Total Party Kill: Difference between revisions

''Then sorry dude, you won't be coming back now;

''One death sucks, but six spells T-P-K.''

 

The entire adventuring party dies in an epic blaze of glory!

 

{{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.

** 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.

 

* 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.}}

 

* 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 ''[[Ready Player One]]'', {{spoiler|at the end of the book there is a massive battle between tens of thousands of "gunter" avatars (the game is mostly set in a futuristic virtual reality called the OASIS) and the avatars of the IOI, the main enemies of the book, as the main characters try to reach the crystal gate which holds the ultimate objective of the story. Upon realising that the three remaining main characters were about to enter this gate, the IOI activate their chekhov's gun: the Catalyst, an artifact which kills the avatars of absolutely every player in the entire sector of space. Permanently. It is earlier stated that a very large percentage of the entire population of the OASIS was present at this fight. Considering that the OASIS is pretty much used by every single person in the world, thats one heck of a TPK. the only reason the story doesn't end there is due to another Chekhov's gun, a magical Quarter found earlier in the book by the protagonist which turned out to grant an extra life, and due to IOI having some backup troops hanging around just outside the sector of space that got nuked.}} There goes the neighbourhood.

 

* ''[[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.

 

* Many fun stories of Total Party Kills caused by player stupidity can be found at [https://web.archive.org/web/20070404045719/http://archive.dumpshock.com/CLUE/index.php3 The C.L.U.E. Foundation], a former feature of The [[Shadowrun]] Archive.

* [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.

 

* 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.

* 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.

* 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).

* 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.

 

* 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.

** 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.]]

 

* 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.

* Some campaigns in ''[[Full Frontal Nerdity]]'' ends like this.

 

* 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

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Player Party]]

[[Category:Tabletop Game Tropes]]