Dig Deep
As an all-knowing GM, you know that there’s a murder mystery coming up in the next town. That’s why you’ve decided to slip an extremely convenient scroll of speak with dead in the nearest evil cultist treasure pile. You watch as the PCs beat up the cult, take their stuff, and add the extremely convenient scroll to their inventory. You steeple your fingers and try not to smile too broadly. Yes…yes…all according to plan. The only problem is that this extremely convenient treasure is robbing your players of agency.
There’s an interesting dynamic at play when it comes to handing out treasure. Put a pile of fungicide in front of your PCs and they know that there’s a Little Shop of Horrors encounter coming up. Give them a few vials of antidote and they know to watch out for assassins. In my mind, this is a laudable impulse in a GM. You’re trying to be fair to those poor saps on the other side of the screen. The party needs some kind of out when the unbeatable ghost/invisible stalker/swarm of bugs comes after them, right? Well no. Very no in fact. I submit to you that this species of treasure distribution is a subset of that most grievous of GM sins: building a “correct solution” into your encounters.
For players there is a fundamental joy to be found in falling into a desperate situation, digging desperately through the depths of a character sheet, and coming out with a silver bullet. That pleasure is ruined if the GM spoon feeds them the answer. I’m not saying you should never give players situationally useful items. However, if you know that those items will prove particularly useful in the next encounter or two, you might want to throw something else on the pile. When players aren’t sticking their heads into spheres of annihilation, they can be a surprisingly canny lot. They know when there’s pandering afoot, and surviving the encounter with that badass iron golem doesn’t mean quite as much when you threw a dwarven king’s ransom worth of adamantine swords at them in the last chamber. Always remember: players are like tyrannosaurs. They don’t want to be fed. They want to hunt.
Question of the day then. Have you ever received a suspiciously convenient item in a game? Conversely, have you ever pulled a truly genius solution out of your bag of holding? What was it?
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As the resident Rogue fanatic, my adventuring pack is always filled with anything I can carry, anything that might ever possibly become useful. I had three pages of items on my last Rogue. Every once in a while, one of them would come out and shine.
I thought one time was such a time, when I was trapped in an anti-magic barrier but needed to help my friends. I rolled a magic ball across the floor (it summons a minotaur when used) so that it would end up outside the anti-magic area. It got stuck right at the edge of the barrier, and nobody had time to retrieve it as mind flayers ate their brains. Oops.
Wait a minute… How’d it get stuck? Did you biff your throw or did the barrier actually stop a magic item from passing through?
The latter. Magic items had to be carried through the barrier or else they would not go through. Learned that the hard way.
I suspect shenanigans on the part of your GM. Still, throwing a magical pokeball and saying “Go minotaur!” from within an antimagic field is at least questionable. Maybe the command word loses its potency in that situation? Bleh. Good on ya for quick thinking in any case.
You’ve got me curious though. What exactly was on those three pages worth of inventory? That’s a lot of stuff!
It certainly wasn’t your default anti-magic field, but we had already noticed that. I think he kept the properties consistent throughout the encounter.
I’d take anything I thought I could get a use out of later, no matter how nebulous. Some gems:
* Staff of Amplifying Troll – Lets one particular halfling buff one particular troll. Both are now dead. I kept it in case I needed a “fake” magic staff at some point, or just a poking tick.
* Necronomicon – Not my favorite school of magic, but a good bargaining chip should our Warlock’s patron ever come calling.
* Jar of Ancient Pickles – From a time-lost ruin.
* Jar of Non-Ancient Pickles – From a time-found grocer.
* Piece of Lich Urn – Probably shouldn’t have touched that so much.
Well then I retract my harsh words about your GM. I’m sure he is an exceptional dungeon master and no doubt smells of lilac.
Also, the “one of these things is not like the other” jingle is playing in my head SO HARD.
“Let’s see… We’ve got a useless staff…a jar of pickles…another jar of pickles… the Necronomicon…”
Heh…
In a LARP game we had to find the bad guys secret base and I was a Healer who just so happened to have Speak with the Dead (ask one dead person, one question, which they must answer truthfuly, but may evil genie it) prepared twice that day.
We murder-hobo’d all the cultists and then realized none of them had a convinient map on hand.
I say “I have Speak with the Dead”.
Collective “yis” all around.
We pick their leader, prop him up and I cast.
I think my question was something to the tune of “Where can we find your master?”…
Anyone with a slight devious streak can figure out I just screwed up.
His head raises, and he says “in his keep.”. It was true and he is an evil cultist so it was exactly what he would say. He smiles as his head rolls back down.
Collective “aww” all around…
I stop to lawyer my question a bit and say I cast again.
He pops his head up and says “do you have it prepared twice?” (He is a ref for this match so he has to make sure everyone is following the rules)
“Yes! Here is my spell list.”
“****”
Collective “woo” as we get the info we need.
One of my best sessions.
“Collective woo” is a custom romance feat invented by Cyrano de Bergerac.
For serious though, there’s nothing better than realizing you’ve got the right spell at the right time. I remember a game where a hag had flayed her victim, kept the poor skinless elf alive, and worn her skin as a disguise. We figured out the deception pretty dang quick, but that didn’t solve the problem.
“Do my bidding,” says the hag. “Only then shall I return the flesh to this poor innocent.”
“Ummm… I cast ‘regeneration’ on the elf,” says the cleric. “Does that grow her skin back?”
“Crap,” says the hag.
Sidenote: That encounter concluded with my all time favorite kill. My behir companion swallowed the hag. Our paladin used “aura of justice” to turn the behir’s throat into a divine weapon. I managed to counterspell the hag’s dimension door escape attempt, and the cleric used his mace as a plunger to stuff the hag back into the behir’s holy throat o’ vengeance. It was a good day at the office.
Is Collective Woo where you have your wingmen singing backup for you outside her window?
I also had my silliest moment in LARP when we were trouncing the enemy monsters, so our rogue and wizard decided to go… Well, rogue I guess…
Anyways, wizard is right next to me and casts Sphere of Anialation (first thing it touches is destroyed entirely; hitting weapon in hand counts as person holding it) and he says “here hold this”.
I’m thinking ‘If he throws it it’s active, but if he hands it to me it’s not?’
So I reach out for it and just as I’m about to grab it he gently pops it up an inch so it lands in my hand… Poof I respawn in a 300 count.
Afterwards everyone laughed as a veteran player recounted from his pov.
‘That’s SoA. He didn’t touch that did he’ *glance back* ‘**** he did’
In an Old World of Darkness changeling game, I played a nocker on a digichat game that would pick up everything that wasn’t nailed down and would take out a crowbar if it was. Eventually, I came up with an Alchemy Shelf for my forge and could plunder its troves to make whatever treasures I wanted to.
Notable inclusions to the shelf were the Obliterating Acid that I gathered by the gallon in a Deadspace sort of area and used by the fluid ounce to get things done, and the sheets of raw shadow that were collected when everyone found themselves in a part of the Dreaming where all the flora was enormous and the shadows floated off by themselves. My guy collected his own shadow and several others from surrounding leaves, stuffing them all into his enchanted gunny sack. Everyone else lost theirs and had to bleed glamour for the next couple of days in the Real World until they put together a quest to reclaim them. Meanwhile, my guy had his wife stitch his shadow back onto his feet like you do when that sort of thing happens.
And now I bring that sort of collective agency into the pathfinder game where I’m an Inquisitor. We just had a rogue/slayer join up, which is handy (for the sneakbuddy aspect, duo scouting runs are much safer than solo), but I’ve already used a bag of rare spices, 10 small glass bars, and a plethora of other random rolls on ‘what do you find?’ from my solo searches, and I’m looking for a way to employ my six bolts of canvas in a way that saves the day again.
How does one utilize small glass bars in the pursuit of dungeoneering heroics?
I suspected an NPC of traitorous shenanigans and consorting with demonfolks, so I followed him. He stopped and did something with the ground, but I couldn’t tell what it was, so after he looped around to go back, I buried the glass bars in a pattern around where he’d done whatever he did, just below the surface of the soil.
Then we got sneak attacked by demons that night. I basically ran the whole fight from one of the creatures that could see invisibility because the Big Boss put me near zero right from the get go, until I finally had enough space to employ my bow. After surviving, in the morning I checked the glass bars. All shattered. Evidence? Yes.
Just having rope and a grappling hook solves most of my problems.
A spell scroll of tidal wave saved my butt when I tried to solo a dungeon that the party had tackled 3 levels prior. (We got the mcGuffin and left, but I went back for loot when I had a good opportunity.)
Ima need some elaboration on this whole scroll of tidal wave situation.
As a rogue, I generally had very few options in the event of being out-numbered, and was in a tight spot with only a few hitpoints left, in this pocket dimension dungeon by myself (as an in-game reason for a few sessions absence from the table), with a half-dozen skeletons in front of me.
Being the default stuff carrier, I figured I must have something on me that would work, and found a spell scroll for a 30ft x 10ft x 10ft tall wall of water for 4d8 damage. None of the skeletons survived, so I took a short rest.
Later that day I went against the vague warnings of some spirits, and accidentally summoned a disembodied evil spirit. Ended up trading my last vial of dragon blood in return for getting to leave alive. It later turned out that he used it to make himself a body, and became the BBEG.
I blame the NPC who gave us the ring/portal to the dungeon, without bothering to tell us that it was Vecna’s personal hideout.
Did you… Did you turn Vecna into an F-ing dragon!?
I wouldn’t put it quite so bluntly, but yes.
It was ok though, because we bombed his army from an airship, then later managed to get his soul sealed into a scroll, which we gave to an angel whose job it was to deal with the soul scroll.
Depending on how you treat an after-campaign slight of hand check, I may have kept it.
Is that a Spider Eater? I had one of those (with some added on templates) as a Leadership granted minion/mount. It was pretty cool and fit the character since the party would often go “uh… what is that you’re even doing” or “uh… I don’t know if that’s ‘evil’ but it’s at least evil-adjacent”.
Anyway, I think Laurel made it appropriately cute.
Also I choose to believe it’s just grabbing Thief so it can have a somewhat fair staring contest for once in it’s life. =P
And Thief is all like, “No! Anything but a staring contest! I’m too self-conscious!” So kawaii.
Also: Looks like somebody made his Knowledge check. I’ve been having great fun going through the bestiary and asking Laurel for different monsters, and that is indeed a spider eater. Fun story about this particular image. I was running a campaign on a tropical island, and I knew that Laurel had to miss the next session. I also knew that I wanted to get the party to go explore a creepy abandoned city on the other side of the island. So as the gang were traipsing along the side of this volcano, I sprung some spider eaters on them as the last encounter of the day.
“And as you try to fend them off, one of the things nabs your trusty paladin!” I go into this big explanation of how the spider eaters grab Laurel’s character, lifting him away into the air. “You can see the two of them struggle with one another, wrestling for the killing blow hundreds of feet above the ground before crash landing in some ruins far below.”
“Can’t I shoot them?” asks the sorcerer.
“What? Ummm… No. They’re out of range.”
“But my range is over 400 ft.! How fast is this thing?”
“Very fast. And also shut up.”
And that is my only experience with spider eaters. If memory serves, Thief should wind up appearing from the ruins just in time to save the party from a chain devil.
So I’m playing a PFS scenario. Bit of a mystery, dungeon, etc. We get to the third room, maybe solve a puzzle. We get this really weird item, a mystic veil for the head slot. What does it do? It counts you as automatically averting your eyes against a Gaze attack, and averting your eyes gives you 100% protection against gaze attacks. It can also be set upon a victim’s body to act as a Stone to Flesh spell.
I’ll give you three guesses as to what the next encounter was.
It worked out, though. My character was a Vigilante with a heavy snake motif, and she was absolutely -delighted- to actually speak face to face with a Medusa afterwards.
I feel like there’s a potential deeper discussion about “silver bullet” mechanics like Swarms needing AoE or Incorporeal creatures in general, but I kinda want to sit down and give it a good think first.
Well feel free to bounce any ideas off of your friendly neighborhood web comic writer. Silver bullets seem like good grounds for another comic.
I have a game with a Dwarvish Cleric who absolutely loves collecting things in his bag of holding. Some items of note include but are not limited to, some acid, several crates of alchemists fire, wyverns skin, a tomb of heavenly wisdom, his brothers corpse, an old tabard from a wight, a lance from the skeleton knight that killed his brother, and 500 pounds of stone from a shambling mound.
In other news, I have an Archmagus with a room entirely devoted to cursed items in her tower. It’s hilarious how often she considers selling said items so that she can acquire better equipment for herself despite the pension from being Archmagus.
How did you manage to acquire a whole room’s worth of cursed crap?
When you’re the Archmagus for a region that is filled with spell casters, over active Gods, and spell slinging monsters, cursed items turn up with a surprising amount of frequency.
What would divine Ritalin do to a mortal? The mind boggles.
I suspect that if it didn’t kill the person they would be very calm.
Instant monk powers.
In my experiences handing players the perfect solution for an upcoming problem was never a… problem. Mostly because hints tended to their/our heads, and anything that we didn’t immediately see a use for was sold, pawned, or traded away at the first available opportunity.
If our GM wanted to hand-feed us a solution, it had to be one for the problem that was already causing us to be neck-deep in trouble.
The thing is, players want to be able to make those mistakes (if you even want to think of them as mistakes). They want to be able to sell, pawn, or trade away the key item. That way they can come up with their own solution instead. And when that happens, I just like to imagine the triumphant player singing high note on “My May.”
Yes, your comments ring very true. a few sessions ago my players were confronted with an agressive, regenerating wall of thorny vines that they needed to pass. I was very clear to specify that they could not circumvent it; and breaking through the wall, though possible, was very hard for the lvl 4 party as one needed to do a lot of damage to a section in a single round to make a hole large enough to scrape through.
This whole “dungeon” was themed as a cursed forest and on multiple occasions before encountering the thorn wall the players had observed a virulent fungal blight attacking trees in some areas – the herbalist Cairstine (that sleepless warlock wiccan girl I mentioned in other comments) even went so far as to study ir somewhat, and found that, though fairly harmless to animals, once it infected a plant it would rapidly eat away at the thing.
Then they left the blight to itself. I’d expected the party, faced with the thorn wall, to gp back and get some blight spores to infect it; I’d left the mechanics for breaking through as a last resort to let the uninventive party hack their way through, and that course would hurt them a lot.
But no, as they studied the obstacle, party ranger Flynn observed that he had three flasks of oil in his kit. These they used to drench a wide section of the barrier, and then had their wizard set it alight with a humble fire bolt. It seemed reasonable to me to count each oil flask as an additional fire bolt level damage, allowing them to simultaneously scorch enough of an area to break through so that only the last two through were grappled by the regerating barrier and had to cut themselves free.
That blight has never even entered their thoughts, then or since.
There’s always an answer in the backpack. Or on Wikipedia.