Lucky Guess
I’m glad things worked out so well for Street Samurai in today’s comic. Magitech terminals are famously tricky beasts, and if your choices are take-a-wild-guess or death, a shot in the dark is probably the right call. However, in contravention of the Handbook’s advice, I posit that blindly trusting your luck isn’t always the best idea. In order to impress upon you the importance this lesson, I would like to relate to you another tale from the local megadungeon.
So no shit, there they were. It was down in the depths of Level 7, and the team had just waded through half an Abyss’s worth of demonic horde. Having nearly TPK’d in a “social encounter” with a glabrezu, our party of intrepid adventurers was ever so slightly jumpy. The stepped into the latest room with swords drawn and spells at the ready, but they needn’t have worried. For once there weren’t any half-fiendish ogres or babau demons waiting to stab them with hayforks. Instead they were greeted by a nice safe puzzle room.
There were some fun objet d’art lying around, but the item that really drew their attention was a copper panel on one wall. There were 10 buttons on the panel, each bearing a numeral in Draconic. After a bit of investigation, they soon found that an aura of transmutation magic hung about the device. After a bit more investigation, they discovered that A) The panel had more than one function, and B) They would have to push three buttons in order for any of the panel’s functions to work.
As many of you good little GMs out there might have guessed, various codes were hidden about the level. By finding these and entering them into the panel, players could deactivate traps (7-7-1), lower forcefields (6-4-7), or otherwise mess with the dungeon’s architecture in advantageous ways.
And as many of you bad little players might have guessed, it was totally possible to brute force the thing. I mean, a three-digit code isn’t exactly rocket science. Even if you assume it takes one full round to enter a code, that’s still only 100 minutes of guess-and-check.
“We begin spamming numbers!” my players declared.
“Alright. Do you start from 9-9-9 and count down, or are you going up from 0-0-0?”
There was a brief conference on the matter. “We’ll start low and count up.”
I began to describe the tedium of the process. I made sure to roll for the requisite random encounters as time passed. I gave them every chance to choose some other course of action.
“You try 4-2-3, but it yields no result,” I said. “Again at 4-2-4, no result. But when you press the final digit of the next sequence… Ima need some Reflex saving throws.”
You see, dungeon author Monte Cook knows his stuff. He understand player psychology. And realizing that players would try a brute force approach, he inserted this little number into the adventure:
4-2-5: Blasts sonic energy (12d6, DC 22 Reflex save for half) in every chamber on this level. (Code found nowhere. Only a divination spell or perhaps long research in ancient tomes could produce this.) This functions only one time.
It was an honest-to-god PA system feedback trap built into the combination lock puzzle, and my players had walked straight into it. Saves were rolled, ears started bleeding, and a few of them came dangerously close to perma-death. Happily, no one quite managed to die. After a few dabs from the group’s wand of cure light wounds, everyone was more or less back in fighting trim.
“Alright,” I said. “What would you guys like to try next?”
They looked at one another. “4-2-6,” they said in unison. Because players are players, and they are predictable creatures.
Question of the day then! Have you ever managed to “brute force” a problem in a game? Was it a matter of bashing through a door rather than unlocking it? Maybe you killed a guardian rather than answering his question. Or perhaps you made like Street Samurai and applied the old guess-and-check until that vault door opened. Whatever your Gordian knot-cutting technique, tell us all about it down in the comments!
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Hah, yes. There we were, exploring a vampire’s lair, when we came to a room whose floor was covered in guano and whose ceiling was covered in bats.
There was a tunnel opening in the middle of the floor, so we should’ve tried stealthing over, yes? Que the party Bard: “Wait. There’s a heavy door and guano burns, right? Besides, the vampire already knows we’re here.”
One guess who was playing a Half-Sidhe Bard, by the way. 😉
A vampire’s lair? You fools! Smoke inhalation was the real villain all along!
No worries, there was adequate ventilation.
The bats needed an exit, after all.
I mean that trap could have been a lot worse. Could dropped ’em into a pit with a horrible monster or an incinerator. Maybe a horrible monster that lives in the incinerator
Damn. I like that a lot. It’s a great marriage of my “traps are more fun in combat” philosophy.
Easiest way to accomplish this is an acid pit, with acid-proof sharks or demons inside. Or just a pit on the bottom of which is an Ooze enemy that auto-engulfs anyone who falls in.
Or a pit with a Sarlacc at the bottom.
So it turns out the ‘pit’ is actually its mouth….
Refer to the Hungry Pit spell!
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/h/hungry-pit/
I don’t get too many puzzles thrown at me, but this one time while we were in a dungeon, Fighter and Rogue activated a magic trap that sent them off to a locked room. The door would only open by solving a Tetris-like puzzle board. They spent the next 2 hours trying to solve it before the session ended but couldn’t, even after the GM gave them a couple of hints. The GM let them come back in the middle of the week to solve it so it wouldn’t take up their whole time the next session. I don’t know how long it took them to finally solve it or how many hints the GM gave.
I like the idea of challenging the players rather than the characters form time to time. But holy crap, don’t make the challenge mandatory! Make it a puzzle box or an optional treasure chamber or something! Yeesh.
Changing up the pace of play is always a good thing; that’s why God of War games have puzzles. But AFAIK (never played one, but I watched a LP of the latest) they keep using and iterating on the a small set of puzzle building blocks, ramp up the complexity slowly, and most importantly use basically the same mechanics as the rest of the game (e.g. breaking stuff), just in a different context.
Contrast Helltaker, whose last level suddenly goes from a puzzle game to what amounts to bullet hell. I’m so bitter about the abrupt genre shift from one I enjoy to one I suck at that it’s still my go-to example for a bad way to introduce contrasting mechanics even though I haven’t played it since…August? Really? Gods, this year has been rough on my sense of time.
Helltaker: The game you play for its puzzle gameplay, and absolutely no other reason. :p
I realize I’m weird, but yes. I’m not a waifu kind of guy.
I think he learnt his lesson because he never through something like that at us again.
That’s too bad. I theoretically have a supplement about riddles coming out in future, and I really do think it’s less about “they’re always an un-fun very bad idea” and more about how your present them as an encounter.
No, he did do a couple more puzzles. Just none that difficult or that we HAD to do. And then he burnt out on DMing and the group kinda ended.
In my first proper campaign, we were meant to fail at killing the main villain, an anti paladin who was well above our level. He would take the McGuffin from us, and we would have to rely on knowledge of the item’s dangers, a little history on him and some detective work to save the world after recovering, because we wouldn’t have the time to level.
Of course, the DM made the mistake of allowing my poet, half-elf grave cleric (poet is the most important bit) Orestes Tintasquel Agellion Xilanthi-Escabaro to make an early 2000 gp from the sale of his books to various idiotic noblemen, so what actually happened when the villain attacked our cart was that the item was safe in the vault of a family friend whilst he had just jumped into the midst of seven barrels of gunpowder primed to explode when the chest in the centre was opened. We ran for cover; he took 153 fire damage, he survived on 3hp and had to run. After a day or so of tracking him, we located his lair… and just sent our hired Gladiators in. It’s a long-running joke in our party that at levels 4 and below, a gladiator is so much better than any party member that you may as well just commission them to clear dungeons and take a 5% finder’s fee, and that worked out here. We made sure we got the killing blow, though. Mr., Mrs. And Master Gladiator did not make it out.
TL; DR – Screw the complex academic and investigative puzzle designed to force our characters to use their brains to defeat a vastly superior opponent – I have money!
I like it. 😀 It’s a bit like being Batman or Tony Stark, except with pragmatism and rationality.
You are the reason this comic exists: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
What system was this in that you could hire gladiators?
Where did Street Samurai find an outpost with future-tech in Handbookworld?
Furture-rech? My dear Rock, the blog clearly says that it is a “magitech terminal.” This is obviously a fantasy image.
Same place Street Samurai’s future-magitech came from.
So here we were, out in a spider-infested forest, Hobbit style, and our hapless party of elves were desperately trying to fend off an ambush of the buggers. One of their victims was still alive, you see, and being basically good aligned we werent just going to leave them there. However, the forest was covered in their webs, and they were going every which way but the one we wanted them to. Cue the wizard:
“I cast fireball on the trees”
Because spiderwebs burn exceptionally well, and he was well and thoroughly done with that nonsense. Well, it worked. something like 10 miles of forest went up in a blaze, and took most of the spiders with it. And their poor captive, who turned out to be an exceptionally tough dwarf named Dalim. Poor Dalim had been wrapped in well-burning spiderwebs, and on top of being burned half to death, had lost his beard. This NPC, who was supposed to be friendly and our way into the dwarven kingdom, nearly killed our wizard on the spot. We’re lucky that we found another way to prove ourselves to the dwarves, and that he became unable to speak against us for a while, or that probably would have ended the campaign then and there.
Some elves! Burning down trees… For shame! What would Druid think?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/damage-type
If druid is anything like us, “OH GOD SPIDERS! KILL IT WITH FIRE!”
Some things just shouldnt be tolerated.
Hey, the occasional quick fire is good for forests. It’s how nature gets rid of mast and dead trees and junk like that so you don’t end up with a really nasty wildfire.
Speaking of which, at least in the USA the National Forest Service didn’t realize this for a few generations. So they worked hard to stop forest fires, which meant that forest fires down the line were eventually too big to contain, burning wide and hot enough to destroy the forest badly enough that it couldn’t regrow like it normally could.
Smokey the Bear is weeping in the ashes of his hubris now. Nobody can prevent forest fires…they can only delay the inevitable.
the group I am currently playing in is actually very good at being smart. And stealthy too. It makes me happy on a tactical level, to see such well organized players playing characters that work together so well!
that being said, dice eventually have to be rolled by both players and DM and luck is not always on our side – in fact, one of our players has extremely bad luck… Wil Wheaton levels of bad luck :O
So even our best plans, come down to brute forcing our way through things as luck just won’t allow us to use any plan or figure things out, even if we as players might know, our characters end up being morons! (or however the situation plays out with skill checks and such)
All that being said, we still have a blast, because what fun is it for everything to go according to plan all the time?
or… ever! 😀
Just had one of these last night. My group was suddenly surrounded by four chromatic dragons. The immediately made plans to regroup and GTFO rather than trying to stand and fight. It was a proud moment as a GM.
Gimme an example on your side! When did the luck suddenly go against you guys despite cautious play?
literally every session XD
I think we may have had a plan go “smooth” once in almost a hundred sessions so far…
using your dragon example, we made a near perfect plan to assault a dragon that we were forewarned about. We scouted, we made a four part entry plan, we had our group ready and entering as intended…
then the dragon breathed frost all over our party in a surprise round (because it knew we were there the whole time, turns out dragons have blindsight) and then the rolls began to fail us, two of our party never got to even enter combat and another two got KOd in the first and second round respectively.
we won the fight, but it was a mess. Hilariously fun tho!
lol. We had that same mistake last session.
“I cast fog cloud! Then quickened fog cloud! The dragons won’t be able to find us in here!”
Friggin’ dragon senses….
That plan’s questionable even without draconic blindsense. After all, dragons are smart—they know that if there’s a big fog cloud, and the people they’re hunting aren’t visible, they must be in the fog cloud…and dragons, by their very nature, have a good AoE attack.
Reminds me of a time I was running a space game and the party decided to ram the enemy spaceship. I pointed out that given the distances and speeds involved, ramming was basically impossible and would result in the destruction of their ship, too.
I wouldn’t be telling this story if they didn’t roll that system’s equivalent of a natural 20. But man do I wish the context was as memorable as m yshock and the player’s joy about the explosive end to that one-shot.
I suppose this is more of a “dumb luck” story than a “brute force” story, though. And I misplaced a space. Ah well.
You know what? I’ll forgive you just this once.
More generally, I think the difference between “guessing a password” and “rolling a d100” isn’t so great. We’re talking about a low chance in both cases, you know? And “this probably won’t work” turning into great success is the real experience.
Oh boy, I have a few of these ‘blind luck’ and ‘brute force’ tales.
In Mummy’s Mask, a particularly conniving bad guy used his mooks as a distraction to run through a secret tunnel, heavily wounded but not downed. As we caught up to them, they pulled a lever and closed a wall on us, all but ensuring their escape, as we’d spend too long trying to open the wall.
My Kobold Gunslinger, pissed and refusing to admit defeat, loaded an adamantine bullet and shot through the wall to try and hit the guy. DM allowed it, asking for a d100 roll.
He rolled a 100. We were all flabbergasted as the Kobold miraculously, through a wall and shooting blindly, managed to score a hit, hearing a pained yelp and a thud. One bashed/disabled wall later and we found the guy on the ground, dead, preventing him from returning later in a nastier fight.
Other brute force solutions include:
Our barbarian ignoring a BBEG’s big speech to demolish a door to their lair, triggering a trap but also destroying a puzzle at the same time.
My wizard encasing a pair of nasty encounters in steel via polymorph any object (the monsters were sleeping in a tar pit), bypassing an encounter entirely.
Demolishing a large, deadly tower that shoots hellfire rays at enemies by destroying its support/base with a Clashing Rocks spell, causing it to collapse.
Poking a Lich’s Phylactery with a Rod of Cancellation, effectively destroying it and the lich connected to it.
Using more Rods of Cancellation to destroy Force Walls that would otherwise been in our way.
Bypassing a Wall of Force by becoming incorporeal and going through the surrounding walls, or teleporting through them entirely.
That Kobold Gunslinger story is epic.
Yeah it. What the crap kind of d100 chance is that anyway!?
Odds wise, I imagine it was like dealing with total concealment (50% miss chance), only even harder as I was shooting at someone I couldn’t see/hear/detect, and my projectile was going through a wall on top of that.
Reviewing through the logs though, I misremembered a few details!
The d100 was done by the DM in secret (simulating the miss chance from shooting blindly through a solid wall), after I rolled a fairly high roll to hit normally, but they said it managed to hit him (to their own disbelief). When asked about whether it was a 100, they said ‘yeah, something like that’.
In addition, there was another element to them trying to flee – our Oracle managed to cast Shadow Trap on the dude as he was fleeing, effectively pinning them to their own shadow and delaying them a turn – enough for me to pull it off.
We had a recently infuriating/trollish dungeon feature which practically asked for brute forcing. It was a series of doors. Ten doors, to be precise, one after another, every single one locked with an Arcane Lock, not unlike the ‘door factory’ cartoon gag. My Gunslinger lost patience after disabling device the 4th door and just ordered the party’s beefcakes to demolish the rest of them.
Hell yeah. My kind of solution!
Though I do hope the last door led into a pit trap or something.
Sort of! It led to a room with six more doors (all trapped, of course), and a annoying pair of swarm enemies that we weren’t able to properly damage.
We ended up using greater dispel to remove all the glyphs at once rather than go through the tedium of disarming each one.
I once set up a puzzle for my players featuring a ring of five small statues on pressure plates and four paintings. Four of the statues corresponded to the paintings; the trick was to pick up the one that didn’t belong. Picking up the wrong statue would unleash an elemental trap. Immediately, no hesitation, the rogue asked if she could “cat” and knock all the statues off the table. After the first trap was sprung, everyone else fled from the room, and she got it right on her third try.
lol. Is the third try average? I’m bad at math, but I think third try is exactly average.
Was the character an actual cat? Was the player a cat?
This is less a brute force story, and more of a lucky guess on my part. I was playing a ratfolk fire warlock with scoundrelous intentions in Palladium Fantasy RPG. We’re level 1, we have no money, it’s session one, and I am already DONE with being dirt poor. The GM starts us in a faire type situation where many local artisans are showing their wares. So naturally, I decide this is an optimal situation to rob someone blind.
I decide I’m going to rob the blacksmith. The GM is completely unprepared for this, but states there is a guard back there. So I walk up to him and stutter out in my best crying acting voice, “A-a-are you Reckson?” and give him a shpiel about how I was sent to find a Private Reckson and deliver a message to him and I’m new and have no idea who it is. I roll my MA and convince the guard this is legit, so he offers to go find Private Reckson for me. No sooner is he out of eye sight that I look into infiltrating the shop and I find a tunnel and a guard dog. Another MA roll and an offering of jerky, and I am past the dog.
Now we come to the puzzle. There are three levels and no clues. Without any hesitation, I call out “Left, right, middle.” It turned out to be the exact combination he made up on the spot. I perform my level one heist while the blacksmith is distracted with customers, and as I am pulling out of the hole with my illicit gains, the guard is coming back.
After we finished playing the Benny Hill theme and I got away, I sold all of the weapons as ‘magic, fiery weapons’ by putting oil in their scabbards, drawing the blades, and igniting the oil using my Fire Warlock magic and turned the pile of eight mundane weapons into 1500 gold.
To this day, I have no idea what would have happened had I got the combination wrong.
I imagine they would have sent the dog in after you. Also the Benny Hill song.
Inspired by Castle Amber and then end of Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone, I had crafted series of rooms for my players to chase a villain through, with the bad guy having somehow slipped past each challenge or puzzle just ahead of them. One room had a statue as a balance with a lb. symbol on the weight permanently affixed to one hand and a tray held in the other. A barrel of wine and three vessels were provided: a wine glass marked “III”, a beer stein marked “V”, and a shattered pint glass marked “IV.” The more accomplished inebriates among the players ID’d the containers as being marked by 4-oz. servings: 12 oz. goblet, 16 oz. pint, 20 oz. imperial pint. The villain had used the pint glass to balance the statue and open the door, then shattered it as he left to foil the PCs in their pursuit. I steepled my fingers, awaiting the trial-error-process that would lead to the solution of the logic puzzle. The team’s Fighter (my teenage son) promptly declared “A pint’s a pound the world around” and used the one-a-day make whole spell on his Dwarven warhammer of Fixit to restore the pint glass, filled it with wine, and opened the door.
A moment later he looked at my stunned face (as I’d clearly forgotten about the hammer’s never-used ability) and asked, “(um) Out of curiosity, how were we supposed to solve it?”
I love hammers of fixing and axes of healing and whatnot. Gives me a laugh every time.
I had a one-eyed dwarf barbarian who, when no one could disarm a trapped door, just took it in the face. I rule of cooled that the subsequent crossbow bolt thudded into his empty eye socket, and he commented that it was good it wasn’t the other eye.
As it turns out, stuffing that socket with gauze is both medically and tactically advisable!
Excuse me, I’ve got to go change the combination on my luggage.
Still holding out hope for a sequel.
When it comes to comedy sequels, there are two kinds—the kind made with passion, and the kind made because the first one was successful. It’s late enough that we can probably discount the first possibility, and the second…
Adorable. https://grownup-gamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/feature_merchandising_818x490.jpg
Colin D&D is pure brute force a problem until it’s solved 😀
Think of it. A bunch of people reunites. Do they look for an honest job to earn money? No. They look for the nearest dungeon to invade it and takes its treasures. Does the king solve the economical problems of the kingdom that provoke a galloping tendency on the younger generations to risk their lives in dungeons through better economical policies and stimulus packages? No. He seats while waiting for this young adventures to come with riches and tax them. Do anyone even resolve their own problems in D&D? No, they take the most brute force option, hire a bunch of adventures to solve your problems for you 🙂
Brute force your problems is the essence of D&D 😀
By the way, is that a vault that contains the artifact that transport Street Samurai to the HBoH world? Is this but a flashback she is having while dreaming in some inn of that strange new world where she is? 😀
It’s magitech. You ever hear of the Red Redoubt of Karamoss?
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Red_Redoubt
Same kinda deal.
There is no such thing as magitech. All tech is just magic sufficiently analyzed 😛
Get out of here, Arthur C. Clarke. Go write some more laws or something!
How little respect for someone of his age and better novelist than that vance guy 🙂
I now want to do a Marxist analysis of D&Dconomics. Unfortunately, the games are awfully vague on how adventuring works for adventurers that aren’t PCs; some people assume everyone plays by the same rules, others assume that NPC adventurers have a high death toll, etc.
Marxist analysis of D&D economics? I think there are several. Specially on dwarfs and dragon and how they hoarding of goods and money disrupt commerce and economy becoming examples of capitalism do wrong 🙂
Look even after a small search: “dragon hoarding according to capitalist view” i got this article called The Smaug Fallacy:
https://fee.org/articles/the-smaug-fallacy/
Wait D&D is economics?
Always has been 😛
reminds me of „Wizard‘s Bane“ by Rick Cook.
password guessing deamon
Holy crap that cover….
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/55/56/ae/5556ae2bd09ca0ec00d001e7e8b98ba4.jpg
This literally just happened to me in a CyberPunk campaign on Roll20. I was playing the groups hacker, and a martial artist wanted me to “talk him through” hacking past a door with a keypad lock and no wireless access. After explaining that it just doesn’t work in real life like it does in the holovids, I told him that there were a few stupid tricks that had an outside chance of working, such as the default passcode that the lock was shipped with, or the “bad manager’s luggage code” of 12345. The second one got him in, random GM roll.
A very important question: Did the GM roll in the open?
It’s always tough to gauge the one-in-a-million chances when GM screens are involved.
I trust this GM. He’s neither vindictive nor Monty Haul.
It was a bold action and my greatest line. You see our rogue had triggered a trap that teleported him to a room with 2 purple worms being on the more heroic side of neutral we rushed to save him. There was a locked door that we couldn’t brute force. My sorcerer “I have a spell for this” cleric “you had knock prepared this whole time!?” “No disintegration” GM I cast disintegration at the door. I rolled it and did over 100 damage. Having fired disintegration over a dozen times that campaign I cant tell you how good it felt to finally roll the full set of dice for disintegration.
“It says here that objects get blown away automatically. So the door disappears into a fine gray–”
“I’d rather roll it.”
“But the door is automatically destroyed!”
“I’m rolling damage.”
“No look, I’m saying there’s no reason for you to–”
“DO NOT TAKE THIS FROM ME!”
…
I may have been frustrated by disintegrate a time or two myself.
Ofcourse, one risk on insisting on rolling is that the dice might turn on you and fail to deliver.
There’s a story walking around in my gaming community of one time in an exalted game where the group where infiltrating some place by jumping over a wall and even through the ST let anyone with athletics 2+ automatically succeed the Athletics focused character of course insisted on rolling to show off his huge fancy dicepool… only to promptly botch and jump face first into it instead.
Ah yes, the first thing players do when encountering any type of combination puzzle… calculate how long it would take to attempt every single combination. (Which funny thing, is actually part of a legit way to bypass certain combination padlocks. Use some tricks to narrow down the remaining combinations to only 100, then only takes about 5min to test all 100 remaining combinations one by one.)
I’ve only run into this twice, once as a player and once while running a published adventure as a GM. As a player, I think we frustrated the GM since the “Puzzle” didn’t take that long to brute force before we all continued on our way.
As a GM running one such puzzle, the scenario writers thought far enough ahead to make the puzzle take place during a timed race against an anti-party. Sitting around to brute force it would almost certainly result in the anti-party catching up, so my group ended up actually solving it the legitimate way. Doing so let them finish looting the place and leaving before the anti-party got a chance to show. At which point I decided to add a bit of improv and the group heard the anti-party shouting curses at them from a distance while they were travelling home, followed by “Oh shit, a Manticore!” (PCs had managed to stealth around the Manticore both in getting to and leaving the area on top of the mountain, so I let them be amused with the idea they let it become a TPK encounter for their rivals.)
Nicely done with the manticore. Always make sure their decisions affect the world!
And that’s a cool example with the time pressure of the combo lock. Brute forcing = combat is an interesting decisions, and I think that’s better than saying “you must solve this puzzle or game night is over.”
One time, a barbarian in my party actually managed to rewrite reality with his incredible puzzle solving skills.
There we were, deep in the depths of a dungeon when we encountered a sphinx. The DM had just gotten a book of riddles and was eager to try them out, so of course the sphinx challenged us to a riddle to pass. The riddle was, “The more of me you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?” Before anyone in the party could even open their mouths, the barbarian roared out, “It’s sh! The more sh‘s you take, the more sh** you leave behind!” There was laughter, and then the sphinx asked, “Is that your final answer?” The rest of the party frantically hushed the barbarian and gave the real answer, footsteps. The sphinx was silent for a moment, then roared, “No, you fools, the answer was clearly sh! You have failed!” After beating the sphinx, one of the players asked the DM what the answer really was. The DM replied, “I mean, it was supposed to be footsteps, but come on, how could I say no to sh?”
I believe the GM solved the riddle of running this encounter correctly.
I actually encourage the ‘brute force puzzle-solving’ in the game I help run. This is the gladiatorial game I’ve mentioned before, and there are several Patrons who reward gladiators for specific behaviours during matches. The Patron I created/control is Kalameet, an enigma creature who is the most chatty patron, and rewards gladiators for solving problems in… Unorthodox ways. One recent example was a player who, during a game of Capture the Flag, ran to the enemy’s flag, grabbed it, and cast Mirror Image, then sprinted back to their side before the enemy could handle all the images. Another example was during a match I was running. The fight was taking place aboard an airship, and one of the contestants decided to spice combat up by using Warp Wood to rip one of the engines off the airship. It turned standard combat with an interesting backdrop into a high-stakes survival encounter as the players had to deal with the airship careening towards the ocean. They survived, and the player earned a Kalameet favour token for needlessly complicating everything in a way the patron found quite entertaining.
You ever see The Thomas Crown Affair?
“I saw him wreck a 100,000 dollar boat because he liked the splash.”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your example, but it seems to me that brute-forcing the panel shouldn’t have worked, or at least not the way the party wanted it to. If there were codes to disarm defenses, there would also have been codes to raise them, and the party would have no way of knowing what each code actually did. So if they simply brute-forced the entire list of options, they would have basically rewritten the dungeon at random, creating new obstacles, removing others, probably undoing some of what they did, and all with no idea what had actually happened. For example, what if one of the codes they entered unlocked some monster pens, releasing several very dangerous wandering monsters. Or imagine if one of the codes locks the doors into the dungeon, so the party can’t get out of the dungeon without getting back to the control room and figuring out which code unlocks the doors.
“I’m sorry, 3 invalid codes have been entered in a row, you will need to wait TEN MINUTES before trying again”
“I’m sorry, 3 invalid codes have been entered in a row, you will need to wait TWENTY MINUTES before trying again”
“I’m sorry…”
Later: Soooo…. What do you guys do while you wait for the 3 days it’ll take for the panel to become valid again?