a pack of wolves. Looking back, those wolves were much more powerful than they should have been, even in Ravenloft... Anyhow! First round of combat, my dwarf barbarian has his throat ripped out on some sort of nonsense critical strike. The bard is set upon and savaged, but not killed. No, instead he simply has one of his hands gnawed off, in true wolf fashion.

The replacement character for that campaign was some paladin. Of course, I wasn't quite appreciative of how Ravenloft worked. The other character in the group, a necromancer, casts sleep on the paladin (Note, it doesn't affect the rest of the party despite being sleep) who is already dozing on this raft we were forced to get on for some reason. Needless to say, the paladin took a nap on the bottom of the swamp, that night.

Getting fed up, there was a replacement that was simply an elf rogue who was quite aloof and not particularly passionate about anything. After that session, the DM phoned me up to - I kid you not - basically asked that I not return to his campaign because I wasn't developing my characters, or some nonsense.

Not a TPK, but a very bad formative experience for a new system. That guy didn't get to play in our group much longer, let alone DM for it.

[Threeshades]

Ahh the old 'Deck of Many Things' - those things should come with a Government Health Warning sticker :) Remember folks, if anyone draws a good card before you that shifts the odds that you'll get a bad one.

We're probably going to draw cards again soon. And i will take 4 i think. Just for the heck of it (if I lose my character it isnt all that hard i still have a couple of ideas to make new ones ^^)

[BardicLasher]

I've been in two games that the DM tried to end with TPK, and both times she failed. The game ended anyway, but I survived.

The first time, she sent our 20th level characters against a level 30 wizard. Our Wizard and Druid died before we reachd him, leaving me (Bard10/lasher10), the Cleric, and the Fighter to face the level 30 wizard alone.

The Cleric got turned to stone via a Prismatic effect. I started whipping out scrolls and playing mage. The epic wizard kept trying damaging spells, and we had stupid high resistance to, well, everything, so it was taking a while. In the end, the whole building was destroyed, theoretically killing everyone... Or it would've been if I hadn't a readied action to use a scroll of Time Stop at that time. Time froze, I grabbed the cleric-statue and planeshifted out (or rather, readied to do so as Timestop wore off). Fighter died, evil wizard did, but hey, I and the cleric's army of incorporeal undead got out safe!



The second time, the same DM got fed up with a group of level 11 characters and sent a party of level 20s run not by her, but by a friend of hers who knew how to run them.

Fun fact about party balance: A level 11 group with enough gold can purchase viable threats for a level 20 group, and we were filthy stinking rich. Our wizard started putting together an army of constructs while our bard created more than a few illusionary defenses... Long story short, here's a run of what happens...


A 20th level party sees a group of displacer beasts. Psion starts using mind powers at them... And none of them hit. Barbarian swings wildly at them, fails to hit, keeps getting hit back from a few feet away... Not that they'r surprised. Displacer beasts are annoying like that.

Psion uses a true seeing effect to find the displacer beasts. Barbarian still can't hit any, and the psion starts targeting them with hold monster... Aaaand it doesn't work. Psion drops power after power, nothing works. Barbarian continues to swing and miss... There was a rogue in there, too, I believe, not very effective at hitting...

They were too frustrated to give up, continually trying failing tactics...

Long story short, army of invisible constructs + illusions of said constructs + viable excuse for attacks hitting the illusions to miss= awesome. Of course, they WERE more powerful than standard displacer beasts, so in the end, the level 20s retreated to find a better tactic...

After that, my party did the intelligent thing... We just up and left. We took the legendary artifact that the level 20s wanted off-plane, as well as much of the money we saved up, and we retired into a life of luxury.

True, we were stopped by taking over the world, but any fight that you can walk away from is a good one.

Highlight of the game: Psion hits me with an augmented death urge. I have no capacity to kill myself. (Can't effectively penetrate own SR, don't have a method of doing physical damage to self due to abysmal strength, energy resistance vs all my spells, and though airborne, I had a constant featherfall effect)

[jindra34]

I've been in two games that the DM tried to end with TPK, and both times she failed. The game ended anyway, but I survived.

The first time, she sent our 20th level characters against a level 30 wizard. Our Wizard and Druid died before we reachd him, leaving me (Bard10/lasher10), the Cleric, and the Fighter to face the level 30 wizard alone.

The Cleric got turned to stone via a Prismatic effect. I started whipping out scrolls and playing mage. The epic wizard kept trying damaging spells, and we had stupid high resistance to, well, everything, so it was taking a while. In the end, the whole building was destroyed, theoretically killing everyone... Or it would've been if I hadn't a readied action to use a scroll of Time Stop at that time. Time froze, I grabbed the cleric-statue and planeshifted out (or rather, readied to do so as Timestop wore off). Fighter died, evil wizard did, but hey, I and the cleric's army of incorporeal undead got out safe!



The second time, the same DM got fed up with a group of level 11 characters and sent a party of level 20s run not by her, but by a friend of hers who knew how to run them.

Fun fact about party balance: A level 11 group with enough gold can purchase viable threats for a level 20 group, and we were filthy stinking rich. Our wizard started putting together an army of constructs while our bard created more than a few illusionary defenses... Long story short, here's a run of what happens...


A 20th level party sees a group of displacer beasts. Psion starts using mind powers at them... And none of them hit. Barbarian swings wildly at them, fails to hit, keeps getting hit back from a few feet away... Not that they'r surprised. Displacer beasts are annoying like that.

Psion uses a true seeing effect to find the displacer beasts. Barbarian still can't hit any, and the psion starts targeting them with hold monster... Aaaand it doesn't work. Psion drops power after power, nothing works. Barbarian continues to swing and miss... There was a rogue in there, too, I believe, not very effective at hitting...

They were too frustrated to give up, continually trying failing tactics...

Long story short, army of invisible constructs + illusions of said constructs + viable excuse for attacks hitting the illusions to miss= awesome. Of course, they WERE more powerful than standard displacer beasts, so in the end, the level 20s retreated to find a better tactic...

After that, my party did the intelligent thing... We just up and left. We took the legendary artifact that the level 20s wanted off-plane, as well as much of the money we saved up, and we retired into a life of luxury.

True, we were stopped by taking over the world, but any fight that you can walk away from is a good one.

Highlight of the game: Psion hits me with an augmented death urge. I have no capacity to kill myself. (Can't effectively penetrate own SR, don't have a method of doing physical damage to self due to abysmal strength, energy resistance vs all my spells, and though airborne, I had a constant featherfall effect)

The displacer beasty illusion idea thing rocks....

[Cywar]

Yep, it has happened to me. T-P-K. Fortunately not by an over-zealous GM, but by ... well lets call it... stupidity... yes, Stupidity is an appropriate word i guess.

First time in Shadowrun. My char had a Cortex Bomb in his head and should betray the group, or otherwise...
Accidently i found out that the ones implanting it could actually hear what my char said, but not see what he saw.
So he wrote down a note on a piece of paper "Cortexbomb... But pssst, be quiet"
Handed it over to the street Sam.
My char even tipped his Lips with his indexfinger, to make sure the Street sam wouldn't accidently ask stupid questions.
The Street Sam unfolded the paper.
"CORTEXBOMB?????"
BOOM
EOP(End of Party)

second time, Fantasy setting. The Group accidently got ahold of a white powder that was able to blast several tons of rock away, in case it became wet. Several gram were sufficient. So they transported it in dry pig bladders, to protect it from getting wet.
Now we were in a swamp near a river. Attacked by some sort of Crocodile. We remember: A few gram of the stuff were sufficient to bust several cubic meters of solid rock.

Mr. Clever: I throw the pig bladder into the crocodiles mouth, that should do the job
GM: Wide eyes
Rest of Party: Wide eyes.
GM: Are you sure
Mr Clever: Yep
GM: Everyone, make a new Char.

[Kreistor]

As a DM, it is easier to TPK a party than some think. Blind obedience to the CR vs. EL recommendation for one. Some parties just don't have anything that can hurt particular monsters, despite the supposed CR equivalency.

I like to challenge the PC's, but sometimes a little detail will get away from me and I'll overlook a possible problem. Most of the time I can change things on the fly, but sometimes the enemy is already introduced and its too late.

I stopped an unintentional TPK once, when I saw it coming. I'd created a Huge Grell with fighter levels (Lords of Madness). Whoops. 10 attacks with high BAB, weapon spec, Amulet of Mighty Fists.... Grells are smart, so they fight smart, and this one could single round kill everyone in the party. I just hadn't sanity checked it closely enough. So, I had to just poof it.

[Querzis]

Thats funny, it never happened before but it could happen in our next game. The last time, we fought a succubus and a fiend caster (I dont remember how he is called) and our ranger (willendorf) died while our two-weapon fighter (Enialis) is charmed by the succubus so things are looking grim for us, especially since Enialis is pretty much our main damage dealer (he got two flaming scimitar with improved critical, greater weapons focus, improved two-weapons fighting and weapons specialization, he could one shot our wizard).

The only way we are getting out of this is if our cleric manage to dispell the charm. I'm going to tell you wednesday if we survived or not.

Edit: Oh yeah I forgot, I was actually in a T-P-K about three years ago but I dont know if that even count. We were all level one, we just barely decided the name, class and alignement of our character (I dont even remember what I was). I'm pretty sure we were all evil (or neutral leaning toward evil). So anyway, on our first game, we meet in a tavern and we decided to form a bandit group. Then, what looked like a merchant came into the tavern. So we decided to kill him and take his gold...and we were all killed by his fireball.

Then we decided to do good guys instead of bad guys cause its kinda hard to do evil when you are weak. Thats how I created Olaf, one of my favorite character ever.

[jindra34]

Fantasy setting. The Group accidently got ahold of a white powder that was able to blast several tons of rock away, in case it became wet. Several gram were sufficient. So they transported it in dry pig bladders, to protect it from getting wet.
Now we were in a swamp near a river. Attacked by some sort of Crocodile. We remember: A few gram of the stuff were sufficient to bust several cubic meters of solid rock.

Mr. Clever: I throw the pig bladder into the crocodiles mouth, that should do the job
GM: Wide eyes
Rest of Party: Wide eyes.
GM: Are you sure
Mr Clever: Yep
GM: Everyone, make a new Char.

Dude Mr. Clever should be Senoir Dumbass...

[Kreistor]

Psion uses a true seeing effect to find the displacer beasts. Barbarian still can't hit any, and the psion starts targeting them with hold monster... Aaaand it doesn't work.

I think you must be misremembering something here. True Seeing sees through Illusions. The Displacer Beasts can be safely ignored from that point, so if this happened, there was a bad ruling or it didn't happen in this order.

[Cywar]

Yep, it has happened to me. T-P-K. Fortunately not by an over-zealous GM, but by ... well lets call it... stupidity... yes, Stupidity is an appropriate word i guess.

First time in Shadowrun. My char had a Cortex Bomb in his head and should betray the group, or otherwise...
Accidently i found out that the ones implanting it could actually hear what my char said, but not see what he saw.
So he wrote down a note on a piece "Cortexbomb... But pssst, be quiet"
Handed it over to the street Sam.
My char even tipped his Lips with his indexfinger, to make sure the Street sam wouldn't accidently ask stupid questions.
The Street Sam unfolded the paper.
"CORTEXBOMB?????"
BOOM
EOP(End of Party)

second time, Fantasy setting. The Group accidently got ahold of a white powder that was able to blast several tons of rock away, in case it became wet. Several gram were sufficient. So they transported it in dry pig bladders, to protect it from getting wet.
Now we were in a swamp near a river. Attacked by some sort of Crocodile. We remember: A few gram of the stuff were sufficient to bust several cubic meters of solid rock.

Mr. Clever: I throw the pig bladder into the crocodiles mouth, that should do the job
GM: Wide eyes
Rest of Party: Wide eyes.
GM: Are you sure
Mr Clever: Yep
GM: Everyone, make a new Char.

[Threeshades]

Yep, it has happened to me. T-P-K. Fortunately not by an over-zealous GM, but by ... well lets call it... stupidity... yes, Stupidity is an appropriate word i guess.

First time in Shadowrun. My char had a Cortex Bomb in his head and should betray the group, or otherwise...
Accidently i found out that the ones implanting it could actually hear what my char said, but not see what he saw.
So he wrote down a note on a piece "Cortexbomb... But pssst, be quiet"
Handed it over to the street Sam.
My char even tipped his Lips with his indexfinger, to make sure the Street sam wouldn't accidently ask stupid questions.
The Street Sam unfolded the paper.
"CORTEXBOMB?????"
BOOM
EOP(End of Party)

second time, Fantasy setting. The Group accidently got ahold of a white powder that was able to blast several tons of rock away, in case it became wet. Several gram were sufficient. So they transported it in dry pig bladders, to protect it from getting wet.
Now we were in a swamp near a river. Attacked by some sort of Crocodile. We remember: A few gram of the stuff were sufficient to bust several cubic meters of solid rock.

Mr. Clever: I throw the pig bladder into the crocodiles mouth, that should do the job
GM: Wide eyes
Rest of Party: Wide eyes.
GM: Are you sure
Mr Clever: Yep
GM: Everyone, make a new Char.

That's the first 10 minutes belated double post i ever saw in my life.

Can you teach me how to do that?

[jindra34]

I think you must be misremembering something here. True Seeing sees through Illusions. The Displacer Beasts can be safely ignored from that point, so if this happened, there was a bad ruling or it didn't happen in this order.

They had constructs built to look like displacer beasts... i think...

[Midnight Lurker]

Halfway through our eight-year-long Champions campaign, the GM had us going after a cosmic artifact called the Stargem. We'd been told, over and over, that the thing had a mind of its own and would take over whoever touched it.

When we finally found the thing, it broadcast a message: "who wants ultimate power?" or something.

Turns out our sorceress hadn't been paying any attention at all to the warnings. Instant Dark Phoenix, destruction of the UNIVERSE, and the campaign rebooted.

[JohnnyPsycho]

Nearly happened to me a couple of times in the same campaign. I've been playing Hackmaster for about 2 or 3 years now, and though there have been a few additions and subtractions from our party, the core line-up has not changed since I started: a human cleric, a pixie-fairy magic-user, and a human fighter (my character). In one of our earlier quests, when everyone was around 3rd or 4th level maybe, our party had stumbled into a large room that turned out to be inhabited by Harpies. Every single one of us failed our saves vs. the Harpies' hypnotic song. Our GM tried all sorts of things to let us survive, since if we were all hypnotized by the Harpies we would have become dead meat for sure. He allowed our cleric to sacrifice his Honor points to gain an automatic save, and he managed to grab our mage (the pixie-fairy) and stuff her into a bag so she wouldn't fly up to the Harpies and get herself killed. Then he started getting attacked, and apparently these particular Harpies had a similar mind-altering effect to their claw attacks, but he managed to throw the bag (with the still hynotized pixie-fairy mage still in it) out of the room before he and my fighter succumbed to the Harpies and fell unconscious.
Fortunately, it turned out that that particular room of Harpies was put in this adventure not to kill off PCs, but to capture them. Our characters (except for the pixie-fairy) woke up in a prison cell in the dungeon, stripped of our belongings. Luckily, our mage woke up in the bag and found that she had been put with all of our equipment. To this day, I'm not really sure if that had really been written in the adventure that way, or if our GM was just being very, very charitable.
Of course, next week it could all change. We are on the verge of cleaning out an abandoned elven city of a sizable invasion force of drow. By next Tuesday, I may in fact be writing up a new character for that game...

[Dragonus45]

Im running a wartime campaign setting and the party is about 4th lvl. So of the course the elf rouge who thinks he is a fighter runs out of the heavlily fortified defenses and charges the attacking army. Then the elan psion charges out to save him. The fighter and the paladin pool their efforts and manage to get the bodies back, then they realize that without there help the front line got overun. And that they were surounded by the enemy army in a moderetly fortified part of the base. Long story short the paladin hoped onto his horse and rolled a crap load of 20s and somehow got away leaving the fighter to die. Then he got executed for abondoning his post and got kicked out of his order.

[Blood]

Never truly happened to me. We were playing a game where we had to rescue a girl from a red dragon. We had all sorts of protection from fire and stuff, and one cast of Change Breath Weapon pretty much killed half the party. Me, the Cleric/Fighter, was only alive with like 10 hit points, and the Warmage that had been out of the blast with 60. He pulled off like 100 damage with some 7th level spells, but we still TPK'd. It was tons of fun, though. Our barbarian had to hold his sword to the girl's neck to get the dragon to not kill us, but our barbarian unfortunately had a WIS of about 5 and ended up accidentally decapitating the girl.

[Quel Technoh]

Twice has this happened to my characters.
In the first occasion, my idiot fighter 'accidently' fumbled his sword into the paladin's chest and his shield into the mage casting fireball. After a failed concentration check, Mrs. Mage prepared some BBQ heroes for the approaching ghouls.
Second occasion involved a deck of many things. The paladin chose, reveresed alignment. I pull out a mirror of Opposition, and the ex-paladin is given a sound beating by his double. My idiot fighter then looked at the mirror because back then I didn't understand the mechanics of it. My double exposed the mage to the mirror.
Damn fireball hurts.

[Gaelbert]

I've DMed aTPK, through no fault of my own. My players weren't very smart. I had a very deep pit trap, that was pretty easy to find. Well, they didn't find it, and one person sprung it but was able to get out of the way in time. However, another person shoved the first back into the pit. While he was falling, he grabbed the shover, and, both first level wizards with very little hp, fell into a spiked pit and died. The other two in the party were on the other side of the room when some monsters came in. The surviving members used fire, and managed to scare off the monsters but catch the room on fire. Suffice to say, they died a few minutes later because of a combination of the building collapsing and the fire. I've never DMed another game for them since.

[Krimm_Blackleaf]

I was once the one who lasted the longest in a TPK. I make characters for fun, and there were a few people over so I just broke out a few characters for everyone. I was a CE cleric/rogue/thrall of demogorgon, a LE cleric/disciple of asmodeus (we hadn't thought alot of the blood war at the time), a CN psychic warrior and a LN fighter/samurai. We were going to a temple for some reason, and one room was just a nearly broken chair that I kicked over (flawless trap-checking method) and nothing happened, so a bit disappointed we walked out of the room and into the one right across the hall from it. Inside we found 12 shadows who had heard the chair falling over... I did NOT expect a group of level 10's to be taken down by 10 shadows. It was just a vicious slaughter. But I never laughed as hard in my life.