It had been a long, long time since I experienced a Total Party Kill, as either a GM or as a player. Luckily for me, I was the GM two weeks ago when it finally happened again. The lethality of the game, and TPKs in particular, are contentious topics within the tabletop RPG community. But now I have a delicious opportunity to express my own two coppers on the issue.

Personally, I like my games extremely lethal. I’ve written before about how my ideal game starts me off with little more than a burlap sack and a rusty stick and then lets the dice fall where they may as I scramble to survive. For me, that makes reaching even third or fourth level a challenging feat, and a cause for celebration. But at the other end of the spectrum, there are players who would argue that since the death of a character is one of the most un-fun things that happens in the game, the GM should take pains to avoid a single death, much more so a TPK.

These “less-than-lethal” players are generally the type who put a LOT of time and effort into creating characters that are deeply rooted in the lore of the universe. They have rich backstories, and likely their own accents, etc, etc. And to have it all swept away with a single roll of the dice — pure chance — is unimaginably cruel. Furthermore, without the real threat of death, they are basically guaranteed success in all they do. By extension, they feel that they are therefore guaranteed fun and excitement throughout the entire campaign.

But my argument against this line of thinking is that while it guarantees fun, it’s watered-down. I’ve even told a few players that if they wanted to take on the world without fear of repercussions, they should just go home and play Skyrim on easy. Really, it’s simple game theory: the greater the risk, the greater the reward! If the threat of death is real, and you manage to survive, then you have actually achieved a great accomplishment!

And here’s the other thing: In games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, even death is not as terrible as it sounds at first blush. It’s pretty difficult to be killed, mechanically. First, you have to be trapped; there is always the option to run away otherwise. Secondly, the entire party has to consistently execute poor tactical decisions. Then, your hit points must be depleted, and you must fail a series of multiple saves. And even if you are really dead, you can still be resurrected. Sure, it’s a tad expensive — but every GM knows that paying for a resurrection is the number one cause of interesting side quests! There’s a budget option, for those who don’t mind coming back as a badger; and there are even some deluxe spells that will resurrect someone even if all that is left is a charred clump of hair!

So here’s the setup: The party has succumbed to a nasty sonic burst trap that dealt roughly half their hit points in damage. There is rough weather imposing a moderate -4 penalty on ranged attacks. Two small ice elementals are attacking. The party consists of a ranger (archer), a monk, a gunslinger (musketeer), and a sorcerer. At this point, I gave the party a 75% chance of success. If I were them, I’d have the archer and gunslinger switch to emergency melee mode immediately, possibly with lit torches (that’s 1d4 x 2 fire damage + 1d4 + str mod bludgeoning damage, which is greater on average than a short sword.) The sorcerer should cast every fire spell he knows until he’s out, and the monk should engage in melee.

But what happened was the musketeer engaged one elemental solo, and the sorcerer and musketeer remained where they were and were subsequently engaged by the second elemental. The archer began firing into melee with a penalty that virtually negated her total ranged attack modifier.

With this configuration, I gave their chances of success 50%. It was now what I’d consider to be a challenging encounter, considering I had bumped up the standard ice elemental HP up to 24. (They’d had easy, easy time in combat up until now, and hey — ice elementals LOVE snowstorms!) I could have fudged the HP back down to 8 or 9… but that would be the fourth encounter in a row where the PCs were able to dispatch dangerous enemies with extreme ease. The correct thing for them to do, in my opinion, would be to all pile on a single elemental with one attack each, and retreat if it was not dropped.

But they stayed in this formation. Unfortunately for the characters, the three engaged in melee could not see the archer hanging back, firing into the fray. Around the table though, the three players were incredulous, pointing out how dangerous the fourth’s tactics were. But she was making a gamble; historically, she had done the most damage, so she was betting that she’d be luckier with her bow than with her short sword. Of course, she didn’t know that these were buff elementals that couldn’t be dropped with a single arrow.

The ice elementals dealt further damage, and their numbing cold properties reduced the PCs’ action economy somewhat. Retreating would have to be an all-or-nothing affair, now; they’d all have to make a run for it at the same time. But the monk had done some damage as well, and didn’t feel ready to retreat. The archer, of course, didn’t want to retreat at all. She would either succeed, or die trying. (That’s called foreshadowing, kids.)

Mentally, I now dropped their chances of success to 25%. It all came down to the dice rolls, at this point. The PCs had virtually locked themselves into this position and couldn’t re-position themselves without losing a valuable attack action. They caught a single lucky break when the monk and the archer destroyed one ice elemental. But the sorcerer and the musketeer were in a bad place. The sorcerer’s issue was that he was trying to build his character around magical claws — but this sort of build takes several levels to optimize. Until then, the sorcerer is still woefully outmatched in melee. My only deliberate mercy was having the ice elemental attack the musketeer and ignore the sorcerer.

But the archer continued to fire into melee. The monk used his last Action Point — in fact, the very last AP in the party, period — to take an arrow for the musketeer. The archer’s high damage thrust the monk into negative HP. Thankfully, due to high constitution, the monk was able to stabilize in a pool of his own blood in the snow. Soon after, the archer shot the sorcerer. The ice elemental’s hit points were chipped down to 6. The archer thought if she could just get a single arrow in, surely it would kill it! But then the ice elemental dealt a hard blow to the musketeer. Even if I had fudged the roll to soften the damage, the musketeer was already so low on HP that it wouldn’t have mattered. He was dying, and had 4 or 5 rounds to try and stabilize. The ice elemental engaged in melee with the archer.

After one round, she had been hit for some damage, bringing her HP low; the ice elemental was down to 2 HP. Her chances of success now came down to whether or not she could beat a 17 with a d20: 15% chance of success. Meanwhile, the ice elemental got a +4 to attack vs the archer’s 18 AC: 30% chance of success, twice that of the archer’s.

She missed. It didn’t.

I felt mixed feelings. Should have I held back more? Should I have outright fudged the encounter? In all honesty, my players didn’t even remember the rules for death and dying in Pathfinder — I had to look them up myself! I could have asked them to roll random crap and then told them they stabilized at the last second, they’d never know the difference until they looked up the death rules themselves!

Instead, I opted to let the dice lay where they may. The sorcerer straight up died during the game, and that was canon. He’d have to reroll, and he was cool with doing so. The other three players were either stabilized unconscious, or still dying and had not yet finished determining their fate. But I stopped the game, and hurriedly read ahead in the module, and came up with a way to keep the story going without starting back at square one:

The PCs were actually very, very close to a building used by some of the bad guys. These bad guys already had one prisoner, and they were apparently looking for more. Technically, the PCs had unwittingly alerted the bad guys to their presence, and the bad guys were in the process of planning to capture the PCs. Had the PCs survived the ice elemental attack, they’d have surprised the bad guys and had the opportunity to break a mystery prisoner out from bondage. But now, the bad guys would come upon the source of that sonic blast to find three unconscious heroes bleeding in the snow.

I’ve given the players the option of letting their current characters die, and rolling up new characters, or letting their current characters live. Those that live will wake up tied up in a dark, cold basement. New characters will have been hot on the heels of the old ones, and would have seen the brutal defeat on the banks of the frozen river. And then next session, we begin in media res with an epic assault from without and within a bad guy fort!

And to me, and to my players, that is far, far more fun than if they had simply smacked down the ice elementals and strolled right into the prison with nary a scratch.