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What is it with players and doors? My players found a stone trap door. In the area they found several torques hidden under big rocks. The stone trapdoor has two divots in the top that lined up the the ends of any/all of the torques. What do the players do? Shoot eldritch blast at it. Which triggers a magical defense that I gave it so they wouldn't just hammer through the stone and the warlock is zapped off his feet. Next, they bury it and ignore it for several sessions. When they finally come back to it, they investigate it to with in an inch of its life and find that it is a) magical b) made of stone c) can be safely touched in a non-violent manner d) has a beveled edge on one side suggesting a hinge e) has two divots on the top (which they already knew). With this new intel the Goliath seeks to lift the trap door straight up. Middling roles and the fact I don't want to have the door open that way results in failure. The best thing to do is get the dwarf to help, right? More mediocre roles and the door continues to refuse to be lifted. In the face of this failure the artificer states her intent to excavate the stone around the door and begins to craft tools that will facilitate this. (The player is an engineer, so fair play to him, but still...its a door, just open it!) I put my thumb on the scale and ask the dwarf to roll wisdom to have the flash of inspiration that the torques they unearthed (many real world weeks ago) would line up nicely with the divots. This revelation is met with deep suspicion. Dear players, if I wanted to make the earth explode beneath your feet and kill you all, I don't need you to do the thing I just suggested. I can just straight up explode you on a whim.  Eventually the dwarf musters up the courage to place a torque in the obvious divots. The edge opposite the "hinge" raises up a little. Pearls are clutched and breaths are held. Nothing happens. A glowing coin is tossed in and quickly the light disappears. The adventurers listen really hard at the hole. The edge of a hole can be seen, but nobody will touch this now unlocked door. The dwarf being suspicious removes the torque and the door closes. Applies another torque and the stone raises slightly. Remove, close. Apply new torque, open. Eventually a long stick and a rock are deployed as a lever and the door pivots up offering zero resistance. The dwarf feels more testing is needed and removes the torque. The door snaps shut which bashes the goliath in the face with the lever . Torque+rock=open yet again. The fact the stone moved with zero resistance is overlooked and a new lever is constructed. Finally they take a proper look and see a rough hewn hole in the stone that the door was sitting on, the hole is very much like a well. Forty-ish feet down they see a glowing coin. A flutter of excitement, until they remember they tossed it down there. A successful rappelling later and they have entered the dungeon that had a big obvious door on it, with a fairly obvious "lock" on it that they had the key for a brisk 20 minutes after they decided to go in. These are all experienced players. They have all run many games in the past, yet this door held them up like few things have in this adventure. Seriously, what is it with players and doors? VOX MACHINA vs DOORS 
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Apr 13, 2023 16:03
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I mean, there was no indication to them that putting the torques (unless I'm misunderstanding what a torque is?) into the slots would open it up other than the video game logic "this is a door so it must have a key nearby" But also, if the experience of watching them fail was frustrating to you, you did have the means to end it by having one of their attempts to get in that wasn't the specific thing you had in mind be a success-at-a-cost rather than a nothing-happens. Let the warlock's eldritch-blasting or the Goliath's lifting or the artificer's digging get them through the door but set off some sort of magical defender and you can all go on with your lives instead of staring at a door for several hours.
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Apr 13, 2023 16:41
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I had a DM who got super mad because we couldn't solve his totally obvious door puzzle. You see, there were a bunch of labeled lockers in the room with the nonmagical locked door. I opened a few lockers at random, and after I get to about 10 the room collapses on us and everyone died. Uhh, okay? But wait, it's a time loop, we're back at the start of the day. We go back and open some different lockers, same thing happens. We say gently caress it and do something else, eventually being straight up told we need to get past that door. We ask around town about it, no one knows how long it's been there or who made it. While the other guys go look for clues my wizard goes to the local church and starts looking up the death dates of the townsfolk, I did pass a check to let me know the door was about 50 years old, maybe something important happened 50ish years ago and that's tied into it? I have no clue, and time resets 5ish? hours no mater what we do. We run out of ideas after the 6th reset so I start sending summoned creatures to try opening the doors in every conceivable order to brute force it, and every time they fail the world resets. At this point the DM is just fuming and tells us that the way to get the door open was just to look at the last names on all then lockers, at which point we should have noticed that they begin with almost every letter of the alphabet (some were worn away by time and are illegible) so all we had to do was open and close the lockers so it spells 'password'. He also told us a bunch of the clues were red herrings and most of the poo poo we did would have never helped us, though we could have also used speak with dead (incorrectly) to summon the spirit of a 300 year dead dwarf who made it, but we failed a persuasion check on the only PC who could have given us the info on him, so we should have just tried talker to her every reset until she liked us. It was just so painfully obvious... That convinced me to leave puzzles and poo poo out of my games.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:29
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I once had a puzzle involving a 6x6 grid of buttons on the wall with symbols, some relating to gods, some to magic, some that were meaningless. The players could get information from books about a path through the symbols to find the right one, investigate them using checks to determine the correct one (I think it was a temple they were in? This was a long time ago), disabling them with tools, some other stuff too. Wrong buttons would activate traps, summon monsters, etc. Enough buttons that you really don't want to press things wildly. One player goes "What's on the third row, fifth column?", pulling numbers out of the air. I describe it, and ask them if they want to do a check. They look, realize their skills are poo poo, and shrug then say "Nah I'll just push it." It's the correct button. I don't do complex puzzles anymore.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:33
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In fairness I could see my own "this is a trap" sensors going off if a magically sealed door which requires two magical devices (wtf is a torque by the way? I assumed you meant hinge but then "hinge" ended up in inverted commas) to open just happened to be hidden under rocks in the area. What sort of person constructs a magical trapdoor with a permanent magical trap and then hides the actual key under a nearby rock like it's an AirBnB? If this was built by some ancient high precursor civilisation the key would be buried deeper than just being under a rock, and if instead it was built by some powerful spellcaster, surely they'd just take the keys with them or hide them in a demiplane or something. In my experience there's a few ways to get around this. The easiest (but also hardest) is to get a player who deliberately triggers traps for fun. As soon as you have one of these doors cease instantly to be a problem because every door gets opened almost immediately. The other way is to make it clear when something isn't dangerous. I kind of detect an undercurrent where the descriptions you're giving are very literal, and it can be hard for players to directly picture what their characters are seeing with completely literal descriptions. I'm getting that from: quote:Forty-ish feet down they see a glowing coin. A flutter of excitement, until they remember they tossed it down there. Again personally as a player, my "this is a trap/ambush" instincts go into overdrive the second I detect a DM going into "exactly literal descriptions mode".
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Apr 13, 2023 17:38
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Whybird posted:I mean, there was no indication to them that putting the torques (unless I'm misunderstanding what a torque is?) into the slots would open it up other than the video game logic "this is a door so it must have a key nearby" That is a mostly reasonable reply. It was 20 or fewer minutes, not "several hours". I wasn't frustrated, it just amused me. The actual unlocking wasn't too bad, but the investigating, testing and prodding took the bulk of the time. The trouble with the magical defender you propose is it would be what they expected and that isn't what I wanted. The tension of the unknown is the point, so having the dungeon go full red-alert is the opposite of what I want. There is no way you could know that, so I am not trying blasting you about it, I'm just fleshing out why I went the route I did. Could they have kicked down the door and been presented with a silent dungeon? Sure. But occasionally I would like to see folks figure out problem and not "solve" everything by tossing a fireball at it. I foolishly assumed leaving items around the door might inspire them to think that they might do something more than just exist since they had zero cash value. I had hoped video game logic would kick in, but that is on me. I felt it was fairly obvious without resorting to using a big brass key that had a label that said "For use on stone trap door". But I am learning that D&D seems to have trained people rely on the game to spotlight and over explain things to them. The artificer is a bit miffed that "Identify" told them about what an item does, but not how to recharge it as I find the "items recharge at dawn because that is how recharging works for all items everywhere" dull. (And apparently I am not completely alone in this). Rather than read the inscription on the item and then try to puzzle out the child's riddle that will reveal how to recharge the item they have just given up before even looking at it, so they have a magical item that doesn't work. Maybe I am a lovely DM, but it is my first time running the game. I guess it's on me for wanting some engagement and not giving players the Haynes Manual on the item just because they had a nap while holding it.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:44
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I really hate using puzzles. They break verisimilitude and can be frustrating for both GM and player when nobody can figure it out. I only ever tried adding a puzzle once in my game and it was a (well, in my opinion) pretty simple riddle to guess the password for a door. They had a character's journal where they had written down the previous passwords, which were "dewclaw" and "foreclaw", and the answer was "hindclaw". Nobody could guess it and eventually I had to drop the answer in their lap once someone had the smart idea to start reading a book of dragon anatomy out loud. This was my attempt to make a reasonable puzzle that made sense in universe and wasn't too hard and it failed miserably. I hate puzzles that are things like doing math or logic problems, sliding blocks, all that gamey stuff. Why would any reasonable dungeon builder protect their most valuable treasures with something any person with sufficient intelligence could solve instead of one good lock?
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Apr 13, 2023 17:53
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I'm a cautious fan of the idea that whatever the actual solution to the puzzle is, a backup solution should be "whatever new thing your party tries after they've spend 10 minutes trying to solve the puzzle". However like Youremother I always want more of a narrative reason why the puzzle exists that isn't just "a higher power is loving with you". An adventure I have planned for a game involves basically doing the Last Crusade thing, with puzzles themed around the temple they're entering, such that each of the religion's commandments is a clue, with the narrative justification that a faithful follower of this god would enter the temple easily while a heretic would never get in.
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Apr 13, 2023 18:02
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sleepy.eyes posted:That convinced me to leave puzzles and poo poo out of my games. Puzzles should only ever be included if they are either truly optional or have some way for the PCs to get the solution from NPCs or at a minimum have a time limit where if they don't get it something bad happens but the story still advances. That players can make insight, investigation, or similar checks to get clues should go without saying. I frequently play characters way smarter than me, they shouldn't be limited by my dumb rear end not getting a puzzle they would make quick work of. I had a similar experience once and while our DM didn't get mad, it did eventually devolve into about an hour of him and one player basically having a one-on-one session to try to figure out the puzzle while everyone else just sat on disinterested. It was a cool puzzle but it featured a "if you guess wrong you get hurt" aspect so we ended up being super cautious and couldn't brute force it and none of us could make the logical jump to get it. When he explained it, we all basically said "oh, yeah I can see that". Adding in red herrings and false clues to a puzzle you gotta solve to proceed is some real bullshit though. That's grounds for sitting down after the session and having a heart to heart.
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Apr 13, 2023 18:02
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sleepy.eyes posted:I had a DM who got super mad because we couldn't solve his totally obvious door puzzle. You see, there were a bunch of labeled lockers in the room with the nonmagical locked door. I opened a few lockers at random, and after I get to about 10 the room collapses on us and everyone died. Uhh, okay? But wait, it's a time loop, we're back at the start of the day. We go back and open some different lockers, same thing happens. We say gently caress it and do something else, eventually being straight up told we need to get past that door. We ask around town about it, no one knows how long it's been there or who made it. While the other guys go look for clues my wizard goes to the local church and starts looking up the death dates of the townsfolk, I did pass a check to let me know the door was about 50 years old, maybe something important happened 50ish years ago and that's tied into it? I have no clue, and time resets 5ish? hours no mater what we do. We run out of ideas after the 6th reset so I start sending summoned creatures to try opening the doors in every conceivable order to brute force it, and every time they fail the world resets. At this point the DM is just fuming and tells us that the way to get the door open was just to look at the last names on all then lockers, at which point we should have noticed that they begin with almost every letter of the alphabet (some were worn away by time and are illegible) so all we had to do was open and close the lockers so it spells 'password'. He also told us a bunch of the clues were red herrings and most of the poo poo we did would have never helped us, though we could have also used speak with dead (incorrectly) to summon the spirit of a 300 year dead dwarf who made it, but we failed a persuasion check on the only PC who could have given us the info on him, so we should have just tried talker to her every reset until she liked us. It was just so painfully obvious... This exact scenario of lethal, boobytrapped lockers opening a nearby door and death/time resetting if you dont get the joke 'password' sequence is from the first Adventure Zone podcast series. Seems like maybe the DM heard it and found it cool and funny without realizing podcasts can edit out all the boring confused time/hints given. FWIW, even listening to it on the podcast and knowing it's mostly a comedy show the scenario seemed pretty contrived! Enjoyed it overall though.
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Apr 13, 2023 18:11
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Azathoth posted:Adding in red herrings and false clues to a puzzle you gotta solve to proceed is some real bullshit though. That's grounds for sitting down after the session and having a heart to heart. lol yeah, that would be so frustrating as a player to learn that half of the clues you had gotten were there to deliberately mislead you. When I'm in puzzle solving mode I tend to latch onto clues/aspects that make sense and that could be a recipe for disaster. Nowadays if I ever do a puzzle in a game I have an "answer" in mind, but also if the players roll decent enough they can do their own thing to circumvent it (or if they come up with an even better solution i'll fess up that what they did was cooler than what I had in mind). An important thing to keep in mind is that video game puzzles get tested pretty rigorously, and unless you like to reuse content the stuff in campaigns are being tested live. So more often than not if the players aren't getting the solution it's a failure of communication on the GM's part and not the players being dumbos.
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Apr 13, 2023 18:16
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Reveilled posted:In fairness I could see my own "this is a trap" sensors going off if a magically sealed door which requires two magical devices (wtf is a torque by the way? I assumed you meant hinge but then "hinge" ended up in inverted commas) to open just happened to be hidden under rocks in the area. What sort of person constructs a magical trapdoor with a permanent magical trap and then hides the actual key under a nearby rock like it's an AirBnB? If this was built by some ancient high precursor civilisation the key would be buried deeper than just being under a rock, and if instead it was built by some powerful spellcaster, surely they'd just take the keys with them or hide them in a demiplane or something. It is supposed to be triggering their "This is a trap" sense. The game module expressly says: "Subverting Expectations Normally, in adventures of this type, unearthing an old circle of stones is obviously an extraordinarily foolish thing to do. In this scenario, it is the exact opposite. If the Characters unearth the ancient oghams [And explore the dungeon I put under the center stone because just uprooting megalithic rocks is a bit humdrum] , nothing but good will result. However, toppling the standing stones will horrify many veterans of RPGs as they will expect to unleash some ancient horror." For reference the whole area they are in is plagued with nightmares and ill omens. They have tracked it to this stone circle and have committed to fixing this evil. They have after days of work uprooted six 6ft tall stones under which were the torques and the larger 9ft center stone that was standing on the trap door. I provided the players with the following reference image of a torque. And when describing them noted the width of the gap which was exactly the same distance the divots in the stone trap door were apart.  The description of the "hinge" was a beveled cut on the back of one side of trap door "Which looks like it could act as a hinge". Which was yet another attempt on my part to say "It could be this" with out saying. "This is a trap door. It has a great big set of hinges on one side and a keyhole in the middle." "What sort of person constructs a magical trapdoor with a permanent magical trap and then hides the actual key under a nearby rock like it's an AirBnB? If this was built by some ancient high precursor civilisation the key would be buried deeper than just being under a rock, and if instead it was built by some powerful spellcaster, surely they'd just take the keys with them or hide them in a demiplane or something." The same sort of BBEG that has a secret backdoor tunnel into their "super secure" lair. Admittedly these rocks weigh a few tons and do require a little bit of effort to shift. I would like to suggest that if the key was hidden away in a remote land, or kept in a different dimension to ensure the security of the dungeon it might make the unlocking the door a little bit too difficult.  Could I have introduced a "find the key" quest? I guess, but no body even knew this trap door was under the huge standing stone as it has been there about 3000+ years, so who would know where the key might be? "Which suggests to me you're not giving players much context in your descriptions because the way I would describe that would be "about 40' down, you see the coin you threw in, which is glowing on a solid stone floor" Thanks for this. I will endeavor to get better at describing the world for my players. Obviously I am leaving them in the dark too much without intending to. Lamuella posted:I'm a cautious fan of the idea that whatever the actual solution to the puzzle is, a backup solution should be "whatever new thing your party tries after they've spend 10 minutes trying to solve the puzzle". It really makes me wonder when you hear about the obtuse clues, puzzles and traps that were the bread a butter of 1st ed. how D&D ever succeeded. The Tomb of Horrors has some of the most inscrutable and unforgiving BS I have ever seen. Who would make a dungeon and leave clues to help invaders succeed? Acererak the demi-litch apparently. 
Indolent Bastard fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Apr 13, 2023 |
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Apr 13, 2023 18:17
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Arrrthritis posted:lol yeah, that would be so frustrating as a player to learn that half of the clues you had gotten were there to deliberately mislead you. When I'm in puzzle solving mode I tend to latch onto clues/aspects that make sense and that could be a recipe for disaster. Another tactic is to have a series of hints ready, which can be meted out to help them along. They can do a perception or insight roll to notice something, perhaps. Puzzles can be a lot of fun as long as you keep everyone involved.
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Apr 13, 2023 18:26
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if you play puzzle games that stand on their own as games, they almost always have core mechanics that are repeated over and over again and which only very gradually grow more complex or introduce wholly novel mechanics even a game like, say, BABA IS YOU -- a specific type of puzzle game that is almost entirely about lateral thinking rather than deductive problem-solving -- aims to put you in situations that are like 9 parts familiar to 1 part new wrinkle the point isn't just to tutorialize or have a smooth difficulty curve, but also to build up a shared language between the player and the game (in a TTRPG, it would be between the player and the GM) so that you can present them with a closed system to work inside of, instead of just free associating and hoping they coincidentally have exactly the same frame of reference that you do
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Apr 13, 2023 19:06
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I just lie and say that they solved the puzzle its sufficiently creative enough because usually my puzzle solution isn't as cool as theirs.
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Apr 13, 2023 19:23
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Tiocfaidh Yar Ma posted:This exact scenario of lethal, boobytrapped lockers opening a nearby door and death/time resetting if you dont get the joke 'password' sequence is from the first Adventure Zone podcast series. Seems like maybe the DM heard it and found it cool and funny without realizing podcasts can edit out all the boring confused time/hints given. Haha, really? I was gonna post that there seemed to be a very specific way we were supposed to do things and some big 'cutscene' fights where what we were doing wasn't really seeming to fit what was going on around us. I've never been able to listen to/watch other people playing TTRPGs. It was still really fun overall, and he was definitely more open to our madness after that.
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Apr 13, 2023 19:29
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The biggest problem with including puzzles, I think, is not accompanying them with a fail forward mentality. Couldn't decipher the ancient inscription's rebus? Looks like you're fighting the sphinx's skeleton! The trick is not making it punitive in terms of resources.
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Apr 13, 2023 19:38
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Indolent Bastard posted:It really makes me wonder when you hear about the obtuse clues, puzzles and traps that were the bread a butter of 1st ed. how D&D ever succeeded. This leads me to my favorite/not-favorite things about early AD&D modules: they were designed to be a series of sneaky, trappy, puzzley one-offs rather that a setting integrated into a larger world. This is noticeable in the way traps are set out, most notably the glyph of warding. I’m currently porting an old Dragon Magazine module called “the House in the Frozen Lands” into my campaign and some of the traps in it are just bonkers. 1. There’s a room that you have to follow a winding path around a couple of columns to get to an altar and if you wander off the path you get lightning bolted or something. (Imagine this temple gets pilgrims visiting in the regular. Now imagine if they get slain if they step but one foot wrong.) 2. The main priest of the place has a glyph on the door to his bedchamber. (What if he sleepwalks? What if an aide comes to him in the middle of the night with a crisis and neglects to say the passcode?) 3. The door to the temple is also trapped with a glyph. (Because of course it is. Never mind the constant blasting of the aforementioned pilgrims who have no way of knowing about the glyph ahead of time.)
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Apr 14, 2023 06:45
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So was the trapdoor actually magically locked or anything in a way that required those specific torques? Because what I'm getting from the description right now is a fairly regular door that's missing its handle but the handle is on a nearby table, and yeah it should be obvious that this handle fits this door but it seems like manipulating the lock or pushing it open should also work. I guess what I'm saying is when I do a puzzle with one intended solution, I try and treat that solution as the backup that will definitely work if whatever the players think up doesn't because of bad rolls.
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Apr 14, 2023 09:20
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My Lovely Horse posted:So was the trapdoor actually magically locked or anything in a way that required those specific torques? Because what I'm getting from the description right now is a fairly regular door that's missing its handle but the handle is on a nearby table, and yeah it should be obvious that this handle fits this door but it seems like manipulating the lock or pushing it open should also work. I didn't actually think whether it was magically locked or not but it didn't matter because nobody touched the divots in the top until they actually stuck the torque into those into the divots. Why this whole thing amuses me is imagining this scenario taking place in real life. You arrive at a warehouse. The door in front of you is missing a door knob. (You have a doorknob in your backpack). You elect as your first action to try and kick the door down. The door does not collapse under your kick and you fall backwards onto your butt. Your next course of action is to try and rip the door off its hinges with your bare hands. When that fails, your next course of action is to devise a way to carve a hole into the wall of the warehouse. The escalation that goes on in role playing games is always funny to me because if you were presented with a locked door in real life I'm going to guess you wouldn't try and find a nearby excavating machine to just rip a hole in the wall of the building. I understand role-playing is a power fantasy but I like rewarding insight and clever thinking. Can you fireball the whole tavern and win the fight that broke out? Sure. But I'm more impressed by the player that tries to de-escalate the situation and not rush to the nuclear option. Maybe I just suck and am no fun 🤷 I do check in with my players and ask them how they're enjoying the game and I try and get honest feedback and so far no major complaints and I have implemented the things that have been requested to change. Indolent Bastard fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 16:03
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I don’t understand how a rock slab with two dents is supposed to be opened by a flimsy half hoop, and if so, how it would be obvious.
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Apr 14, 2023 16:05
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Bad Munki posted:I don’t understand how a rock slab with two dents is supposed to be opened by a flimsy half hoop, and if so, how it would be obvious. Did you play Monkey Island? You rub everything on everything to see if it does anything. 😂 It is something that has been described as a trapdoor. The two dents are described as exactly 3 inches apart. You have found six pieces of metal surrounding this trapdoor. They have been described as having a gap exactly 3 inches apart and terminate in spheres that are the exact same size as the dents in the stone. I guess there is a reason that video games come with waypoint markers and glowing pick ups nowadays. Am I getting a bit exhausted? Yes I am! It has been a long week. I know this because I'm getting salty at bad munki a poster I've enjoyed for many years. I think I'm going to lock myself out of the something awful app for the rest of the day. Thank you for the input. I will attempt to apply what has been said by you all. I just need to try and find some kind of balance between giving them a challenge and not simply saying "yes and" to every plan that's presented to me, which feels like it removes all stakes. Indolent Bastard fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 16:19
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Indolent Bastard posted:I just need to try and find some kind of balance between giving them a challenge and not simply saying "yes and" to every plan that's presented to me, which feels like it removes all stakes. Having not been at your table at the time it's hard to say, but this feels very much like content (i.e. the rest of the dungeon) that is being gated behind a specific thing. This is why so many posters here (myself included) don't like puzzles: they are in so many cases effectively stakeless gatekeepers between the players and the content. They serve only to frustrate. It's why "investigative" games where the PCs are trying to solve a "mystery" can so often go so very, very badly - if the PCs miss a clue (or worse, misinterpret a clue), then there might be no mechanism to get them back onto the "correct" path. Congratulations, you're now playing "Cold Case: the RPG" You should always have something that can guide the players to the solution or give them a way to effectively circumvent the barrier. That circumvention might have consequences, but so long as those are adequately communicated, you give agency back to the players. In Apocalypse World parlance, you "tell them the consequences and ask." Something like, "Well, it's made of stone but you figure you can eventually bash your way through it hammer-and-chisel style. But it'll take the better part of an hour and everyone for miles around will hear you coming. You still wanna do that?" Also, I've gotta be honest: the part where you say that you "didn't want them to brute force their way through" raises huge red flags for me.
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Apr 14, 2023 18:41
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My rule of thumb is that puzzles should never gate the plot. Gate some of the loot, yes. Gate shortcuts/quiet entrances, certainly. And sometimes the puzzle is realising that there is a puzzle (for example when I had the floor layout explicitly almost identical on multiple floors two rooms had small storage rooms while the third had a blank wall. Pay enough attention to the map and if you even tap on that door it's hollow and there's treasure - don't follow the map and you don't even realise there was a puzzle there).
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Apr 14, 2023 20:57
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Has anyone ever set up a plot hook that is supposed to be a fun spotlight storyline for a player and they just absolutely reject it? For context: my game is in a homebrew world that is fantasy dnd meets ancient history. Dwarves/Romans, Drow/Persians stuff like that. Gods in the setting are the Norse, Greek, and Egyptian pantheons with some tweaking to fit. One of my players is a human fighter from the lands of the north. Think Gallic/Germanic warrior. He is kind of a fuckup and stumbles his way through fights and encounters. Impulsive and believes he is amazing and believes his own bullshit stories he tells to people. He lies so much he is fooled by his own lies. I had my doubts about the character at first but he is played well enough where it’s not annoying at all. It’s an enjoyable pc that brings a fun dynamic to the group. This PC decided to enter a contest where entrants had to vault over this massive chasm in a town called Farvault. The festival is held yearly and the winners “live on in story and song” though no one in town can name any past winners. Most of the entrants fail and fall into the chasm to their death or dismemberment. The rest of the group was solidly against this as detect magic was lighting the entire area up in a magical fog. The magic was emanating from a temple just outside of town. The PC actually manages to clear the chasm through some amazing roles and some sneaky speak help from his friends. He gets to visit the town temple where he encounters a small wooden carving of a northern god. This statue telepathically speaks to the group and asks them to take it back up north. The statue exhibits some strong powers and tells the pc that he is now the statue’s champion for his amazing feats, bullshit stories, and constant half truths. My co-dm and I had thought the pc would jump at this. Was planning on a fun adventure that would be this players “spotlight” in the campaign. Would visit the pc’s home city and give him some action and rp moments to shine. The pc absolutely didn’t give a poo poo about the statue and wants to pawn it off to the goblin warlock and let him deal with it. He kinda did an abrupt turnabout in personality and all the things that were tailor made to make him think “gently caress yes!” He just shot down and wanted nothing to do with. It’s like he suddenly decided to be an entirely different character. Honestly we were kinda blindsided in how he reacted. Anyone have anything like this happen or have any suggestions on how to handle it? We had pondered to just kinda low key drop the quest line and very much diminish the statue’s importance. We also pondered “giving” the storyline focus to the goblin warlock who is pretty pumped about the seemingly rear end in a top hat deceptive statue. Nash fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 03:59
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Yeah give it to the warlock. That's weird!
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Apr 18, 2023 04:59
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Nash posted:Has anyone ever set up a plot hook that is supposed to be a fun spotlight storyline for a player and they just absolutely reject it? Some players just don't want the spotlight, they want to be the enabler to everyone else. That's a totally legitimate way to play and if they're having fun just buddying around with the rest of the party, let them do that. But also, there's no substitute for talking to your players. If you're not sure why a player did a thing, ask them.
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Apr 18, 2023 06:50
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It’s not really a spotlight thing. He actually passed some high enough rolls with my co-dm to sneak away from the group to head to Farvault. Will probably wind up texting him and just giving the tiniest explanation of the statue and it’s purpose and plainly ask if it’s a major thing he wants to pursue or not.
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Apr 18, 2023 12:48
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It sort of sounds like he likes being a comedic bend on a straight story and didn't want to play a game about his bullshit. Maybe he felt drawing too much attention to it kind of spoils it?
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Apr 18, 2023 14:14
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Just ask him what's up and what's he feeling for his character
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Apr 18, 2023 14:52
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Honestly the statue is an idol of Loki. Due to religious stuff and his home city being sacked during the war he was partially trapped and de powered in the statue. The bullshit lies and chaotic nature of the PC are what made the statue reach out to him. The pc’s home city was sacked during the war, which cause the pc to become a war refuge. The player had come up with this pretty serious backstory for the character so we had planned for the story to ultimately allow him to bring the statue home and help to reestablish his home city. I texted the player a few questions so we will see how it goes.
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Apr 18, 2023 19:37
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I remember playing in a friends Dragonlance campaign. I was playing for laughs so I made a magic-user with a high dex and high charisma and had con and strength as dump stats. He had one hit point at first level and three at second level and his favorite spell was charm person. He was a con man to the core and was always one step ahead of the last town’s law enforcement. Well the GM really wanted me to be playing Raistlin the Second and was railroading us every step of the way. In frustration we decided to ditch the plot and do our own thing and become bandits. Well the GM took the hint and decided to railroad us in /that/ direction which sucked the fun out of the whole thing so we stopped. It turns out that sometimes players just want to have a little thing that doesn’t need to become A Thing. Maybe that player was thinking the same thing? (We subsequently had a good conversation with the Newbie GM about railroading and he became a really good GM)
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Apr 19, 2023 03:59
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I have a specific need for some software and was wondering if anyone knew of anything along these lines. I am running a Strixhaven campaign focused on social intrigue. My players want lots of social intrigue so much so that I am basically running it more like a Vampire 5E campaign than a D&D 5E campaign. We are currently at over 75 regularly appearing NPCs including faculty, fellow students, campus staff, townies, and others. Far from being overwhelmed by the number of NPCs, I did an anonymous survey of my players and the consensus was that they loved the variety of the NPCs and that it made it feel like a real school. I was using Notion to keep a simple relational database of them but it's not scaling well for my needs as I approach 100 NPCs. My dream tool would be something that basically looks like a Facebook for NPCs: you can see their pronouns, likes and dislikes, hometown, and other basic information. They can also have friends and enemies and I could view these in a web view. Finally I could assign them to groups/clubs/departments so that I can organize them and filter on those attributes. Ideally, I could share a public version of this with my players (with a private version where I can keep my own notes secret from the players) so that the 2-3 who never pay attention can look up NPCs so I don't constantly have to give a biographical sketch every time Joey Joejoe shows up again.
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Apr 20, 2023 03:39
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I've never used it, but I know a couple of GMs who use https://npc-tracker.com/.
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Apr 20, 2023 05:39
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Rosalind posted:I have a specific need for some software and was wondering if anyone knew of anything along these lines. I am running a Strixhaven campaign focused on social intrigue. My players want lots of social intrigue so much so that I am basically running it more like a Vampire 5E campaign than a D&D 5E campaign. Obsidian is a more customizable piece of software that might do what you're looking for, if you're willing to put time into it. It's what I found when I was fed up with Notion. This video is not this person's most up to date version but it's a good place to get started. She has a lot of videos on all kinds of stuff about Obsidian. Depending on how deep you want to go with it you can essentially do anything. It doesn't natively do relational databases, but there are plugins that give it the ability to do so. that youtuber talks about it at some point in her obsidian tutorials
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Apr 22, 2023 03:31
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Is there a good catalog of free tools to use to make a bunch of maps or a place with a bunch of free assets to use?
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Apr 23, 2023 21:23
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I use https://www.reddit.com/r/battlemaps/ a lot, though I also find googling "type of terrain + drone/aerial" is great for outdoor maps.
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Apr 23, 2023 22:20
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Paratime has a whole section on creative commons licensed maps. http://paratime.ca/cartography/index.html
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Apr 23, 2023 22:25
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Hello thread! My PCs have been raising a dragon-snail hybrid as a pet, and one of the Patreons I follow just released, of all things, an agility course map. I'd love to have my players' nurturing of this horrible snail beast pay off. What would be the best way to run an agility course event in D&D? I'd like to go beyond animal handling checks.
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May 3, 2023 18:49
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Dienes posted:Hello thread! My PCs have been raising a dragon-snail hybrid as a pet, and one of the Patreons I follow just released, of all things, an agility course map. I'd love to have my players' nurturing of this horrible snail beast pay off. What would be the best way to run an agility course event in D&D? I'd like to go beyond animal handling checks. This doesn't work with every game or group, but with my group I'd consider handling this as a flashback montage - GM describes the challenge the pet is facing, players describe their training or other preparatory actions that got the snail ready to excel at the challenge, with appropriate checks, bonuses for flavorful or clever (or funny) preparatory measures, etc.
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May 3, 2023 21:46
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