Let’s forget about the Oops TPK, but let’s discuss about the time it ended-up greatly, no matter whether the party decided t sacrify their life to save the world (or simply their honour) or that horror game where the PC found-out too late that they’re hopeless and bound to die
On the other thread, I was talking about Small note passing between GM and PC, and let me tell you the way it lead to TPK.
Context, horror one-shot, occurring in space-ship, with PC agreeing on PvP option (As they said It’s a one shot anyway, let’s have fun). I started to introduce some hallucination, at the beginning it was just stuff like not consistent between what they see and what the clue says, but quickly, I started to give inconsistent information to the PC through small notes, letting the Paranoia grew until they were sure there was a traitor amont them. Now imagine, the PC lost in space, inside a haunted space-ship starting to fight each other.
Obviously it finished by a TPK, which for an horror oneshot is a great result
This was indeed one of the idea and had w some PC understood it, except that there was no actual traitor just a mind manipulating monsters. So PC having different information (Hallucinations) and knowing a traitor may be among them was enough…
But great session and everyone enjoyed it
Level 2 party vs a Smothering Rug. We each went up to it alone, at different times. The last player ran into a side room with no exit, and after a few moments of silence, opened the door to see if it was gone.
Queue the horror movie music.
I have a few not-quite-TPKs stories, but my DM (despite trying very hard to pose as a tough-as-nails juror) is physically unable to kill off his players.
Last time he had the Pally’s god come down and give us 10 HP each to allow us to survive the encounter and run away.
Playing Star Wars 5e, short campaign, first time DM, we did fine for the whole 3 games we played, all four players were playing fine, taking smart choices trying to make it the best experience for our friend who was dming for the first time ever. All until we got to the end of the campaign, time to confront the big baddie. I missed an investigation check to spot a trap, we take massive damage, dm tells us to roll initiative, we all roll really low (under 5), DM says we see a laser coming from a vantage position, starts rolling multi-attack, 3 straight nat 20s, massive damage rolls, 3 out of 4 members of the party died instantly, me included. The remaining member was a doctor, we felt we had a chance… DM says the big baddie has legendary actions. After around 12 hours of gaming, across three days, we all died in less than 10 minutes. Fun times, we still make fun of him whenever we remember. The worst thing? I took a look at the encounter later, it was not even that badly tuned, it was really just piss-poor luck.
We had two close calls while running Curse of Strahd. First was the ambush >!at the coffin maker!<. Which ended with 1 pc fully dead, one still standing and the rest bleeding out. While two >!vampire spawns!< where still standing. At this point I was not willing to fully kill my party, so the healthier of the >!vampire spawns!< Kidnapped one of the PCs for a private Date with strahd. That’s was barely enough to let them survive the encounter
The second time was the fight against >!Bab Lysaga!< In berez. Multiple people told them, that this area was extremely dangerous. They didn’t listen. The boss showed them really quickly that the rumours were true. Then the >!house of Baba lysaga!< Awoke and dropped one of the PCs. At one point I stopped the game briefly and flat out told my players: “this is a potential TPK, watch what you are doing”. Two PCs choose to heroically sacrifice themselves to give the others a chance to escape.
Both events echoed through the entire campaign