|
On the subject of pits, either bottomless or bottomfull, and what they could be used for- I recently had a 10'x10' square x 20' deep pit in a darkened corner, and there was a Gelatinous Cube stuck at the bottom of it, kind of like a "wizard's garbage chute". My echo knight fighter kept launching echo after echo into it, for like 5 minutes, only for them to get exactly halfway down the very obviously 20' deep pit and immediately get destroyed. Sometimes players just see some stupid object or npc and their brains latch on to it like a rabid dog.
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 22:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 15:33 |
|
|
YggdrasilTM posted:Or maybe they are dumb. If you lose a player because they thought the only reason you mentioned a pit was because it was the key to a puzzle you’ve been dragging them through all session, and that kills off your whole campaign, then maybe they aren’t the dumb one.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 22:25
|
|
|
Kaal posted:If you lose a player because they thought the only reason you mentioned a pit was because it was the key to a puzzle you’ve been dragging them through all session, and that kills off your whole campaign, then maybe they aren’t the dumb one. In that case, both of you are dumb because of your inability to have conversations about numerous things, least of which is that loving pit.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 22:32
|
|
|
I've had plenty of "bottomless pits" in my campaigns and have never had a player fling themselves into it to try and find some hidden reward. If somebody SOMEHOW finds themselves falling into bottomless pit, they always get the option to lose their weapon (or their backpack, or something) to grab onto a ledge instead of dying outright. Though I had an exception where a player bombed their roll trying to jump over a 10 ft. gap (they had 8 strength) while a dungeon was collapsing. They died, but it was a cool way to die during an adventure climax so they loved it. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 22:37
|
|
|
Kaal posted:If you lose a player because they thought the only reason you mentioned a pit was because it was the key to a puzzle you’ve been dragging them through all session, and that kills off your whole campaign, then maybe they aren’t the dumb one. If the only way to explore a bottomless pit someone can think of is throwing themselves inside the aforementioned pit, they are dumb.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 22:46
|
|
|
If a PC purposefully dives into a pit that you have described as bottomless, with no plan at all to survive, they at best are too stupid to ask additional questions and at worst are metagaming. I can't fathom what additional information would need to be shared to convince them otherwise. This is why almost every DM uses the "are you sure you want to do that?" or "so you are choosing to dive into the bottomless pit?" questions to communicate "that is a very bad idea and there will be very real consequences." Additionally, if you make an absolutely bone-headed and fatal decision for your PC, it is not the DM's responsibility to retcon in order to accommodate you.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 22:57
|
|
|
PeterWeller posted:In that case, both of you are dumb because of your inability to have conversations about numerous things, least of which is that loving pit. Which is, again, just a DM issue. You have to build trust with your players. Both in terms of how the game is presented, and how the game is discussed. If they don’t like what you’re doing, and they don’t want to debate it, they’ll just cite scheduling issues and drop out.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 22:58
|
|
|
Kaal posted:Which is, again, just a DM issue. You have to build trust with your players. Both in terms of how the game is presented, and how the game is discussed. If they don’t like what you’re doing, and they don’t want to debate it, they’ll just cite scheduling issues and drop out. I don't know how you can write these words out and not identify this as toxic player behavior. If you are bored with a campaign, throwing your PC into a ridiculous and perilous situation with the intention of influencing the campaign is simply punitive to the DM and everyone else at the table. If you have to be convinced that the bottomless pit in front of you is truly perilous and your solution is to force the DM to convince you, you're not mature enough to play a TTRPG.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 23:15
|
|
|
Try to remember that failure to empathize is how you get into this situation in the first place. Players not wanting to play after their characters get - to their mind - screwed over is a fairly normal thing. And there’s a lot more ways of doing this than just having bottomless pits everywhere. So use the tools available to you to avoid this dilemma: Create different sorts of skill checks to give players the information they want; be flexible in the narrative rather than railroading your players down the path you want to go; use NPCs to act as guide stones for how the rules work; recognize if your players are getting bored and proactively meet their needs; and find ways to have fun together, rather than expecting the other players to have fun the way you like to (this one is a biggie for many DMs, who often get attracted to the game for different reasons than players do). Because at the end of the day there’s a lot of games out there with DMs who are navigating this sort of thing just fine.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2024 23:59
|
|
|
Maybe all campaigns need to start with a tpk, set the tone.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 00:03
|
|
|
While I've never encountered this issue before and also never heard of anyone that has, I have definitely seen players engage in basically "narrative chicken" with the DM, where they more or less force the DM to call them on their poo poo, relying on the inconvenience and awkwardness of actually responding to a dumb situation to avoid consequences. Like you know, insulting the angry dragon directly because what are you gonna do, kill my character? That said, this doesn't seem like that, it literally seems like some players treating the game like Myst with quicksave or something. "Well, the DM said there's nothing down there and it's just a descriptive feature, but DMs often lie about the best rewards, I better test them. If they were serious, they won't actually kill my character, that'd be an rear end in a top hat move and I'd get to point that out, so I feel relatively safe here" sort of vibe. Additionally, I gotta disagree with the "let them do it, players gotta learn" thing, because frankly, I'm not their dad, teacher, legal guardian, or elected representative. I'm just some other guy at the table also trying to have a good time. All that "Make them smoke the whole pack" poo poo is patronizing as hell. That's just a situation where everyone at the table is a moron, and ... oh wait I don't care what happens at that sort of table. Carry on.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 00:06
|
|
|
Are there any official or "semi-official" (i.e paid for but curated) published adventures that's like a Martial Arts tournament?
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 01:34
|
|
|
Yeah this is a situation where you kinda have to just break kayfabe and talk to your player like a fellow adult, "out of character, this is just here for set dressing, if you jump down this pit I the GM 100% guarantee you will just die and get nothing."
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 01:38
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:I think players should be allowed to do stupid things and suffer the consequences. I don't think DMs should go out of their way to protect them from their own foolishness. Part of this is RPG traditionalism. One set of people (often those who gamed in earlier days of the hobby or had their first games with an "adversarial" GM) are all for avoiding "meta" at the table and that means allowing PCs to do dumb stuff; others are focused on the collective experience and have no trouble with "meta" conversations and straight talk. And most slide between those extremes: I've seen plenty of "trad GMs" pull the "Are you sure you want to do that? Are you really sure?" which is nothing if not a meta-conversation, it's just the kind of meta-conversation that works with alert and experienced players and can easily get missed by new players or neurodivergant players or a player who is tired or pissed or hung-over. But really, part of it is that "being a jerk at the table" tends to be tolerated beyond the point it should be, and that includes the GM. Back in the days of 2E, when I was much less experienced as a GM, I ran an adventure in the underdark where the PCs were exploring the ruins of an ancient, highly-magical species that seemed to have died out. They came across the remains of what had been an outhouse: the structure had collapsed, but the chair (designed for an alien body-type) sitting over a hole still stood, as did the disintegration field in the hole that disposed of the waste. The PCs studied the chair for a moment, noticed a magical field in the hole, and decided it should be investigated. One PC had Boots of Levitation and he activated them as he stepped into the hole and began a slow descent toward the field, saying he was going to see what was under it. Of course, if the boots hit the field and failed their saving throw, their disintegration would dump the PC into the field, too, and it'd be pretty hard to get him out of the hole should he survive falling through it. As an insufficiently experienced GM, I allowed the save, he made it, he found out the field was a disintegration field, he got out of the hole, and play proceeded. If he'd failed I probably would have given him a save or check to grab onto the side of the hole before following his boots into the field. Nowadays, I'd have had him accidentally knock some rubble into the hole as he approached it to jump in, allowing him to see the disintegration field in action and change his mind. If he still opted to go in, I'd probably not have a second intervention, but I might clarify for the player "that rock definitely disintegrated when it hit the field" and if I didn't know the player well, I'd make certain they knew what that meant. Conversely, players should know that they, too, can communicate directly with the GM. Like, it's OK to say "It seems like you don't want me to explore that pit, does that mean it's just set dressing and not important to the adventure?" In one campaign, my human sorcerer got attacked by a ghost and aged from his 20s to his 70s. As we were fruitlessly trying to find a way to reverse the aging, I directly told the GM out-of-character, "if he can't get the aging reversed, this will end my PC's adventuring career." As the aging had no practical in-game effect, the GM had figured he'd just let things stand; knowing that, he found a way to resolve the situation so I didn't have to retire the character.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 01:47
|
|
|
Feel like this thread is descending down a metaphorical bottomless pit. Is anyone here actually putting totally context free bottomless pits in their campaigns? The stuff that started this conversation was "a well so deep you couldn't see the bottom" and "literally Star Wars, the series that has deadly bottomless pits in every movie", you kinda know what you're in for when you jump in those. If its just a weird hole in a dungeon that has no context for being bottomless yeah sure, people are going to check it out, people like things with interesting qualifiers and "bottomless" can be one of those, but no one is pro Weird Dungeon Pit here that's just bad dungeon design that's insanely bad set dressing. Now if its established that your dungeon is constructed over a stable portal to the Paraelemental Plane of Smoke or whatever, and people still want to jump into it fully informed with the context of where that hole probably goes that's on them.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 01:48
|
|
|
Just roll on the wild magic surge table whenever someone jumps down a pit.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 01:49
|
|
|
I'm the player that will see a pretty reward in an obvious trap and then spend the rest of the session trying to get the goodie instead of realizing the entire room filled with 26 foot tall statues of dragons' heads and walls, floors and ceilings that obviously move should be left alone.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:01
|
|
|
Anyway the best context free death hole in D&D is in Tomb of Horrorsquote:6. The Face of the Great Green Devil p216
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:07
|
|
|
homeless snail posted:Anyway the best context free death hole in D&D is in Tomb of Horrors When my party came across this thing at the entrance to the Tomb of Annihilation (yes I know they're different), we just... stuck a stick in and chucked some rocks to see what would happen. Why would you jump in without checking first.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:13
|
|
|
homeless snail posted:Anyway the best context free death hole in D&D is in Tomb of Horrors Wasn't there a teleport trap somewhere else in the dungeon that would "spit you out" in that room, designed to subtly imply that going through the devil mouth would send you back to where you came from, but actually it just annihilates you?
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:16
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:Wasn't there a teleport trap somewhere else in the dungeon that would "spit you out" in that room, designed to subtly imply that going through the devil mouth would send you back to where you came from, but actually it just annihilates you? quote:Northwest Devil Face.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:19
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Are there any official or "semi-official" (i.e paid for but curated) published adventures that's like a Martial Arts tournament? It’s not 5e, but one of the first pathfinder 2E adventure was based on a tournament and it was pretty dope. https://paizo.com/store/pathfinder/adventures/adventurePath/fistsOfTheRubyPhoenix
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:49
|
|
|
VaultAggie posted:It’s not 5e, but one of the first pathfinder 2E adventure was based on a tournament and it was pretty dope. Perfect! System is mostly agnostic for me, as I'll likely just take the overall adventure and plop it into 5e.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 02:55
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:Bottomless pits show up in Star Wars all the time, but those are Chekov's Guns that tend to get someone falling down them at some point, they rarely just exist for ambiance. They're going to assume that if you went to the trouble of describing it, it must be important. The Emperor is just very opposed to safety railings for some reason.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 03:50
|
|
|
Space Social Darwinism. Any Storm Troopers that is unobservant enough to fall in to one of the hundreds of death pits are weak and their death strengthens the whole.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 03:55
|
|
|
When the replacement character dies the old character pops back put of the hole leveled up and ready without any knowledge that time passed
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 04:21
|
|
|
Session zero involves a cavalcade of pregenerated L1 characters into the incubator pit for the BBEG boss battle three years from now.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 04:26
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:Space Social Darwinism. The true enemy
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 14:07
|
|
|
The idea of a bottomless pit as the recurring BBEG of the campaign is certainly novel.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 14:57
|
|
|
Kaal posted:Which is, again, just a DM issue. You have to build trust with your players. Both in terms of how the game is presented, and how the game is discussed. If they don’t like what you’re doing, and they don’t want to debate it, they’ll just cite scheduling issues and drop out. No. They'll drop in. Did you forget we're talking about pits? homeless snail posted:Feel like this thread is descending down a metaphorical bottomless pit. Is anyone here actually putting totally context free bottomless pits in their campaigns? Maybe some of the BG3 devs are lurkers. You never know.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 15:09
|
|
|
YggdrasilTM posted:The idea of a bottomless pit as the recurring BBEG of the campaign is certainly novel. I'm legit stealing this.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 15:42
|
|
|
Sentient portable hole
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 15:50
|
|
|
bagrada posted:Sure jumping into bottomless pits is a bad idea 99% of the time but its worth it for that 1% chance there's a new magic grimoire down there. I would like to un-lurk just long enough to let you know that I appreciate this post.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 16:12
|
|
|
A gourmand ogre named Pytt.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 16:36
|
|
|
homeless snail posted:Sentient portable hole There is a demon that I can't remember the name of that takes over holes and covertly turns them into portals to the abyss, this one isn't even that crazy just as-written
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 16:51
|
|
|
Surprised a demon would do that. They tend to be unholy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 17:24
|
|
|
I've got an idea for a campaign that starts with the kingdom being subjugated by a dragon as a background that slowly becomes the main plot. Only the dragon sees the kingdom as it's lair and treasure, including the people. So as long as the kingdom continues to prosper it doesn't mind that the people are walking around with all that gold. It's a dragon and doesn't really care about the details of it all as long as the amount of gold and people in the kingdom goes up, and that the people are healthy and wearing nice things because that means they're more valuable. Then it learns about trade and forbids any movement of gold or currency across border and I'm not sure where it goes from there. Some sort of lesson about capitalism or something?
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 17:32
|
|
|
YggdrasilTM posted:The idea of a bottomless pit as the recurring BBEG of the campaign is certainly novel. homeless snail posted:Sentient portable hole There's a "Living Demiplane" monster in Rime of the Frostmaiden. Sounds perfect.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 17:37
|
|
|
change my name posted:There is a demon that I can't remember the name of that takes over holes and covertly turns them into portals to the abyss, this one isn't even that crazy just as-written Nothing can defeat the dread demon Yelnats!
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 17:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 15:33 |
|
|
One Legged Ninja posted:I would like to un-lurk just long enough to let you know that I appreciate this post. Hahaha I just got the reference now myself.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2024 19:11
|
|