A Question About Tension Die and Death in the Living Series

[bloxgate]

This might be a bit better suited for General Discussion or the feedback forum, but I figured I'd ask here first since it deals with the interaction between tension die and a living series episode.

I've been running the living campaign episodes for a small group. We recently ran the Birthplace side mission instead of a full episode after a player bailed on our session at the last minute. We've had a bit of a situation that I'm not 100% sure how to handle:

Spoiler

After reaching Father's lab, the party failed the convince encounter. According to the episode, Father would fight to the death as a result.

Soon enough all 3 of my players went down. According to the tension die level (D6) for this episode, combat is non-lethal by default for player characters so I just knocked them unconscious as it happened. However now that we've ended with all 3 players unconscious and the mission failed, I'm not sure if they should survive given the in-episode description of how the fight goes. Previous episodes have often had some sort of mention about players dying if captured non-lethally if that would apply while this doesn't, so I'm not sure what to do here. If it weren't for the whole living series thing I'd probably rule that they survived, but I'm not sure what the intended outcome for a failure is meant to be here.

Both myself and the players involved are all ok with a TPK, the dice roll what the dice roll, but we'd really like to be certain that a TPK is the intended outcome for failure here.

[Mhodus]

If I might suggest, given that the TD indicates non-lethal... Perhaps send in another Phoenix team of NPCs to save their bacon after they miss a check-in?

[TheEditor]

That would be the SG thing to do.  The team doesn't return, but they are found and brought back.