First time DM’ing with new players, party died first session, feel bad /u/KillaSama DnD: Roll for Initiative!

As the title says, I had a couple friends who wanted to play DND and never played it before so we just rolled with me being the DM, I only played one campaign myself and BG3 and watched a shit ton of videos on how to be a good DM so despite the lack of experience I know how its supposed to be run (or at least I think), we had a party of 5: a cleric, ranger, warlock, fighter and barbarian and I decided to play the Lost Mines of Phandelver, since that was the campaign that I played myself I wanted to run something I was familiar with.

Here occurs the first problem, my fighter and barbarian could not turn up but I decided to start it nonetheless since we were with more than half, I thought the party could handle it since you can finish the campaign with 4 players but they already died in the first encounter with the goblin ambush (which I didn’t expect at all) so I tried to salvage the situation by describing a horror scene where the bodies of the partymembers were gathered by the goblins and went through all kinds of horrible acts (a la typical goblin sadism, the players were fine with it as I know them personally) and that they suddenly woke up sitting around a campfire with a mystical being sitting in front of them and all of the goblins lying dead, the being was sent by the warlock’s patron (we talked about his background before the session a bit), I gave the partymembers no details but with RP they all acted confused and traumatized and the being just disappeared into thin air after welcoming the travelers to Faerun & telling them to investigate the goblin trails (which was the cue I left behind like that).

So the party goes through the trails, handled the traps, killed one of the goblins in Area 2 and after interrogating the other killed him as well (I made the goblin beg for mercy hoping that maybe they’d add him to the party but they were fueled by anger towards the goblin race already), as the party entered the cave they decided to enter the Kennel area and after fighting the wolves the 3 of them died again.

However they did not allow me to salvage the situation (I was thinking of the god of the cleric reviving him) simply because they thought they sucked a** and decided to make new characters and come to the area again with their new experience and we’re in the process of arranging a new session, and although they said they had fun and had good laughs I do feel pretty bad that they just died twice like that in their very first session as new players and in the very first encounters as well.

Did I handle this bad? What am I supposed to do in the future?

As the title says, I had a couple friends who wanted to play DND and never played it before so we just rolled with me being the DM, I only played one campaign myself and BG3 and watched a shit ton of videos on how to be a good DM so despite the lack of experience I know how its supposed to be run (or at least I think), we had a party of 5: a cleric, ranger, warlock, fighter and barbarian and I decided to play the Lost Mines of Phandelver, since that was the campaign that I played myself I wanted to run something I was familiar with.

Here occurs the first problem, my fighter and barbarian could not turn up but I decided to start it nonetheless since we were with more than half, I thought the party could handle it since you can finish the campaign with 4 players but they already died in the first encounter with the goblin ambush (which I didn’t expect at all) so I tried to salvage the situation by describing a horror scene where the bodies of the partymembers were gathered by the goblins and went through all kinds of horrible acts (a la typical goblin sadism, the players were fine with it as I know them personally) and that they suddenly woke up sitting around a campfire with a mystical being sitting in front of them and all of the goblins lying dead, the being was sent by the warlock’s patron (we talked about his background before the session a bit), I gave the partymembers no details but with RP they all acted confused and traumatized and the being just disappeared into thin air after welcoming the travelers to Faerun & telling them to investigate the goblin trails (which was the cue I left behind like that).

So the party goes through the trails, handled the traps, killed one of the goblins in Area 2 and after interrogating the other killed him as well (I made the goblin beg for mercy hoping that maybe they’d add him to the party but they were fueled by anger towards the goblin race already), as the party entered the cave they decided to enter the Kennel area and after fighting the wolves the 3 of them died again.

However they did not allow me to salvage the situation (I was thinking of the god of the cleric reviving him) simply because they thought they sucked a** and decided to make new characters and come to the area again with their new experience and we’re in the process of arranging a new session, and although they said they had fun and had good laughs I do feel pretty bad that they just died twice like that in their very first session as new players and in the very first encounters as well.

Did I handle this bad? What am I supposed to do in the future?