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So. It happened. The party wandered a bit too far into the Abyss, and it spat out some nasty demon who smacked them into vague, red, party-shaped smears. Sorry about that. The good thing about playingDungeons & Dragonsis that the deaths of player characters can’t quite stop you from playing, whether you’re using homebrew or one of the many Wizards of the Coast-sanctioned realms.
So, where do you go from here? You’ve spent anywhere from thirty minutes to hours a week preparing for this campaign, but now the players are character-less. This means you are potentially player-less temporarily. But don’t panic! Here’s how to handle the worst: the Total Party Kill.
Have A Debrief
The first thing you should do is take a breath, metaphorically. Take a moment to laugh hysterically, cry, and regroup. Chances are, your players will be fumbling about what to do next, soit’s important, even in campaigns that rely primarily on fun, to sit and take a moment to decompress.
Even if the characters were jokes, suddenly having them ripped from you can be emotionally difficult.Giving your players some time to process the change and recover from the scene’s intensitywill let them take the distance they need to make the next part easier.
Open up the table for discussion onwhat to do next.This is the time to ask them what to do next. Let your players guide you through how they’re feeling about the game and their characters.
No matter what you, as the Dungeon Master, want to do, your players are the ones who are running through the world you’ve set up!Let them all decide on how to proceed, and thentell them what you’re thinkingin return.
As fun as it is to have secrets,it’s far better to have communication. You wouldn’t want to continue the game if the players were happy with the way it ended, after all.
Send Them Off Properly
Assuming everyone is fine with it, considerwriting or improvising a death scene.Narrating anendingfor the players can bea good step toward closing that chapter of the campaign.Perhaps you can even ask your players tonarrate their endings themselves,giving them one last moment to roleplay their characters.
One interesting way to handle player death is toreflavor unconsciousness.When a player drops to zero hit points, you can instead implement the idea of the character beingawake, but incapacitated.As dark as it is, this allows the player to have a moment where they can perhaps utter a prayer to a god or spit in the face of their enemy before going out.
Last Actions
Giving your player characters' last wordsis one of the best ways toensure the character has a memorable death.It provides some measure of closure for the players and can shift the mood of the session from devastating to bittersweet.
Another idea is to give themone last action.The character is going to die no matter what,but the player can decide to do one last thing before going out, barring healing or revival.
This makes the character’s death more cinematic and is all around a better goodbye than watching them die unceremoniously. Unless, of course, they want to go unceremoniously.
Continuing With The Party
Some D&D groups just aren’t ready to let go. Whether they were a bunch of level ones who fell to a particularly hardy goblin or level twelve mercenaries who died in a horrible blaze of glory, some parties agree that the best thing to do is to keep playing their characters. This is a common reaction,especially in the middle of shorter campaigns where players are invested in the characters.
It may feel like pulling a punch, but if it works for your table, it works!A defeat isn’t always a kill.Here are a couple of ideas to get your party out of the jaws of death, besides spontaneously combusting the Big Bad.
Continue Into The Afterlife
Perhaps your party is taken to acircle of Hellor into thecleric’s god’s domainin the afterlife. From here, the story can continue without many problems, except that the setting has shifted, and the character may be dealing with the repercussions of dying.
Perhaps the gods aren’t done with them yet, and the players need to return to their bodies in the material plane.
Capture Them
The Big Bad may have a facsimile of mercy in them, and theymay take the characters prisonerrather than outright kill them. You can always have a post-combat reveal that they were using non-lethal damage and that the characters awaken in prison cells.
The objective can quickly shift into the players trying tofigure out how to get their characters out of imprisonment,which can let you set upa dungeon crawl.
Divine Intervention
Gods or various warlock patrons mayintervene on the characters' behalffor their own inscrutable means. This can also tie your party even further together by giving thema group patron, of sorts.
Create New Characters
There’s a joke in the community about Dungeon Masters reaching out to players amid their planning with the ominous phrase: “Hey, you’ve made abackup character, right?” There’s another joke about a character who dies miraculously getting a brother with the same statblock as the fallen character.
As funny as these are, they’re also no joke.Backup characters are the best way to go after a TPK.They allow the players tokeep going through the story, but with different perspectives.
Sometimes a TPK is what you needto shake up a campaign, and if the players are ready, it’s time to throw them back into character creation.
The great thing about making new characters is that you get to approach thesame problems with different skill sets.you may also get an entirely new story, which can beexcitingandtake the sting out of losing the old party.
Keeping the new characters at the same level as the fallen characters may be useful. You don’t want to punish your players for being willing to move on.
Some Dungeon Masters may even incorporatea small time skipto show the effect the party’s loss has had on the world or to give the characters clean slates. If the previous party died in aparticularly important battle,you can let this concept shine.
How might the world have changed in the face of a villain’s triumph? What does the landscape and the politics of the world look like? Is the villain continuing their crusade? And perhaps, most importantly, who will stop them?
