Did you ever experience TPK?
What is the story behind?
@dnd
Tarrasque Point Kills?
So many.
Curse of Strahd in 3.5: Who knew Con damage to a mostly spell caster group could be dangerous not just once but 4 times. In comparison both fights were Strahd were a f**ing walk in the park.
More of a test game than an actual campaign: We were testing if a CR appropriate group of goblins with levels vs a group of players would play out for the players: Well as it turns out I suck at calculating CR so our first fight was 5 players vs 5 goblins level 15 (Same as players) plus 10 starting goblins. We adjusted it for a correct CR and it was still a massacre. Ambush is a HELL of an advantage.
Anything goes campaign. Well turns out anything goes for the DM too so Level 3 half colossal half minotaur barbarian opponent with a posse of gobs with a ballista safely away means players die every other round or so.
We almost TPK’d on our very first encounter fighting 3 goblins. A party of 4 level 1 adventurers. We didn’t even get ambushed.
As one member lay dead and another dying, (and the other two of us near 0) we ended the session.
The dead cleric saw their diety, who said their work was not yet finished, saved the sorcerer’s life, and expected additional converts to the religion.
Only once. DM had a circular dungeon. We started a fight and got split and a couple PC’s fled the fight deeper into the dungeon.
Some out of game drama leaked into the game and one player sprinted their character through the whole dungeon, brining all the enemies together behind him as he looped back around.
It was a shits and giggles evil campaign, we weren’t, super attached to our characters, so we kicked that player out and started a new campaign.
Our bard got a magic item that let them cast Wall of Thorns before we would normal have access to a spell that high level. We used it on a boss pretty much immediately to trap it in one side of a room while we mopped up the rest of its adds that didn’t get killed by the Wall. The boss we were fighting was a bug queen. What we didn’t know was that, while we were fighting the first adds, it spent the whole time spawning more behind the wall, since it didn’t have any other actions it could spend. That did not go well lol
It was our first TPK, most of us were new to the game, and we put a lot of focus on RP, so the DM gave us the choice if we actually wanted each of our characters to die, or if we’d prefer to be Deus ex Machina’d. I was the only one that chose to let their character die. My warlock had made his pact initially as part of a deal to save his sister who was crushed in a cave-in. He decided to swear more oaths, fully giving his soul for eternity to his patron, in exchange for saving the lives of his friends.
It was a pretty cool way for him to go out, and now he gets to be an antagonist later. That’s going to be interesting, because our bard took up his fake religion out of a desperation to know that he went to a better place