Dwindling Party

So you're The Hero on a dangerous quest, you gather The Squad and even rally that Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to your cause. Battles are fought, Character Development is had, Fire-Forged Friends are made, and hearty laughs are shared by all.

Then, as you proceed towards the final battle, your friends start to die... One. By. One.

When an author uses a Dwindling Party, it's to showcase just how dangerous the situation is. Not only Can Anyone Die, but in fact, everyone is dying! The reasoning is that as audiences grow attached to characters, the Emotional Torque from their death will resonate more and more with each passing, until it reaches fever pitch when The Hero confronts the cause of all the deaths.

Usually it works pretty well, though there are a few risks to using this trope. Namely, killing characters off too quickly or without proper characterization will not elicit the audience's empathy at the deaths. Also, playing the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality too straight will allow moderately Genre Savvy viewers to pick off the obvious Red Shirts and avoid feeling urgency or attachment.

This trope is usually used only in the Action Adventure and Survival Horror Genres because, lets face it, it's kinda hard to write a Love Dodecahedron when Everybody's Dead, Dave. There are a few common set-ups to each, but they usually boil down to:
 * Suicide Mission: The heroes know they have no chance to survive, but give it their all to ensure that the Hero makes it. Expect to see a conga-line of Heroic Sacrifices.
 * Hunted: The protagonists are trapped and hunted by a killer, monster, or some other deadly agent out to kill them all. They look for an escape or means of beating it as it kills them off.
 * Escape: The protagonists are in a very hazardous place like a Hungry Jungle or Thirsty Desert, and have to fight the elements rather than a killer (though a Super-Persistent Predator is usually involved here, it's often an additional hazard rather than the crux of the danger in and of itself).
 * Exploration: See River of Insanity a.k.a. Doomed Wilderness Expedition, where The Captain is often the last man standing for some reason, along with Send in the Search Team and Total Party Kill.

This is a pretty common trope in these genres. However, it does carry a few "common" twists that are often used to keep it fresh. While usually it's The Hero or Final Girl (plus Love Interest and/or Sidekick) who survive to the end, sometimes the last survivor(s) aren't the ones you'd come to expect, but more the "expendable" characters. It's also frequently used as The Cavalry by revealing one of the "expendable" characters survived and came back to help. Then again, whoever said someone should survive? A Downer Ending where everyone dies makes for pretty potent drama.

Another twist is to use this trope before or near the beginning of a story, leaving the Hero as the last survivor of their squad/family/camping trip. What follows is their rage fueled quest for revenge on whoever (or whatever) killed the rest of the group. And thanks to the Inverse Ninja Law, odds are they'll win. Of course, it's also possible that their superiors or the authorities force them to go back to help rescuers against their will.

It's worth noting that if this happens to a hero enough times, you have to wonder why anyone would voluntarily follow him after a while.

Related to Final Girl. When multiple characters say You Shall Not Pass, leading to In the End You Are on Your Own, its The Rest Shall Pass. This trope culminates in Everybody's Dead, Dave. Compare Minimalist Cast. Not to be confused with There Can Be Only One, where characters in the setting are explicitly out to kill/eliminate each other. If the circumstances allow everyone to come back afterward, it's a Battle Royale With Cheese. Contrast with We Do the Impossible, for a team that subverts Dwindling Party (mostly) and gets the mission done.

Anime & Manga

 * Berserk does this with the Eclipse that ends the Golden Age arc (and the anime) with Griffith's Face Heel Turn leaving the entire Band of the Hawk branded for sacrifice. The Hawks' Raiders pretty much get slaughtered en masse by the monsters from hell, but as the horror continues, each of the important members of the Hawks go down one by one until only Guts and Casca are left. And then it all goes to hell. This sequence also has an aspect of a Suicide Mission about it, in that two of the Hawks die trying to get Casca away; Pippin gets eaten holding off a bunch of monsters and Judeau takes a spike through the chest for Casca. They succeed insofar that Casca doesn't die, but...
 * The Hawks began dwindling even before the Eclipse happened, since the moment that Guts left the Hawks for his own reason and Griffith just went on a downward spiral was when shit started getting worse for them.
 * Angel Beats!
 * In one episode, while the group is dodging traps set for Angel on their way to Guild, they are gradually all "killed" off, leaving only the two most central protagonists. Except, of course, they're already dead, so it's impossible for them to die; the "dead" members are all back by the next episode.
 * They run this "gauntlet" twice, and are eventually resurrected, however, the story does still play it straight at the end, Though a large number of them simply vanish with less characterization, probably simply because there wasn't animation time to do it properly, eventually the group is left with only five members, and finally they vanish as well. The final ending theme shows this trope heartrendingly well.
 * Wolf's Rain in the final four episodes... down to Kill'Em All.
 * This is the entire purpose of Bokurano.
 * Space Runaway Ideon does this during probably one of Yoshiyuki Tomino's most infamous endings. He has the Kill'Em All moniker for a reason.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion: The cast starts getting picked off rather rapidly as the series draws near the end. First  No so much Dwindling Party as much as Dwindling Race by the end of End of Evangelion. By the end of the series only two children:   are left on Earth.
 * Season endings in Sailor Moon tend to involve the cast getting picked off one by one, with a lot of Tear Jerker Heroic Sacrifices, leaving the title hero to stand up on her own. Of course, as the main character explicitly has "resurrection" as one of her powers, this doesn't stick...as long as you're a main character.
 * Zeta Gundam spends the last half-a-dozen episodes killing off the majority of its remaining characters, regardless of what faction they're a part of.
 * Victory Gundam is the franchise's best example, since the (named character) death rate is constant to the point of making many viewers suffer from Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy.
 * The Sanctuary arc of Saint Seiya, and to some extent the anime-only Asgard arc and the Poseidon arc were this for the Bronze Boys. It's particularly noticeable in the first example because the Bronzies are all breaking through the Twelve Houses as a single group, until one of them stays behind to fight the residing Gold Saint and distract him/hold him off long enough to let the others through (whereas in Asgard and Poseidon's domain they all split up and then reunited at the very end, and then the dwindling occurred.) The Hades Saga, on the other hand, became this for the Gold Saints once they entered the realm of the dead, often for the benefit of the Bronzies.
 * The Lost Canvas plays it straight, on both Athena's and Hades' side.
 * In the last bunch of episodes of Gurren Lagann, all of the front line members of team Dai Gurren are killed one after the other. Being Gurren Lagann, of course even their deaths are awesome!
 * The ending of RG Veda.
 * Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, especially the Everybody Dies chapter.
 * Simoun spends the first seven episodes gathering up Chor Tempest, then proceeds to decimate them via Heroic BSODs, other personal traumas, accidental, and bad cases of death. By the time in the last episodes, only half of its members are still there. This is even lampshaded in the mid-season episode title "One by One."
 * Simoun spends the first seven episodes gathering up Chor Tempest, then proceeds to decimate them via Heroic BSODs, other personal traumas, accidental, and bad cases of death. By the time in the last episodes, only half of its members are still there. This is even lampshaded in the mid-season episode title "One by One."

Comic Books

 * In Flesh: "Texas", Pat Mills has stated he is aiming to have an average of one character dying each week.
 * Garth Ennis's Crossed has this. Some of the characters are killed by the titular sadistic, not-quite-zombie Crossed while others kill themselves or are killed by the other survivors.

Fanfiction

 * Invoked and defied in The Dresden Fillies -  lures the group into her castle full of traps exactly for this purpose but Harry pushes his powers to the limit to keep everypony alive.
 * Happens to the main gang in the Calvin at Camp episode "Hobbes of the Wild."

Films -- Animation

 * 9|Nine We start with nine characters, and end with four. And it's all due to the lead's curiosity.

Films -- Live-Action

 * Clash of the Titans, both the 1981 and 2009 editions have the Argive soldiers killed to a man save for Perseus.
 * The Doom movie killed off all the marines one by one.
 * Sunshine uses the suicide mission format.
 * Saving Private Ryan has most of the squad die rather heroically.
 * Terminator: Salvation John Connor's squad is wiped out in a nuclear flash in the first ten minutes of the movie.
 * Predator. And Predators.
 * Krull kills off most of the cast, including A: the mentor figure, who dies in the process of finding out where to find the Black Fortress, B: The 'Travelling Man', one of whose wives we meet in a previous scene, and C: Rell the Cyclops, who makes a Heroic Sacrifice. Whereas the hero began with nearly an army, only four of his allies are still alive at the end to walk off into the distance with the hero after he rescues the Damsel in Distress and saves the world.
 * Four of the Seven Samurai.
 * Four of The Magnificient Seven, following the plot of Seven Samurai
 * The landing on Iscandar in Space Battleship Yamato.
 * Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, almost every stop causes one kid to get bumped from the group, until only Charley is left.
 * Avatar. Jake, Neytiri, Norm, Max, Mo'at, and Selfridge are the only named characters to survive the movie. )
 * AlienS has three humans and the android surviving. (Too bad for what followed.)
 * Whedon's commentary on Serenity states that he was deliberately evoking the Suicide Mission, killing off  and seriously injuring everyone but , who he put in an inescapable death trap. Then he let some of them live.
 * The ten National Guardsmen in Southern Comfort are whittled down to, mostly at the hands of some pissed-off Cajuns.
 * Anaconda
 * Deep Rising
 * Pitch Black
 * The Thing
 * The Core
 * The Wild Geese: successive encounters with the Simbas steadily chip away at the ranks of the principals.
 * Damnatus invokes this trope once G'gour gets loose.
 * The 13th Warrior A few of the other warriors are dispatched in each battle scene till only the title character and two others remain. "Ibn" (as they call him!), Weath, Herger, Edgtho and Hatlaf(the boy) all survive. Plus characterization is given beyond Buliwyf and Herger. Weath is hinted at being a celt, a musician and has a family. Herger is one of the more educated members of the party. Edgtho is known as "the silent" just like in the book and is shown to be the group's dour-mannered scout and tracker.
 * Shaun of the Dead starts off with seven characters in the group, which dwindles down to two in the end (and one friendly zombie). Extra materials do show one other character survived and that she maintains 'Christmas card contact' with the main characters.
 * The alien guards in Hunter Prey. Soon only our main character is left.
 * Centurion ends with only the main character surviving and returning to his new Celtic girlfriend.
 * Variation in The Thing- both the 1981 John Carpenter film and the 2011 prequel. In both films, while a dwindling party does occur, the alien killing people off one by one also creates a perfect copy, and so with a few exceptions you're never totally sure who's already been killed. Some have even argued that at least one of the survivors is in fact a Thing.
 * The Grey where the wolves pick them off one by one. Either that, or the Alaskan environment.
 * Oh, and Ottway himself dies but manages to take the alpha wolf with him.
 * The Descent.
 * The Cave.
 * Dawn of the Dead in the original only two characters got out alive, in the 2004 film only four out the dozen characters made it out in a boat, but after the make it to land
 * Not surprising that this happens in The Dirty Dozen, as a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits are sent on a Suicide Mission. The first death happens right when they land with the parachutes, the last while leaving the scene. The others somewhere in between.

Gamebooks

 * This happens in the fourth Lone Wolf book, among others—over the course of a simple mission to investigate a cult trying to bring back an evil god, your entire squad is slowly killed off, bit by bit. By the time you arrive there, you're alone.

Live-Action TV

 * Almost any Doctor Who episode involving a group of people. For the Trope Namer of Everybody Lives, they invert it quite a lot.
 * This was actually played with in "The Curse of the Black Spot". For most of the episode it seems that there's an evil siren running around a pirate ship and killing off the crew one by one.
 * Of the five main characters Torchwood started with, only two are still alive. One of whom is immortal and dies as what comes close to a hobby.
 * Interesting that the three other members die as a result of Captain Jack Harkness's past coming back to haunt him (Tosh is shot by Jack's brother Grey; Owen's body dissolves preventing a nuclear meltdown caused by Grey; Ianto is killed by a virus spread by an alien who can back after dealing with Jack decades ago).
 * While this is true of many horror pieces, Stephen King's Rose Red is notable for this, particularly with the sudden change in frequency of the deaths. Other than Bollinger, no one dies in Part 1; in Part 2 Pam and Vic meet their ends; then in Part 3, in rapid succession, Mrs. Waterman, Professor Miller, Nick, and finally are taken by the house.
 * In the Community animated Christmas episode, Shirley, Jeff, and Britta are evicted from Planet Abed. Troy and Annie stay behind to hold off Duncan and only Pierce makes it to the end with Abed.
 * In the second season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the supporting cast gets picked off one by one, starting with in the beginning of the season, and  in the last few episodes.
 * In murder mystery Harper's Island, we go from a cast of 25 main characters plus a dozen extras to four survivors out of the main cast:
 * Supernatural has always killed off a lot of characters—one of the leads, Dean, is a leader in the television dying field all on his own—and any single ghost episode sometimes does this. The zombie virus episode, 'Croatoan,' also did it, in proper tropey fashion. Since the end of season six, the whole show has been doing it, killing off or otherwise removing recurring cast members without replacing them with new players and paring things down until, as of December 2011, the main cast has been completely reduced to Ackles and Padalecki, just like at the start of season one. Almost the only other even recurring character still in play is the demon Crowley.
 * When you consider they faced the Apocalypse with a team that maxed out at six at any one time, being reduced to two doesn't seem that big a change...
 * It looks like Sam and Dean are gearing up for that Butch & Sundance ending the actors keep talking about.
 * An episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys has Herc and Iolaus having a reunion with the other Argonauts. Of course, something happens, requiring King Jason to once again gather the old gang and sail. This is when the problems start, with the original Argonauts dying off one-by-one, some through a convenient accident, some killed by an unknown assailant by someone they know. It turns out that one of the Argonauts is the culprit.
 * The Walking Dead more and more of the characters die frequently.

Literature

 * Harry Potter
 * In Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone (or "Sorcerer's Stone" if you're in the US), while they don't die the trio does indeed get whittled down to just one over the course of running the gauntlet to the mirror.
 * Over the course of its existence, The Order of the Phoenix (the organization, not the book) was like this as well. When Moody shows Harry a group photo of the original members, we find that over the years they've lost thirteen people, including the Potters and the Longbottoms, with only 9 of them still in the order by book five. While they did get more members in the form of the Weasleys, Snape and others, the order.
 * In the various voyages of Sinbad, he would get shipwrecked or marooned on far off shores. If his fellow passengers or crew mates weren't all immediately killed, the locals would dine on them soon enough.
 * The Three Musketeers: The musketeers peel off one by one to hold off pursuers or deal with ambushes as the four travel to London, with only D'Artagnan reaching their destination. However, all three of his friends survive their You Shall Not Pass moments in one piece, and they are reunited as D'Artagnan travels home.
 * John Peel's 2099 series killed off the entire human race except twelve children in the first book, and two children somewhat later in that same book. Every subsequent book killed off another two characters, until only two were left in book six. This editor is unsure whether those two survived for an Adam and Eve Plot.
 * Battle Royale has this in its very premise, with the twist that the party is killing itself.
 * All Quiet on the Western Front is an early example, killing off its soldier protagonists one by one in every way the author can think of.
 * Roland's ka-tet in the last Dark Tower book.
 * Almost all of Jair Ohmsford's companions die in The Wishsong of Shannara, just about all of them in a You Shall Not Pass situation.
 * Dan Simmons' The Terror is pretty much made of this trope. Of course, since it's based on the historical Franklin Expedition, which nobody survived, it's not exactly unexpected.
 * This happens in The Silmarillion. Pretty much any character who does anything even remotely heroic gets killed in a series of battles in which things get progressively worse. The number of Elves who survive the First Age can be counted on one hand, and the only reason that civilization was not destroyed utterly was a literal Deus Ex Machina.
 * Happens in the B-plot (Meanwhile in the Future style) in the first book of The Magnificent Twelve, with the original Magnifica. The original group gets smaller and smaller, either by members dying, or crossing the Despair Event Horizon and subsequently losing their powers, until by the time the A-plot takes place only Grimluk's left. It gets to Tear Jerker levels when the Plot Line Crossover occurs and the reader pieces it together.
 * Against a Dark Background generally whittles down its Five-Man Band of adventurers.
 * David Gemmell's books usually featured this due to the prevalence of sieges and last stands. The order of the Thirty is based on the idea that they fight in support of hopeless causes and they will die one by one until the last survivor leaves to found a new Thirty.
 * Eternity Road is kind of weird about this. At first, it looks like it's heading for an Everybody Lives ending, especially since the first death is a case of Never Found the Body. The first and second deaths both come out of nowhere, but after the second it sets itself up for a Dwindling Party scenario.
 * Rowan of Rin uses a nonlethal variant, as each character encounters their personal worst fear and turns back rather than face it.
 * The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.
 * In The Odyssey, Odysseus's party is picked off by the fantastical beings they encounter on their journey home. This was part of a curse Odysseus received, stating he would be allowed to finally return home at the end of his long adventure, but it would be at the cost of his men.
 * In Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, the characters are at a dinner party (of sorts), and are killed off one-by-one, as you might be able to tell from the title.
 * In Lady of the Lake, Geralt's Ragtag Bunch of Misfits is decimated while storming Vilgefortz castle. Milva scores a Mutual Kill with the enemy archer leader, Cahir is killed by the Implacable Man Bonhart while defending Ciri, Angouleme dies in Ciri's arms from blood loss, and Regis (a vampire) is melted into glass by Vilgefortz himself. Add the fact that Dandelion quit the party before that and only Geralt leaves the castle alive.
 * The original Pack in The Sight pretty much drop like flies.

Theater

 * The Golden Apple has Ulysses gradually lose all his men over the course of the Big Spree, in a series of episodes loosely inspired by The Odyssey.

Video Games

 * Mass Effect 2's final mission can be like this if you don't prepare properly and/or make bad decisions for assignments. In the worst case scenario, only Joker makes it out alive.
 * In Super Paper Mario, the last dungeon sees Bowser, Peach and Luigi staying back and facing O'Chunks, Mimi and Dimentio (that are doing the exact same thing for Count Bleck), and then falling into death traps.ItGetsBetter though.
 * Tales of Symphonia, during your second trip to the Tethe'alla Tower of Salvation, has each supporting character pull off a Heroic Sacrifice one at a time to help Lloyd rescue Colette.
 * Dwarf Fortress. Every single game turns out to be this way, unless you decide to quit early. At least they tend to die off in amusing fashions.
 * Happens in Romancing SaGa 3 when they trigger various (seemingly) fatal traps, but your members come back one by one when you fight the boss.
 * Starts around the halfway point in Halo: Reach and ends with.
 * In Obs Cure 2, unlike the original, the main cast runs into one horrific Plotline Death after another, until only  are left standing to face.
 * The assault on the Shadowlord's castle in Nie R leaves only Nier and Kaine alive in endings A and B. Then in endings C and D, only Nier OR Kaine will survive till the very end.
 * Knights of the Old Republic Dark side users will have a fairly limited party selection for the last section. Wonder whose fault that is?
 * The Lord of the Rings Online: Siege of Mirkwood storyline. You are send on a dangerous errand with Five Elves which compose "The Hidden Guard". Their number starts to dwindle pretty fast. But when you barely knew the first one to die and couldn't really relay to his death, the passing of the last victim is truly heartbreaking.
 * This is possible in Fallout: New Vegas, though you have to be pure evil or comically incompetent to make it happen.
 * Dragon Age II can play like this, with party members leaving due to certain quests or their particular stance in the mage-templar conflict as well as their relationship with Hawke near the end of the game. The only character that is guaranteed to stay with Hawke throughout is Varric since he's the narrator of the story.
 * The original game also included it, but only in DLC and only from the enemy POV: in The Darkspawn Chronicles, the Warden has died at Ostagar and Alistair leads their remaining party into the Final Battle, leaving a member to defend every major point in the city. Then you, as a Hurlock Vanguard, come along and kill them all, one by one.
 * In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine', the heroes begin with Tidus, Sidonis, Mira, Leandros, and Inquisitor Drogan among named characters holding Graia. By the end of the game, Drogan has been revealed as a daemon-possessed puppet, Sidonis has been gutted by Nemeroth, and Leandros has sold Titus to the Inquisition over a question of Warp-resistance.
 * Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh gleefully uses this trope. By the time the game is over, only two people are still alive. Who are they?.
 * Final Fantasy IV has an interesting interpretation of this as your party gets picked off, one by one,
 * In Duodecim the games starts with sixteen Warriors of Cosmos, but whittles them down to just ten for the sequel.
 * Team Fortress 2 doesn't normally invoke this, but there are exceptions. The most notable is Arena mode, where the objective is literally to kill everyone on the opposing team, and respawning is not permitted until the next round. As a result, both teams lose their players one by one, and typically only one or two members on one team are still alive at the end.
 * There's also the Zombie mod, which as its name implies, creates a Zombie Apocalypse-type scenario. One team plays as the survivors while the other is the Zombies. The catch is that anyone playing among the survivors becomes a zombie if they die. Often the result is that the survivors' numbers gradually dwindle whilst the zombies grow stronger.
 * A more straight forward example would be the Saxton Hale mod, which uses the "hunted" variety. The players are confined to relatively small map whilst a random player is selected to play as Saxton Hale or another Memetic Mutation character. Whoever, they're playing as, they have rediculously high health and instant kill attacks. Good luck trying to kill them.
 * This is seen in the 2008 Turok reboot. Of the two dozen or so Whiskey Company soldiers who survive the spaceship crash at the beginning of the game, only 3 (one of whom is the main character) end up surviving to escape the planet.
 * Oregon Trail can and will be like this.
 * Non-lethally inverted in Predator rooms in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City. The "party" is a number of gun-toting henchmen who are initially confident that they can kill the Batman (which they can if they find him). The room is full of vantage points, ventilation shafts, blind corners, and fragile walls that Batman can use to pick them off one by one, reducing the henchmen to an increasingly-smaller number of increasingly-terrified whimpering children.

Visual Novels

 * Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors begins with The Ninth Man's death. In most of the endings, after the third room you go through, the bodies really start to stack up.
 * In Muv-Luv Alternative, the

Web Comics

 * Recently, in Homestuck. At the beginning, there were 12. Then,

Western Animation

 * My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, of all shows, provides an example of this (which is, albeit non-lethal, not any less tragic). The 2nd season pilot thematises how the 6 protagonists are lured into an enchanted maze by Discord, the antagonist, and get hypnotised and subsequently psychologically broken by him one. by. one. He even spares Twilight Sparkle, the last of the cast, just so she can see what he has done to the others.
 * In "The Dungeon at the Heart of Dawn", one of the most universally praised episodes of the Dungeons and Dragons TV show, the kids have to help Dungeon Master get to the eponymous locale to restore his powers so he can save them all from the Bigger Bad. So important is this quest that at various points one hero after another has to be left behind, either due to a separation that leaves them in a dangerous locale or to hold off some terrible threat so the others can go on. By the time they reach the dungeon and are facing off with Venger, only Hank and Sheila are left. Of course everyone makes it (albeit by the skin of their teeth), but it was one of the most suspenseful and exciting episodes of the series.
 * This shows up often in Bad Future episodes. The Bad Future episode in Gargoyles, "Future Tense", has the band of heroes dying off left and right as they assault Xanatos'  base. One of them gets a poignant death scene with Famous Last Words, others are killed suddenly without a word for extra shock value,  In the end, the only main characters left alive are Eliza and Goliath who is himself dying.
 * In the Teen Titans Episode "Fear Itself", the group is stalked by a monster throughout their tower.
 * Happens in the last episode of Mighty Max. Several of the main characters perform a Heroic Sacrifice to help Max escape, and in the end he faces Skullmaster all alone.
 * In the Young Justice episode "Failsafe", the main party - the Team - die almost one-by-one.