“They’re dead! They’re all dead!”
-Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible

The fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released last month, and being so far from home Nadia and I had no one to play with. After a few weeks of searching, we came across a new campaign starting up via meetup.com. The DM running the game lives 35 miles from us!

Our first session was two weeks ago. Nadia is playing a halfling rogue and I’m playing a human wizard. The party is rounded out by the DM’s wife, playing a elf ranger and another meetup.com member playing a eladrin cleric. Below is the result of our very first rolls of 4th Edition:

For the uninitiated, 1s are bad rolls. The higher, the better.

This latest edition inspires an adventuring group to keep pushing themselves. Instead of resting after every other encounter to regain health and spells, 4e is set up so that even beginning adventurers can engage multiple groups of enemies before resting for the day. After slaughtering two very large groups of kobolds (small reptilian humanoids), we decided to venture into their lair. We figured that we had enough resources to continue the fight, which was true, but we didn’t realize that we were about to run out of luck.

Another nine kobolds fell at our feet after being punctured by a hail of arrows and bolts from our strikers. There were only two more enemies left: one kobold with a shield and a goblin with a battle axe. There was no way we could lose.

A TPK is a Total Party Kill. These typically occur when the party makes very poor tatical decisions, or when the players run out of luck and their dice work against them. In our case, roll after roll after roll came up low. I rolled eight single-digit numbers in a row! In a few short rounds, my three adventuring buddies lay dead (or near dying, as it is in 4e) and my wizard stood facing the last two monsters with only 1 hit point.

While this was a TPK, our DM was merciful and allowed me to run out of turn. This means that I will return later and drag my companions away so we can heal up and try again another day.

This is the first time I’ve ever been in a game where the party was totally wiped out like that, and it reminded me of the quote that I opened this post with. At our next session in two weeks, we’ll have better strategies in mind and (hopefully) a replenished font of luck to draw from.