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Bam, TPK

After making their way to the Keep on the Borderlands in preperation for hitting the Caves of Chaos my Party of 5 had hit 2nd level.

They roamed around the keep and hired an additional 1st level cleric to bolster their party. The dwarven fighter and barbarian then got into a fight with a pair of racist men-at-arms and asked to leave the keep.

Displaying some staggering stupidity the party decided to push on to the Caves and camp nearby. I'd spent the better part of an hour having every NPC tell them how dangerous it was, they'd already heard tale of goblins, hobgoblins, ogres and one entirely ficticous tale of a dragon inhabiting the area.

During the night they were dicovered by an Orc scout, those on watch overheard its approach but it fled when they moved to investigate. They didn't investigate any further once it ran off and assumed it was an animal, they did mention the incident when awakening the next shift.

The scout returned with 8 of its friends for what I thought would be a moderately challenging encounter. They got the drop on the watch and shot the 2 players and the npc on watch in the suprise round felling the NPC. 

The wizard's Thunderwave slew two outright, bloodied a third and awoke the rest of the party. 3 Orcs discarded their shortbows and entered melee with the awakening party members one scoring a critical and bloodying the dwarven fighter. The mage was dropped by an avenging orc with bleeding ears.

The players made a poor accounting of themselves, the martial characters rolling an unfortunate string of misses  aside from the Rogue who slew an orc outright and Displayed his Deadliness putting the two remaining melee orcs at disadvantage. The priest channeled radiance, wounding another trio of orcs and drawing them into melee.

The priest was introduced to 3 crudely crafted orc axes and fell, after unleashing a lance of faith and dropping an attacker, the orcs at disadvantage flailed around in melee while the mage slayer sunk an axe into the barbarian's back.

The martial players dropped only a single orc in their melee with another string of awful rolls, 3 d20s were thrown out of the room in disgust by various players.

With 4 wounded orcs vs 3 wounded players things were looking up, then the rogue and the barbarian were dropped with 4 well-placed axe blows. The warrior felled another orc but missed his cleave and was brought down by the two remaining.

I read all these tales of player wandering through combats without a scratch and that player damage is too high or hit ratios are too consistent but I've yet to have a combat where I've not dropped at least one of the players and none of my combats have used my full XP budget.

Where they hit they burned them for damage to try to drop the orcs, the fighter was parrying when he missed in the round though.

Only one of my players was a fighter with access to Parry which he used successfully once or twice I'm not sure that would of managed to lead to him surviving more than an additional round. Although that could have been enough to change the tide of the combat.

Well, it sort of begs the question as to what is supposed to be considered a legitimate party kill, assuming parties are to ever TPK? If not this sort of situation, then what situation should set off a TPK and be considered a 'yep, that's how it goes' situation?

Sure they had a chance. They could have run away. That option seems to have disappeared in the minds of many as a viable choice. This version will change their thinking quickly. Besides, the DM told them repeatidly that the caves were dangerous. You don't camp in front of the enemy gates.