Climbing Mt. Gotcha
It’s been a good long while since we talked about adversarial GMing. While it’s generally obnoxious for the guy behind the screen to try and beat players at RPGing, today we’re getting a little more specific. We’re looking about that most annoying of adversarial habits: “the gotcha.” And if I’m not mistaken, Fighter is stuck inside of one.
You can imagine how it went at the table. No doubt the poor lug just heard a description like this one: “You stand at the base of a snow-capped mountain. The gentle slopes of the foothills quickly rise to treacherous cliffs, followed by the blinding white of glaciers. The only way to reach your goal is to summit this beast. How do you proceed?”
And if you’re Fighter (a repulsive thought, I know), you’re probably replying with, “I climb the mountain.” After all, making that trek is the only way to reach your goal. The GM just said so! Note, however, what they didn’t say. There was no mention of, “Make a Perception check.”
When it comes to gotchas, there’s this weird tendency to gate the obvious behind game mechanics. Rather than telling us what’s plainly visible (“There’s a ski lift!”) the GM is waiting for us to ask. And even though I think it’s good policy to expect your players to actively investigate their surroundings, there’s no call to use narrative sleight of hand to hide it details that ought to be in the room description. The comedy payoff just isn’t worth it from the GM side.
Take this old Gygax anecdote, for example. A solo player boots open a door to discover a treasure hoard. Filthy lucre abounds!
“You’re up to your ankles in precious gemstones!”
“I dance for joy!”
“You’re up to you knees in gemstones!”
“I continue dancing.”
“The hoard reaches all the way up to you waist!”
“Wahoo!”
“You drown to death in the ever-filling gemstone trap. Roll a new guy.”
Hardy har har, Gary. But to my way of thinking, this style of ‘punishing bad play’ just ain’t worth it. You mean to tell me I didn’t notice the hoard climbing up the walls. Rising to the level of the door? Climbing up my own bode and impairing my victory dance? Maybe I’m a coddled modern player rather than an old school veteran, but I’m probably walking out rather than rerolling.
What about the rest of you guys though? Have you ever encountered a GM who plays this kind of word game? What was the scenario, and what was the gotcha? Tell us all about your own invisible ski lifts and subtle gemstone piles down in the comments!
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It’s usually not with anything deadly, but if we don’t specifically look for loot, we won’t find it. Occasionally it comes into play with things like traps, but generally my GMs are nice enough to at least point out that there are potentially hazards in the area, even if they don’t out and out say there is one.
I much prefer “reading comprehension challenge” over the “guess and check” version of read aloud text. The dangers are in there. It’s on you to investigate them, not to imagine them in the first place.
I have been in the rooms with deep DEEP descriptions of all the nuances and smells and the strange odds and ends on the shelves that look too finely crafted to be made for a space such as this one… only to NOT be told about the person sitting in the chair behind the desk in front of me.
“Oh, he was in the shadows. You didn’t see him.” says the half clever DM.
“You didn’t *check* behind the door did you?” says the more jerky DM.
“I guess you should have *looked* in the room first.” says the complete tool of a DM.
What do you think I am doing with my eyes, generally 95% of the time?! (Please don’t ask what I am doing with my eyes the other 5% of the time… even I don’t know).
Yeah, this kind of thing can be adversarial, but it can also be a genuine lack of DM ability or an honest mistake. Especially when coping with some adventure modules that want you to read some specific text and then don’t tell you until later in the description that there is ALSO something else to notice… like the dragon sleeping in the center of the hoard that is visible to anyone with a passive perception of 10+!
I think when it is an honest mistake you can usually tell, but if the DM is “that guy”… it’s time to seek another gaming table for me.
Keep this general idea in mind:
– Saves are for when you have no choice but to roll.
– Checks are for when you *can* do a thing, but the thing is not going to be easy or simple, so it requires… a check.
If something should be obvious, you don’t need to let game mechanics override good sense. Just let the players see the thing they should obviously be able to see (or hear, or whatever the situation is. This applies to more than just observations using general wisdom).
Was shopping for a new house last year. Talking back and forth with my realtor about pricing and the shape of the bedroom we were standing in and —
“There’s a man in that bed.”
“What?”
Then we slowly backed out of the poor tenant’s bedroom.
All of which is to say, if a dude is actively camouflaged or hiding in shadows, fair play. But don’t sit there and hide your special secret surprise from the players just cuz.
Related, I love how the “hospitality” industry is 100% throwing people out as fast as they can to get new tenants and higher rents.
The ONLY time I do that is when the players are inattentive. Even then they usually get hints that they are screwing up (the previously mentioned Tootsie Rolls) and not paying attention to important stuff. If after all that they bypass the ski lift and end up in the bottom of a crevasse, I don’t feel bad about it at all.
There is an odd tendency to talk over room descriptions, almost as if they’re flavor text rather than vital environmental clues.
I was always tempted to make a “PAY ATTENTION HERE” sign to hold up during those times, but stuck to pelting them with candy instead.
I had a GM once (who was otherwise perfectly decent) who had an annoying inability to imagine what a magical trap could possibly look like.
Even after succeeding on the relevant checks you’d often be told that you noticed “something” or perhaps “there’s something special” about this tapestry/chest/door, with nothing to indicate that it’s a damn magical trap.
Come on, that’s when you should pull out the flavor text about tiny carved runes/subtle weaved magical circles, or other magical patterns and doodads.
I also very much agree with you in regards to descriptions.
The GM serves as the PC’s eyes, ears and other senses.
They need to describe the things the PC’s see to the players so the players can play their characters.
I always like the idea of very fine sigils in magic traps: tiny runes in the mortar between paving stones and similar.
That is why I take a page of wisdom from Thief and take all the 20s
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/take-all
That can’t be good for your tail.
If it’s not actively hidden, it’s in the room description. That’s just common sense. Gygax was a dick and should be treated as an anti-role model. Seriously, this is the man who says it’s lawful good to kill goblin children.
The more stories I hear about the guy, the more I’m inclined to agree.
My one encounter with him, he was yelling a kid at an early GenCon and nearly had him in tears. I’m talking a 12 year old. If there is anything in the world I absolutely can’t stand and won’t tolerate, it’s a bully. So instead of a 4′ foot something child, he ended up being torn a new one by a 5’10”, pissed off, woman. He stormed off in a huff rather quickly.
Asked the kid what that was all about and he said he was asking a question about the homebrew he was trying to create for him and his friends to adventure in. This was right at the time that Gary was ranting in his columns in the Dragon magazine about, “the rules are only guidelines”. Something that was stated in various places in early AD&D. He wasn’t happy that so many people were taking D&D and making it their own, instead of sticking to Greyhawk and his version, so this kid just got caught in his general assholery about that subject. I told him I had a homebrew and he DEFINITELY should make one and make it his own take on AD&D. We had a good conversation after he calmed down.
I’ve been that GM on a few occassions, but never deliberately. I just… forget to describe something important, sometimes. I always cut my players plenty of slack in such cases, since it’s not *their* fault they didn’t know [insert important thing here] was in the room with them.
On the other hand, there have also been a couple of times where I felt I had dropped plenty enough hints as to the presence of [insert important thing here] and the party chooses to ignore it anyway, only to get mad at me later for not pointing it out clearly enough. One anectode which springs to mind is when I told a player that he notices the floor in the next room shifting slightly; he just walks right in anyway, only to get snagged (and nearly killed) by a floor mimic. Why would you blithely waltz across a clearly unstable or otherwise suspicious floor? I’m not taking the blame for that one!
I think it’s a fine play if you want to face-tank traps and just dive into combat with a barbarian or similar. But if you’re playing the kind of daredevil who likes to push the big red button, that mess is on you at some point, you know?
I just registered that those hats aren’t covering their ears at all. They’re going to get frostbite, but they’ll look awfully cute doing it!
We tried to put the hats over the ears, but there was a clipping issue. 😛
Nobody ever makes these hats for goblins. It’s an accessibility issue. Don’t get me started on getting them to fit shisks just right.
You know, I have thoughts about the example you gave, because on the one hand, it’s vague about what the gems are doing, other than increasing in number.
On the other hand, I spot at least two chances to notice “hey, something’s weird here, I should pay attention.”
On the gripping hand, random murder is probably NOT the appropriate punishment.
Granted. And a sharper player might have done so. But I can’t help but feel like Gygax was hiding some pretty obvious details behind word games.
Players: „we take the waggon to town to get the freshly destroyed undead, cursed abomination to the temple for de-cursing and burrying“.
DM (two days travel later): „you didn’t specifically mention loading that thing on the waggon, therefore you left it in your village“.
I‘ll never be desperate enough to have him DM another campaign with me in it.
Lol. Yup, that shit is spot-on. Remind me of this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/key-item
I lean towards old-school and against coddled modern play, but Gygax often seems like he’s just being spiteful, and takes it too far.
Wish I could remember where I heard the story. It’s either in “Playing at the World” or “Shared Fantasy.”
Ok, the treasure reaching my knees could be overlooked. I would just assume my character waded into the pile a bit. But suddenly being at my waist, you’d think someone would wonder if something’s wrong.
It’s not an *entirely* unfair interaction, but it still sticks in my craw as an “I should notice this.”
I tend toward letting my players notice stuff. If the player notices, so does the character. If the passive perception is high enough, I’ll call for a roll. A player can choose to roll with or without getting a hint from passive. It’s still possible to miss the thing, but it’s less frequent. Players, myself included, are pretty dense when it comes to hints, and the game is more interesting when players have the chance to meaningfully engage with obstacles rather than being blindsided by them. Just my 2 cents.
One of my groups once all spent the night at a friends place, playing both days we were there. Roughly 4 or so hours of which were us just walking around an ever changing landscape, making perception checks and insight checks to no avail. Until I finally broke character with my barbarian and voiced a concern I had had for some time out loud, in-character “Guys, are we in a dream”.
Which was all the GM needed us to say, before he revealed that yes, we were in a dream, and now we could actually move onto the fun part (Well, it was a giant mess of a part, but it beat walking around a lava-lamp). We were given no clues, our skill checks and spells were useless and it relied entirely on us having our characters voice what was an in-universe nonsensical idea.
We were actively seeking a solution and trying to search for clues and ways out, but because we didn´t say the exact magic words the GM wanted to hear, we were forced to wander around there for way too long.
The GM had a habit of doing this. He also had a tendency to make every conversation we had with an NPC feel like we were pulling teeth out, just trying to get a scrap of information. Even the ones that should by all accounts be friendly towards us.
I will say, I learnt a lot about GM´ing and communication from that guy.