[Eisenbeiß]

Hello,

I'm interested in your experiences with TPKs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Party_Kill). How did they happen? Do you blame yourself, your team or your GM? And what did you learn from them?

[Usda Beph]

In all my years of gaming, I have never witnessed a TPK. There were always some survivors. 45% loss is the highest I've seen. Falls into the Crap-Occurs collumn.

[FastJack]

3E Ogres. The Challenge ratings on these #$#@s are WAY off base. I lost two adventuring parties because the books said Ogres were a good match for us and they wound up wiping the floors with us.

[Aces]

I have never had a TPK in Shadowrun either, which I would likely have to attribute to the players. I tend to run a very "raw" campaign, where I don't limit the actions of the party. If they want to try something that is ill advised, however, I do give them subtle hints about the danger of that course of action. While doing legwork before hitting a Target that is out of their league, a contact or two will likely recommend against it, or the decker may come across some interesting tidbit on the target's (over)reaction to similar actions in the past.

All that said, I have witnessed numerous occasions where at least on member of a team makes a bad decision, usually driven by ego, and lost a limb, gotten themselves killed, or cost the life of a team member. I find that the best way to avoid unnecessary deaths is to simply tell it to them straight. If the team wants to do something stupid, don't make it sound like a foolproof plan. Double crosses and misinformation are certainly occupational hazards in the shadows, of course, but your group will grow weary if you play the "I bet you didn't see that coming" card too often.

[Usda Beph]

3E Ogres. The Challenge ratings on these #$#@s are WAY off base. I lost two adventuring parties because the books said Ogres were a good match for us and they wound up wiping the floors with us.

I never used those silly 3E rules because they always seemed to be either to weak or way to powerful! Ogres are tough for most low/mid range 4 player parties. Put them in the hands of a crafty DM and they become downright terrifying.!

[Angelone]

We got blasted out of the sky over Aztlan cause our rigger was power tripping, got wasted on our first run through the original Food Fight, during the 3rd ed Missions book we got annihilated during the Doc Wagon ambush, lots of misused explosives, that's all I can think of right now.

The Food Fight thing was my fault, we didn't know each other, it was supposed to be our introduction I ended up killing two or three of the other players before being taken down by Wanda and Slicer-Dicer I think his name was. The Doc Wagon ambush was so stacked against us I don't think anyone made it past the second combat round. The explosives were mainly blond moments by various players. One of them the explosives were detonated with us still in the building we were hitting.

[Chaotic Insane]

I have two.

First one the DM failed his will save and forgot we were fighting an illusion that TPK'd us. So the past 4 hours of combat where everyone died couldn't have actually happened. Oops.

Second was when my party, my stupid, stupid party, didn't see my best friend and I plotting against them and between us and the final boss, we killed the whole party. I had a lot of fun having my drow barbarian kick the elf cleric/paladin in the face for his killing blow.

[Irian]

According to the wikipedia definition, I had one of those a few months ago... The spaceship on which the group was exploded - fortunately, it was just a vision (and a way to start the session with a little shock effect) that should, what COULD happen if the group wouldn't prevent it :-)

[Coldbringer]

The closest to a TPK in a game I have run was  with a bunch of newish characters, and one noticed some gangers messing with some one or something that tripped his trigger so he tried and failed to toss a grenade out of the slightly armored vehicle they were all riding in.  He fumbled the roll and  dropped the grenade in the car, and BOOM, all the characters in the back of the car bit it the driver was nearly dead.  The only character that made it out more a less unscathed was the Vampire who was riding shotgun.  This was right after they left the meet to get the job.

[Dakka]

3E Ogres. The Challenge ratings on these #$#@s are WAY off base. I lost two adventuring parties because the books said Ogres were a good match for us and they wound up wiping the floors with us.

Ahhh Challenge Rating... an arbitrary measure of power if there ever was one.  Dire Wolves were another relatively low underrated CR monster that could kill a party with a little luck.

While I haven't been playing shadowrun long (no TPKs so far) we did have a small brush with death involving grenades and close quarters.  The TROLL with body 9 and armor of craziness was left with a single physical box remaining after using Edge to reroll damage soak twice on 2 grenades that were like 20P a piece after wall bounces.  My orc adept had one physical box left thanks to some extremely lucky rolls and also 2 edge.   Luckily the squishier members of the party were off doing some other task or they would have been very dead.  The lesson learned, don't use grenades in the house.  That's what bullets are for. 

[esprism]

I played a fantastic Polaris party once (post apocalyptic role playing game where humanity survive under the sea with a lot of interesting stuffs. 3rd edition is currently edited by black book edition, the French SR4 editor).

It was a "small" party with 3 players. After 1st combat, we survived but one player ended tetraplegic so he change character. (my character was badly wounded with a 1 on a million chance fumble series)

For the epic finish, GM learned us everything we must not do in this game : "be curious" is the worst thing we could do ^^

End of the game : 3 characters dead plus the one who was only tetraplegic

The funny thing is we were really attached to our character on a single game and even at the end hope did not leave us...but the GM did it to the end

[Rigger_Joe]

We had a TPK in our 3rd game in 1st Edition Shadowrun. My character had already died in the 1st game so I was playong a GM made NPC who was a yakuza enforcer. I was to take the team into a research facility (cannot remember which one, this was 18 years ago) which I did. We split up into teams but I had to double back to help back-up another team who got bogged down.

I was using Stealth to move safely and the GM made the sammy roll a perception and informed him he saw a shadow move up behind them. He declared he spun and fired his shotgun into the "approaching enemy" point blank. Heaps of 6s later and I was straight into over-damage. Apparently I was a favoured lieutenant because I had Platinum DocWagon and my bio-sensor kicked in.

Within minutes there was a DocWagon chopper and a retrieval team going in. Some team members tried to steal the chopper while escaping - they died in a hail of bullets. Another tried to steal a chopper in the grounds and got it started. He however had no Pilot Skill and got it about 10' of the ground before it tilted and slammed into the ground in a huge fireball. The remaining decided to use my body as a shield to escape and got sniped.

In the end, the only surviving member was actually me, DocWagon revived me in the Chopper and I ended up keeping the character for years top come. Stupid team but we were like 13-14 years old, can't expect to much can we