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The last time I used traps was in a kobold lair full of pit traps. I draw my own maps ahead of time so I was able to make a load of obvious visual cues that a square had been tampered with like a rotated section of an emblem or errors in a chessboard pattern. The boss encounter of that area was in a chamber full of pit traps and against an ogre that liked to use charge attacks, which rewarded players that used smart positioning. Unless I can come up with something similar that players can turn to their advantage I tend not to use traps.
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Jul 30, 2017 13:01
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Bubblyblubber posted:For a second there I was worried we'd gotten ourselves stuck into some sex-weirdo gently caress dungeon. don't speak too soon. this isn't the kind of "shag carpeting" you're expecting 
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Jul 30, 2017 13:52
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There's a fun 1st level Pathfinder module, that I think was/is free, that made fun use of traps. I might be misremembering some bits but the premise is the town elders send a group of their young prospective adventures into a "dangerous dungeon" to retrieve the sacred flame for their spring festival. What they don't tell the group is that the elders have gone in and reset the "safety traps" and added some "treasures" to help them out. There are pit traps with pillows in the bottom, so PCs can fall in but they take little or no damage. There's an arrow trap with blunted arrows. Stuff like that. It ended up being a great starting point for a campaign since I got the group together and had them build a party of kids who had pretty much grown up together, so they came up with a nice group dynamic from the start. The details of the town didn't really matter, so we built it together.
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Jul 30, 2017 21:19
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I think the distinction to make is that traps can be interesting, but checking for traps is boring, so you should always design traps so that the challenge is not "Do you spot the trap?" but either "How do you get past the trap without setting it off?" or "How do you escape the effects of the trap now that you've set it off?" The first is a thing that only the Rogue can contribute to, whereas with the others the whole party can get involved.
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Jul 31, 2017 01:23
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Whybird posted:I think the distinction to make is that traps can be interesting, but checking for traps is boring, so you should always design traps so that the challenge is not "Do you spot the trap?" but either "How do you get past the trap without setting it off?" or "How do you escape the effects of the trap now that you've set it off?" The first is a thing that only the Rogue can contribute to, whereas with the others the whole party can get involved. Completely agreed. It's almost to the point where you want the group to always spot the trap, and then the game is talking through how to avoid it or mitigate its effects. (with the usual caveat that even that isn't necessarily everyone's cup of tea)
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Jul 31, 2017 01:27
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eyes of the stone thief has great traps. there is one that is giant, obvious saw blades coming out of slots in the wall. you can duck them or jump them easily enough, but halfway down the corridor is a trigger that pushes the floor up into the path of one of the blades
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Jul 31, 2017 01:59
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So Paranoia is XP or 25th Anniversary, the latter of which is actually three books, of which it sounds like Troubleshooters is the most like XP, and is apparently the one I want, yeah? Is it really a hundred bucks, or am I just bad at internet? I don't mind, I just want to be sure I'm dropping all that dosh on the right thing. At that price point, I presume one book will suffice for an entire table?
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Jul 31, 2017 20:18
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:don't speak too soon. this isn't the kind of "shag carpeting" you're expecting All my boners are by GM fiat Which is to say, largely unnecessary, usually disappointing and inherently unfair.
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Jul 31, 2017 20:59
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I am getting a little in over my head with this idea and was hoping for some help. One of my players is a paladin of the goddess, Artemis and her mission is to find and ascend Mount Olympis. I have hinted at a dungeon or set of trials that will reveal the secret location of Mount Olympus, and she wants to start taking on the trials. So I am looking to build a dungeon with Greek-themed tasks, traps and enemies. It may also be a dungeon that cannot be completed on one visit...was thinking of it as a thing to return to between other big quests (gets much harder as it goes on, divided by floors like in Diablo?) The one solid idea I have is the classic Labrynth complete with a minotaur.
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Jul 31, 2017 23:00
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Tir McDohl posted:I am getting a little in over my head with this idea and was hoping for some help. 12 Labors of Hercules would be decent to crib from.
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Jul 31, 2017 23:12
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When they first start to climb the mountain have them encounter a young expectant mother journeying to a shrine to receive a blessing for her child to be. The paladin needs to protect her on the journey. If you feel like you and the player are up to it, have her act as a midwife at the birth, since Artimis' earliest act was to aid her mother in giving birth to her twin, Apollo. You should also have some kind of hunting/archery challenge. Make the target a the boar that killed Adonis. Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 23:19
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Keeshhound posted:When they first start to climb the mountain have them encounter a young expectant mother journeying to a shrine to receive a blessing for her child to be. The paladin needs to protect her on the journey.
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Jul 31, 2017 23:24
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Skwirl posted:12 Labors of Hercules would be decent to crib from. I wouldn't; Artemis has plenty of her own mythology to draw on without having to copy off of an angry drunk's work. Some other elements to include would be her six wishes, the scorpion that killed Orion, and her role in the Trojan war. Yawgmoth posted:Then in true escort quest fashion, have her wander directly into packs of monsters and loop around random buckets and the like. She also talks incessantly about how you need to hurry while walking at a pace that could be described as "drunk, tired, and possibly lost." Why would that have any relevance in a tabletop game? 
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Jul 31, 2017 23:42
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Keeshhound posted:Why would that have any relevance in a tabletop game? jōk noun: joke; plural noun: jokes 1. a thing that someone says to cause amusement or laughter.
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Jul 31, 2017 23:49
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wrong forum for that, buddy
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Aug 1, 2017 00:08
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Yawgmoth posted:joke I'm glad your experiences with GMs have left you viewing that suggestion as a laughable absurdity; I've known idiots who would've done it unironically.
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Aug 1, 2017 02:12
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Thanks Skwirl and Keeshhound. I got some ideas...now to do a lot of reading 
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Aug 1, 2017 04:26
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"You find the wonderful warrior woman she begs for your wayward souls to assist her to the well." "uh fine I guess." *start laughing maniacally as I pull out my 1d1000 and chart of random encounters.*
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Aug 1, 2017 04:36
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Tir McDohl posted:Thanks Skwirl and Keeshhound. I got some ideas...now to do a lot of reading You could also set up the quest/dungeon to take place in the dreams of the Paladin - that way you can completely control how far the Paladin gets in the 'dungeon' and it will never detract from the party's main plot.
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Aug 1, 2017 05:06
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how do the other players take part control their dream selves? great, but there's no development for them there
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Aug 1, 2017 21:38
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The mountain isn't a physical location you travel to -- it's a place you keep finding yourself. Every so often, when the party are climbing something -- be it a cliff, a tower, a wall, or just going up a flight of stairs -- they'll suddenly find that the thing they're climbing is much, much bigger than it should be and that there are weird mythological Artemis-flavoured trials in their way. Once they defeat whatever was guarding the stairs up to the bedroom of the inn they were staying, they get to the top and look back and see it's just a regular old flight of stairs after all.
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Aug 1, 2017 23:29
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Keeshhound posted:I'm glad your experiences with GMs have left you viewing that suggestion as a laughable absurdity; I've known idiots who would've done it unironically. The goat escort quest was one of my favorite dumb jokes in the Witcher 3. I need some help tuning an idea for a campaign I'm working on, if I could be so bold as to ask for some assistance. I'll be DMing a game for friends and co-workers, and would like to try dungeon world. The idea is that everyone starts off already dead. A friendly novice necromancer has raised the party (and dug them up himself, he can't afford an Igor yet with all of his necro student loans). This could be a way to show the lethality of the world, he can just raise them again if they die. There will also be some entirely new players, so I don't have to worry about going easy At First. So they do bonds etc, get their characters, and also get to say how they died, and what the Other Side looks like. The last breath move really intrigues me, and this seems like a good way to start the players thinking and contributing to the world. The plot will start with them having slowly awoken as revanants or spirits, maybe they get a cool undead move. The necromancer gets targeted by a holy order, and vanquished, leaving the player characters high and dry, on the run from holy avenging monks/paladins/clerics, who they [probably] don't want to kill. How would you feel if this got sprung on you as a player, that your character is already [mostly] dead? Should I bring it up beforehand? Too morbid for a first time player? The idea is they can have their first adventure be how to rejoin the living [if they don't like being dead], or what I hope is they want to stay dead anyway and move on from there. Any ideas for plot points or hooks? Am I missing anything important?
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Aug 2, 2017 06:11
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My advice with DW is to plan nothing, and after character creation take a 15 minute break to figure out how to start from the prompts that emerge.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:17
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I would advise letting them know about the whole "you all wake up dead" thing before hand, but other than that, yeah, for dungeon world, no more than 15 minutes ahead, and probably less than five. This ain't chess.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:41
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Don't plan the whole thing out, but don't plan nothing, especially if it's newer players. It's "draw maps, leave blanks", not "don't draw maps". I'd have no problem with "you wake up dead", but instead of "what killed you?" introduce the baddies with (for example) "last thing you remember they were beating you down..." and ask some leading questions about why they [i/]beat the PC to death[/i] instead of just beating them up a bit. I hate starting with effectively "so what's your story" because a lot of people panic when you throw a huge blank slate in front of htem and tell them to fill it in. My most successful DW game opened on a fight that was already in progress, and for each character I did some fight stuff and then a leading class-appropriate question like "...why are these guys so pissed off at you anyway, it's not like you took anything important or expensive, right?" or "...so are these guys the cultists you were looking for, or did you get mixed up in something else?" or whatever.
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Aug 2, 2017 07:19
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Okay, so running Legend of the Five Rings 4e and everything peachy except for one or two things: the party is far from proactive, so there are major pauses where the party just decide what to do, and I seem to suck at running mysteries. Any advice on these issues would be appreciated. And yes, I have tried talking to them about the proactivity problem.
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Aug 2, 2017 14:40
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Terratina posted:Okay, so running Legend of the Five Rings 4e and everything peachy except for one or two things: the party is far from proactive, so there are major pauses where the party just decide what to do, and I seem to suck at running mysteries. Any advice on these issues would be appreciated. Well if you're bad at running mysteries then..don't L5r is pretty good for this as deductive reasoning just isn't a thing in setting. let whatever mystery there is get solved easily and then make the fallout of that be the main crux of the situation.
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Aug 2, 2017 16:17
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The best way to spur players to action is to present them with a situation that they cannot ignore. There are lots of ways to do this, but one of the things that helps is to have NPCs to which the PCs have a connection. Placing the PCs within a well-developed social system pays huge dividends down the road, so do this if at all possible. If your party are stereotypical murder-hobos who form no personal connections, this is going to be harder to do - so the next best thing is to threaten their stuff. And ultimately, threaten their identity; nothing will motivate your Mage faster than something that looks like it's going to destroy magic in the world. Another thing that helps is to make it clear that whatever forces are at work will continue to be at work if the PCs do nothing. Apocalypse World (and many of its derivatives) has a nice mechanic for this in its "countdown" system; the GM defines some pre-determined list of steps through which the threat will proceed if the PCs do nothing. They can throw a shoe in the gears at any time (which will cause the GM to alter/reset/modify the countdown for the existing threat or create a new threat - and a new countdown - entirely), but inaction generally causes bad poo poo to happen. The trick is in communicating the changing situation to players in a meaningful way, to convince them that if they dither or idle that the situation will worsen for them. Finally, on the topic of mysteries, the key is to be extremely loose in letting PCs determine how they will approach it. Probably the worst thing you can do is come up with N key clues before hand and wait for the PCs to find them (and interpret them correctly). It's much better to look at what the PCs are doing and find a way on the fly to give them useful information. That way, they can feel clever without having to stumble across whatever thing you think is totally obvious but that they keep missing.
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Aug 2, 2017 16:26
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ZorajitZorajit posted:Again, I'm less concerned about "usin' big words" than I am about the disconnect in education levels. I'm aware that I'm being an rear end in a top hat when I write like Mieville just for the sake of doing it. She's a good player who deserves a better GM, who can keep their intellect out of their rear end.  Point her my way, our poor stupid non-college-educated ladybrains should be on the same level.If this seems hostile, I hope you see my point! Since you've already called yourself an rear end in a top hat, apparently you do. So do something about it. (What exactly does a word-a-day calendar have to do with education levels, anyway?) Snark aside, good writing is about good communication, and not jarring people out of the story to figure something out. If you MUST use a little-known big word, like the writing thing I don't feel like looking up again, then immediately explain what it means in context, because making that a setting detail is pretty neat...if you don't expect everyone at the table to be a very specific linguistics expert, or just happen to have the same calendar. Not knowing "lying prostrate" is a little odd, but not odd enough to look down your drat nose at her. In other words, cease your floccinaucinihilipilification of her intellect anon.
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Aug 2, 2017 19:05
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Echo Cian posted:She's a good player who deserves a better GM, who can keep their intellect out of their rear end. The word of the day calendar is my favorite parts. Me and my friend who's also on the forums have been laughing about it for like a week.
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Aug 2, 2017 19:06
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Thanks for the tips everyone, and thanks for the cool thread too. I think I'm just overthinking it as it's been a while since I've DMed, and this will be for mostly new people. But I should be ok, we all have similar edumacation levels.
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Aug 2, 2017 20:56
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Terratina posted:Okay, so running Legend of the Five Rings 4e and everything peachy except for one or two things: the party is far from proactive, so there are major pauses where the party just decide what to do, and I seem to suck at running mysteries. Any advice on these issues would be appreciated. In my own experience, L5R has built-in setting tools that help you easily address these issues. PCs not proactive? Have their respective daimyo/magistrate/high-ranking-whatever order them around. There's a very strictly-defined social hierarchy to explore. Could it be that your players are leery of stepping on the wrong toes? If so, being ordered to do so by their superiors may help. It may be worthwhile to play straight Clan stereotypes to get them going - stuff like having the Crane engage in social situations to secure favor or the Scorpion having to find dirt on that one courtier's yojimbo and so forth. Add conflicting goals when appropriate if desired. As far as L5R is concerned, I say don't be afraid to railroad until your players are more proactive and the training wheels can come off. As far as mysteries, remember that unless there's one of them weird Kitsuki around using that strange "evidence-based deductive reasoning" thing, all investigation is handled via testimony. Any physical evidence is circumstantial at best and if that Status 7.5 dude is saying something that contradicts what the other 15 Status 2.5 schmucks are saying, guess what, Status 7.5 dude is correct unless you find someone with higher Status to trump his testimony. Like Elfgames said, make the investigation secondary to dealing with the crap that comes from it or even what to do with the information you've gathered (do your players use it as blackmail? do they frame someone of no consequence as a favor to be called in at a later date? do they stick their necks out and try to call out a higher-ranking samurai? if so, are they ready to face a champion in a iaijutsu duel?) Hope that helps.
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Aug 2, 2017 22:47
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I've been out of the dungeon making game for a while. What do people use for creating dungeons nowadays? Something with a grid that I could print out if needed.
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Aug 3, 2017 02:53
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Savidudeosoo posted:The word of the day calendar is my favorite parts. Me and my friend who's also on the forums have been laughing about it for like a week. Yeah I shared that post in my discord and it's making rounds here as well, because lmao.
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Aug 3, 2017 03:03
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Admiral Joeslop posted:I've been out of the dungeon making game for a while. What do people use for creating dungeons nowadays? Something with a grid that I could print out if needed. I've been using dungeon painter studio. It's pretty easy to use and I'm getting some nice results.
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Aug 3, 2017 03:52
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8one6 posted:I've been using dungeon painter studio. It's pretty easy to use and I'm getting some nice results. $15 on Steam sounds reasonable. quote:One click D20 random generator dungeons import This I like as well. I much prefer finding something I like and modifying it than making it from scratch. How many tilesets and objects are there?
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Aug 3, 2017 04:01
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Admiral Joeslop posted:$15 on Steam sounds reasonable. It comes with a couple, but it has workshop support and there are a good selection of nice sized collections alread.
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Aug 3, 2017 04:06
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Usually, I've found it's a lot easier to start a campaign and have the group work together when we start with everyone already knowing each other, being an established group of some kind, that sort of thing. What are some successful ways to instead have everyone's characters meet during the first session for the first time? Obviously there's the "you're all in a bar, someone has a job that needs X number of adventurers, you all take the job and work together" approach, but I'm also looking for other ideas. For example, I love the opening to Wild ARMs 3, which has all four player characters just collide with each other in a train car, each there looking for the same treasure, they all point their guns at each other and then you pick whose "how we got here" story to play first. Obviously the flashback, play-each-person's-solo-story thing won't work in a tabletop game, but I love the idea of everyone meeting as part of a Mexican stand-off and somehow teaming up. Step 1 is definitely to get buy-in from all the players that they'll find some way to make their characters work together from the meet-up onwards, but I'm curious what other things can be done to make something like that go smoothly.
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Aug 4, 2017 15:07
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Harrow posted:Usually, I've found it's a lot easier to start a campaign and have the group work together when we start with everyone already knowing each other, being an established group of some kind, that sort of thing. In the first game I ever ran I had the players all make characters who were prisoners compelled into mercenary work. I had them all come up with their crime (which they didn't have to be guilty of) and then threw them all together in essentially an armed chain gang to solve a spate of robot disappearances. Another time I had them all start as passengers on an airship headed for a port city that was taken down by sabotage in the middle of a giant haunted forest. They had to work together to survive and find the culprit among them and then just stuck together.
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Aug 4, 2017 15:14
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Admiral Joeslop posted:$15 on Steam sounds reasonable.
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Aug 4, 2017 15:25
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