Total Party Kill: Difference between revisions
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''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]]'', [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0445.html strip #445]}}
The entire adventuring party dies in an epic blaze of glory!
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{{examples}}
==
* 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.
* Has actually happened to the [[Justice League of America|Justice 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
** 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 ... [[Anachronism Stew|very roughly era-appropriate]] cultures with a much less [[Values Dissonance|"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 [[Fate Worse Than Death|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).
* 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 [[Death Is Cheap|come back anyway.]]
* 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.
* Of all the superheroes listed above, most 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.)
== [[Film]] ==
* Let's not forget ''[[The Gamers]]''. Well... sort-of... {{spoiler|The characters didn't die, but they did show up in the real world and kill all of their players, GM included.}}
** ''[[The Gamers|The Gamers: Dorkness Rising]]''. {{spoiler|Within the first 5 minutes, the entire party dies.}}
* ''[[The Wild Bunch]]'' {{spoiler|ends with this.}}
== [[Literature]] ==▼
▲== Literature ==
* In one of history's most famous wars, [[The Trojan War|Team Troy]] decided it might be [[Sarcasm Mode|smart]] to roll the opposing team's [[Trojan Horse|giant horse]] [[Too Dumb to Live|into their base.]] What followed was a lot of [[Back Stab|back stabbery]] that resulted in a TPK.
* In ''Game Night'' by Jonny Nexus, {{spoiler|this occurs at the end of the book.}}
* In the book
* ''[[Blake's 7]]'' - over the course of the series, the membership of the 7 changes, even losing Blake, but in the final episode, the bad guys manipulate the party in killing each, even bringing Blake back just so the party can kill him after mistakenly believing he'd betrayed everything they fought for...▼
* ''[[Supernatural]]'' - {{spoiler|2014!Dean's}} run against the Devil in {{spoiler|"The End"}} leads to everyone except the guy who's not from then dying, one way or another.▼
* ''[[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, nearly three times if it weren't do to [[Butt Monkey|Britta]] [[Achievements in Ignorance|accidentally creating a poison instead of a strength potion]]. That said, the entire group manages to be killed by [[Goddamned Bats|the hippies]] immediately after respawning from Gilbert's second party kill.▼
== [[New Media]] ==
* Many fun stories of Total Party Kills caused by player stupidity can be found at [
* [http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42454 This] thread in ''[[The Order of the Stick|Order of the Stick]]'' forum is dedicated to TPKs.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==▼
* This is an expected -- indeed, ''intended'' -- 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 survived with the most people standing. Back then, the [[Game Master]] was usually [[Killer Game Master|playing ''against'' the party]], not ''with'' them.▼
▲== Tabletop Games ==
▲* 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 survived with the most people standing. Back then, the [[Game Master]] was usually [[Killer Game Master|playing against the party]], not with them.
* According to an anecdote by the late, great E. 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.
** So ''that's'' where the inspiration for the ''[[Goblins]]''
* The [[Sourcebook|dime novel]] "Night Train" for the early ''[[Deadlands]]'' is notorious for being a TPK, but a later adventure ("Canyon o' Doom") actually gives the [[Game Master|Marshal]] ''permission'' to off a [[Too Dumb to Live|stupidly obstinate]] [[Player Party|posse]].
* Happens regularly in ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]''; 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.
* This is expected to happen in ''[[Paranoia (game)|Paranoia]]''. Repeatedly. If the players don't kill each other or themselves, [[Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies|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.
* ''
** Though to be fair, it's worth noting that of all the tabletop role-playing games out there, ''Fudge'' kind of stands out by having very few really hard and fast rules; most chapters go out of their way to discuss multiple possible approaches to handling things. Even the section that introduces the "default" multiple-opponent rules immediately reminds the reader that for more "epic" games the penalties can be reduced or the members of the "mob" given appropriately poor combat stats to balance things out.
* The nicer ''[[Dark Heresy]]'' and ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]]'' games end like this. The bad ones don't bear thinking about.
** That's a bit of an exaggeration; unlike in Call of Cthulhu, the player characters have Fate Points that allow them to escape death (until they run out, that is).
* Can happen entirely as a result of ''one'' magical fumble in ''[[FATAL]]'', if you roll "1351: accidentally casts FATAL". This spell goes [[Up to Eleven|significantly beyond being a Total Party Kill]], and ends up a Total ''Planet'' Kill as [[Kill'Em All|everybody in the entire world dies]]. Given [[So Bad It's Horrible
* So much expected in ''[[Dark Sun]]'' that players are advised to have '''three''' backup characters handy at any given time.
* 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.
== [[Video Games]] ==▼
▲== Video Games ==
* 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 [[Infinity+1 Sword|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 "[[The End of the World as We Know It|total world kill]]", though...
* In the [[Nintendo Hard|early]] ''[[Wizardry]]'' computer 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.
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*** 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.
* Happened in the lore for the dungeon Frore in ''[[Asheron's Call]]''.
* As far as ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130813000618/http://www.armadaonline.com/ 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.
* A fully-farmed carry hero (in the sense of "being able to carry the whole team to victory) in the ''[[Warcraft]] III'' map "[[Defense of the Ancients]]" is ''supposed'' to be able to single-handedly wipe the enemy team. In practice, of course, things rarely work that way. Such as if the enemy team has stuns/silences...
* Fulfilled in ''[[Battlefield (series)|Battlefield]] 2142'' when:
* Interesting variation in in ''[[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 put on your big girl panties and 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 [[That One Boss]], [[Bonus Boss]] 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 there is nothing you can do but pray.
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** You foolishly move your entire group to open a door and a [[Action Bomb|Balloon Fish]] comes out to say "Die."
** Of course, there are lesser versions including, for example, starting out separated in a base defence mission and winding up with everyone being ganged up on by aliens with rapid-firing laser cannons.
* In Bungie's ''[[Myth]]'' series, your explosive-chucking dwarves have incredible TPK potential, as you can tell in [http://www.viddler.com/explore/Johnny_Law/videos/36/ this video]{{Dead link}}.
* This is the point in VS mode in ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' 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!"
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* 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 [[Guide Dang It|ridiculously specific]] Fusion Spell not only kills every enemy, but also kills two of your party members as well.
* The primary cause of mission failure in ''[[Rainbow Six]]''. "Mission failed, your team was wiped out". Can instantly result from [[Explosive Stupidity|grenade mishaps]].
* ''[[MOTHER 1]]'' has the [[Hopeless Boss Fight|R703x robots]] a trio of robot enemies - each of which if 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 respectfully.
** The middle of these the R7038 can't be defeated at all and will ''always'' wipeout your party. (People have hacked the game to discover that even if you somehow mange to lower it's HP to 0, it still won't be defeated.) However, right after the party wiped a friend of yours will appear in the [[Brick Joke|newly rebuilt tank]] that was used to defeat the R7037 and [[Big Damn Heroes|obliterate it.]]
== [[Web Comics]] ==▼
== Web Original ==▼
* 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 [[Crowning Moment of Funny|make the same jump into a Piranha Plant.]]▼
* [[Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do In An RPG]] gives a guide on what's an appropriate TPK▼
{{quote|1430. If the party goes out like ~300~, that's cool. [[Thelma and Louise]] not so much.}}▼
* Happens regularly in The [[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.▼
▲== Live Action TV ==
▲* Blake's 7 - over the course of the series, the membership of the 7 changes, even losing Blake, but in the final episode, the bad guys manipulate the party in killing each, even bringing Blake back just so the party can kill him after mistakenly believing he'd betrayed everything they fought for...
▲* [[Supernatural]] - {{spoiler|2014!Dean's}} run against the Devil in {{spoiler|"The End"}} leads to everyone except the guy who's not from then dying, one way or another.
▲* [[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, nearly three times if it weren't do to [[Butt Monkey|Britta]] [[Achievements in Ignorance|accidentally creating a poison instead of a strength potion]]. That said, the entire group manages to be killed by [[Goddamned Bats|the hippies]] immediately after respawning from Gilbert's second party kill.
▲== Web Comics ==
* This happens to the party in the Fantasy storyline of ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' on occasion. It's a reason never to let your party's Fire Mage put all of his skill points into that Fireball spell... Good thing [[Death Is Cheap]] and Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs is woefully incompetent...
* [http://www.rpgeneric.com/comics/31/ This strip]{{Dead link}} 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 (tabletop game)]]'', [http://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/93/ as proved] by ''[[The Unspeakable Vault of Doom]]''.
* Referenced in ''[[Erfworld]]''.
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* The end of the Ruby arc of the original ''[[Nuzlocke Comics]]'' had this occur to the last remnants of Ruby's team against [[True Final Boss|Steven]], thus setting up his [[Failure Knight]] status for the FireRed arc.
* Some campaigns in ''[[Full Frontal Nerdity]]'' ends like this.
▲== [[Web Original]] ==
▲* 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 [[Crowning Moment of Funny|make the same jump into a Piranha Plant.]]
▲* [[Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do In An RPG]] gives a guide on what's an appropriate TPK
▲{{quote|1430. If the party goes out like
▲* Happens regularly in The [[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.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]▼
[[Category:Player Party]]
[[Category:Tabletop Game Tropes]]
▲[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
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