What's the best way to handle TPK? Pretend it didn't happen? Everyone makes a new character? Something else?
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Depends on the game.
I would usually end that campaign if every character got killed.
When I start a new one I usually work in that failure into the new story. Maybe the bad guy took over the country and threatens a new country. It gives you a nice hook and gives a sense of continuity to the world.
Edit: To be honest I have never had a TPK. I have taken over from DMs where the group had a TPK. I have used the same game world since it was a published setting and used the character's failure as one of the adventure hooks.
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Well, I can tell you how we handled it in my campaign and why that's probably not your best option.
In Rise of the Runelords, we had a TPK during book 5. The whole party died and, due to circumstances involving the dungeon, there wasn't any realistic chance that they would be found by friendly parties, let alone resurrected. Thus I made a decisions: I ended he campaign right there.
Now let me say why this was probably a bad idea.
We had invested two and a half years of time in pursuing this story. Take the time the players had invested and multiply it by four for the time I had put in as GM. This, of course, says nothing of the financial investment - but money spent for 30 months entertainment is probably worth it.
The time invested, however, suddenly turns to ash in the mouths of my players. Everything they had done to develop heroes worthy to take down a Runelord is now reduced to a group who died alone and forgotten in a dungeon that only a handful of people even know exist.
As a response strategy, I can share what my wife is doing with her Kingmaker campaign. As the kingdom develops, we've got a ton of NPCs. After a PC unexpectedly died, she made the decision to have us each create one of those NPCs ourselves and that this NPC would be there if our current character fails a critical saving throw. It also gets around the Kingmaker-specific problem of "Welcome, strangers. Won't you please join our government?"
All of this is a long way around to answering your question: don't let the story die. If your players are invested in the story, get them involved in finding away to see it through to its conclusion. For my part, I'd endorse the creation of new PCs to follow in the dead PCs footsteps; however, I don't think a deus ex machina save of the party is completely out of the question if that what it takes to save the story.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Whatever you and the players want to.
Sometimes it might be a combination of two of those. Perhaps one player wants a new character so brings a new character in and helps recover the dead PCs and raises them from the dead to help him finish the mission...
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I prepared this scene for the Arkhryst battle in Sins of the Saviors as I didn't think they'd make it.
The characters all wake up alone, dressed in white versions of their outfit in a purely white chamber with a white door that leads to a white hall where lots of people also dressed in white are queueing.
The entire party meets up in that queue, which leads to Pharasma's Spire; have Pharasma feel a disturbance in the natural balance of things, which can only be corrected -and MUST be corrected- by letting the party resume their life and finish what they started. fortunately, she has the powers to make it happen, being a god and all.
Now the players are even more motivated to finish the story; as if the original story wasn't cool enough, now they are on a mission from a god.
Maybe no one will take notice to my two cents, but ...
There are a lot of ways of handling it:
1. Die with Honor - where a TPK is a tpk. No hard feelings, just the nature of life...
2. It was only a dream - a deus ex machina system where under the event of a tpk, all characters find themselves waking from a horrible nightmare, perhaps a threat from main antagonist, warning the PC's not to meddle with his plans.
3. Death is only the Beginning - in this scenario, some unearthly force decided to interfere with the PC's fate, but not by resurrecting them, but by granting them undeath/deathless/reincarnation/reincorporation (your pick), the motivation and purpose of this could be left unanswered as the PC's try to regain their lost life.
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Generally, in a continuing campaign, the best way to handle it is to say that everyone gets new PC’s, who have been sent out to rescue/check on/find the old PC’s.
Ask your players!
1) All the players gain the ghost template. Then they have to avenge their deaths and find a way to get somebody to cast raise dead on their bodies.
2) There's *all* dead and *MOSTLY* dead. Ok, they are not really dead. Somehow they lived but have serious injuries, like missing limbs or an eye.
I agree with Kyller Tiamatson and darth borehead. Have the big bad raise your PCs as intelligent undead. They get to keep playing and deal with the lovely RP opportunity of being forced to destroy all of the things they worked so hard to put together. they also get the opportunity for revenge on any NPCs they didn't like.
I have never tried the dream ending. This may not be a TPK because technically no one hit -10 but I did have a TKO and rather than end it there I kept them alive and gave them a shot at escape. They were fighting Lizardmen. They all went down, but awoke as prisoners with 0 gear and equipment as the Lizardman shaman was reading the ritual to sacrifice them to their god.
There's always having a mysterious "benefactor" getting them resurrected for their own purposes.
Manipulated in a matrix like fashion by mindflayers might be fun too. When they die they awake in the Underdark prisoners now that they are aware of the mindflayers experimentation on them they are freed left to wonder how much if any of their lives up till that point are real.
If they are a high enough level and on a "holy" quest it is usually within a deity's interest to have a powerful servant revived.
I was DMing in a game where we went with the "Dream" scenario. Honestly it was a redo because I told them that I wouldn't be building the world in a vacuum, one of the PC's challenged a big baddie and they all got slaughtered.
They woke up, dug a pit and filled it with flaming zombies and hilarity ensued in the new NPC interaction. Never regretted letting them have one do over.
I think the only thing worse than handling a tpk is an ALMOST tpk. Recently our group had a VERY bad day dealing with a witch who was manipulating us because somebody let the barbarian play face. We get to the meet to deliver the evil relic to her for "destruction" only to be met by a handful of summoned devils. One after the other the Devils continually rolled and confirmed critical hits against all but 2 members of the party, followed by the monk failing an easy save and becoming quickly dead. The problem we were left with was the 2 surviving party members( a dwarf ranger and an elf rogue) got pretty exclusive XP for killing 5 devils and a very lucky shot killing the witch before she could escape. We were both left with almost 2 levels worth of XP and a whole lot of loot that put us well ahead of the curve. Luckily it was a homebrew game so being ahead on levels wasn't a huge deal, and the extra loot was mostly invested into a "business" the pc's started as a group as a hideout.
Asta
PSY
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The problem we were left with was the 2 surviving party members( a dwarf ranger and an elf rogue) got pretty exclusive XP for killing 5 devils and a very lucky shot killing the witch before she could escape. We were both left with almost 2 levels worth of XP and a whole lot of loot that put us well ahead of the curve.
Which is why dead characters still get XP. They participated in the fight, they get XP. That way, when the character is revived, he's not 2 levels behind.
Usually I start a new campaign. It takes work, but i prefer that than having to flush all the party-npc relationships down the toilet and have a new party that has to pretend like it doesn't know the history of the current campaign.
I had a TPK in my current campaign when the first gaming group split up. I ended up resurrecting my wife's character and her cohort to continue the story with a new group...but it wasn't exactly a freebie. The divine intervention of saving her character from a demiplane that doesn't allow ANY planeshifting...yeah. The phane that was imprisoned on the demiplane was released and ended up completely destroying Evereska before the Chosen of Mystra were able to kill it. Not to mention that her character now has the backing of at least 3 deities who told her that if she fails her quest, the entire cosmology dies. No pressure though.
In short, deus ex machina, but make the costs incredibly high.
In Rise of the Runelords, we had a TPK during book 5.
We would have had two if these in Book 5 (which we just finished, book 6 starts soon!), and both where due to DM just not realizing that what he put us up against was over what any group comp could handle. Both times he fudged rolls or took away abilities from monsters to level the playing field and avoid the TPK. While i feel kind of cheated when DM does this (takes away the threat and you lose something), looking back I would be far more upset if the campaign had just ended. I agree with Bookkeeper, I put a lot into this campaign and wouldn't want it to end. Talk to the players, come to an agreement. And if its your fault, IE you put the group against something they didn't have the chance to beat, then let them off with minimal repercussions. If they died to sting of bad rolls or bad tactics then give them hefty repercussions.
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What's the best way to handle TPK? Pretend it didn't happen? Everyone makes a new character? Something else?
Thing is, with TPKs, they don't just happen by themselves. As a DM, you choose go through with them or not. If you don't want them to happen, don't kill the PCs. If they're all into negatives, once the last one of them goes unconciouss, end the session and think about how you're going to handle the situation.
Or, if the most of the part reall died during the fight, make a suggestion to the standing PCs that it might be a good idea to retreat, if they want to avoid a TPK. Yes, it's breaking the immersion, but it's a far better idea than ending the campaign or coming up with an unplausible idea of replacement PCs.
I’ve only had 2:
One on purpose for storyline reasons and End game with that group. The other happy accident. Here is how I handled the accident:
They were facing a Basilisk (regular CR 5) vs a group of level five adventures (A rogue, Cleric, Fighter and witch). One by one they got turned to stone (bad dice rolls) but legit got it down to 1 hp; because they got so close I had a random adventure come by and kill it/use blood to reverse it (after I had them roll a percentile roll to see if enough blood was left). None of the players and cheapened and as each one was revived the suspense of is there enough blood left still made it a game of chance. I chose to do it that way due to one player was missing that session and in my point was the better choice then having a new group of adventures align with his character (who was the team lead/face)
If only the meat is dead, the first order of business is securing a large supply of deodorant.
I avoid them like the plague as DM. Fortunately, I've never been in a situation (as a DM) where things have screwed up that badly that it's been a possbility. (And it's only happened to me a couple of times as a player - under the same DM, actually - in AD&D at low-level.)
That may partly be because we have always generally played with 6-8 character parties. One thing I noticed as a player during the time we were down to about three players for a while was how dramatically worse it was when someone went down. If one person goes down in a six-character group, it's either 17% of combat powwer for the combat or 33% for a round while someone gets them back up. In a three man party, its 33% and 67%. Things can get out of hand very quickly. With literally just more bodies around, it significantly ameliorates the impact of any bad luck. (Usually. If we're playing Rolemaster, our group can have Group Fumble down to a fine art...)
So I agree with Richard D Bennett and Slacker2010. I am a very prep-heavy DM (hand-in-hand with the large party thing), so if the campaign suddenly ended with a TPK at book 5 on RotRL (which we are actually about to start when I'm back DMing again), it would not be a case of just "well, new game next week," until very recently when we have had a new chap wanting to DM Starfinder, it would have been "whelp, that's it chaps, it's going to be weeks before I can prepare a new campaign." Since I cannot run off-the-cuff for more than short periods; the days when I could run a game with prep-time week to week are a good decade, maybe two, behind me.
I thus treat the PCs like I do the characters in a long-running TV series (and even then, sometimes the characters can outlast the players...!) Better to do some fudging behind the screen if absolutely necessary than to kill the campaign off (unless the potential TPK has resulted from PC willful stupidity as by the point it reaches there, the players have clearly stopped listening to the DM).
The point is, of course, to not let them players KNOW that DURING the session, on either count, at least in the moment. You should always try to present the image of cheerfully splattering them, and playing off fudging or whatever. After-session dissection is fine, but you should always try to make the players believe they could be splorched at any moment to maintain credible threat and make sure they don't fall into the trap of "ah, he won't kill us," because of course, so they start believng that, you kind of have to.
Crap,sorry, folks, I only just noticed now this was two fresh posts on a seven-year old thread before I posted, or I wouldn't have bothered. Guh. I normall catch that, but the perils, I guess of infrequently coming to Paizo's forums rather than my usual haunt (which is down for the count at the moment). Clearly my Pecerption check got a TPK...