What do you do after a Total party kill?

[garhkal]

Assuming for what ever reason, all the characters die. Whether they just made bad choices, played baddly (stuck to a poor plan lets say), or the fates decreed it was their time (nearly every roll went bad for them)..

What do you do next?
Start a new game?
Start a new campaign with a different gm?
Continue the current one with new pcs??
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[ZzaphodD]

Never had a TPK actually. I think 50% lethality has been the maximum (and then not for SW but WFRP) at the same time. I tend to give players a brake, but not big enough for everyone to escape with their lives if they are not extremely lucky.
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[Bren]

The only TPK's I can recall are for one character parties. In that case the player just rolled up a new character and moved on, but I don't think single character TPK is really in the spirit of the question. For multiple character parties, TPK seems to me an acronym for failure of GM imagination.

[Riij Skootu]

[laztheinfamous]

Most of the TPKs I've had were in D&D and in situations where the PCs could have gotten themselves out of it if they had used their brains instead of their swords.

I've been involved in TPKs in Star Wars. I think that both of them happened the same way, everyone in one ship, and ship goes boom. Everyone dead. I think we all threw our pop bottles at the GM. I think after that we played some one-shots for awhile with different systems, and then eventually went back.

[Mythosaur]

Never had a total party kill as a player or a GM. Though I have seen online games that have GM's disappear which kills the game.

[Orgaloth]

Been in one TPK, but it was the first game and first fire fight of the campagne. We all rolled badly and were all killed by about the 3rd round of combat. We just redid the characters and started again.
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[Ankhanu]

We've had a couple TPKs in our time... what we do after really depends on the circumstances. Generally in my gaming groups there are multiple potential GMs, so we sometimes just start fresh with a whole new game... sometimes a whole new game system and setting. Sometimes we continue on with the story with new characters, if the GM has a really good story going and we're all THAT into it that we want to see it through to the end, despite the characters and some context changing. Other times, the GM continues on GMing, but in a new game.

It really depends on how everyone feels. We take a breather and discuss how satisfied we were with what had been going on and take the choice from there.
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[Praxian]

Sometimes we'll switch campaigns for a while, someone else will run a different game altogether. But when we get back to said game, very typically it's the same world (as all the characters have made some kind of impact, and players want to see that impact, even on different characters). So example, in my world-line of star wars, the PC's setup Onderon with an elite unit called the "Protectors of Onderon". While anyone was able to apply, only the Force Sensitives were selected and taught military tactics, strategies, and were literally trained in both martial aspects and force apsects.

Anyways, Players love to see the long-term effects of what their characters do, even if they're on new characters!

"Ok, the setting is 20 years later? I'm gonna play a child of my last character." (actually had two players do that with their chars)

[ZzaphodD]

Thought I was going to have one today... In the end only one character blew himself up (while thrown 60 m up in the air with TK) trying to take the enemy with him. Another character, our young girl airhead jedi, turned to the dark side and was taken by the Dark Sider they were fighting. Ah, we dont know what happened to one player who was Mortally wounded (but stabilized) and dropped 5 m over a wall. We will check if he survives at our next session when the player is around again. Finally, our other Jedi had his arm cut of and his led impaled by a lightsaber, but managed to TK himself away when no one was looking.....
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[Hellcat]

I've never had a total party kill. But I think it'd depend on the campaign I'm running as to what I'd do. If the campaign is pretty much open then I'd let the players make new characters and go from where things ended. Open meaning there may be a goal but there's no central mission so a whole new team could come in without being at a loss by not knowing what the TPK team knew. If the campaign is a mission oriented campaign then I'd probably thow it up to the players. Form a new team to follow the same mission, saying the previous team had made reports every so often with the last report having been an episode or so ago so that the new team has some idea of what was happening but anything learned since the last report they have absolutely no clue about. Or form a new team and start a whole new campaign with either the same GM or a new GM. Probably push more for a new campaign as it'd be less headache.
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