Rewarding Quests
It’s not easy being Quest Giver. The clients are disreputable. The business model is questionable. And if that floppy hat is anything to judge by, peripheral vision is hovering somewhere around zero. Worst of all though, the quest giving business itself is way harder than you’d think.
This issue has been on my mind lately thanks to a recent uptick in design work. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been knocking out mini-dungeons for AAW Games. It’s a cool gimmick for a writer. They give you a map, 1,000 words to work with, and access to the 5e SRD. Otherwise they turn you loose to write whatever you like. It’s been a fun design challenge turning numbered rooms on a map into fully fleshed-out dungeons, and the constraints tend to produce all kinds of creativity. However, when the deadline looms and word count is getting tight, the temptation to toss in “lock and key” quests is sometimes hard to resist. You know the type. Get blue key to open blue door. Give the correct answer to the riddle. Collect six wolf butts to impress the Huntsmaster. There’s nothing wrong with these scenarios per se. They’re tried and true staples of game design because they work. Titles like Adventure, Monkey Island, and WoW are more or less built on these principles. But when it comes to designing quests for the tabletop, you’ve got to remember that there’s always more than one key for any given lock.
Take our Dragon Party in today’s comic. They’ve gone in for the direct approach, turning themselves in for their own bounty. That is certainly one way to do it. But if the goal is to get that sweet sweet quest reward, I bet you can think of half a dozen different ways to get the job done. A simple Deception check, straight up robbing Quest Giver, or esoteric solutions like sculpt corpse could all do the trick. As GMs we know that players like nothing better than cutting Gordian knots, applying outrageous solutions to seemingly straightforward problems. This is a GOOD THING, and very much to be encouraged. When you’re designing an adventure though (or prepping notes for a session), it’s all too easy to pencil in the “correct” solution.
Phrases like “it’s impossible to open the door unless,” “to get past the Sphinx the heroes must,” or “to prove their loyalty the party will have to” have a habit of showing up in my own games. And when they’re written down with all the authority of The Module Says So, GMs may begin to think that these are the only solutions. The railroad rears its ugly head, and the joy of creative problem solving threatens to disappear. That’s why I make it a habit to take modules (including my own) with a massive grain of salt. Just because the phrase “one possible solution” isn’t written down in black and white doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, hiding between the lines. My point is that your players can and will think of their own solutions. That means anything a designer, a GM, or a game system suggests should be understood as a solution, not the solution.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we share our own experiences with “lock and key” design? When did you last encounter an encounter with only one “correct” solution? Did you manage to think your way around the problem, or did the gates remain stubbornly shut? Tell us all about your most rigidly-defined obstacles down in the comments!
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I was playing a game of pathfinder where we were wandering down a long abandoned dwarven highway and came across a very suspicious salesman. I (and my character) were trying to figure out how a lone dwarf could be in this tunnel, let alone selling all the exact best things we possibly could have wanted to purchase that we hadn’t been able to find up til this point in the campaign.
As the token bard, I was trying to make sense of this in a story capacity, and asked if there was any history of the classic magic teleporting shops, or gods that fit this particular dwarf’s description.
Apparently this did not suit the single action which the DM was looking for. Not only did I get confirmation of being correct in my guess right after the salesman left (with the DM claiming magic dwarf god powers for the bard not remembering the specific bit of lore that he knew) but the rest of the party that purchased something off the highly suspicious dwarf got a free stat boost, and my poor maligned bard received nothing for daring to guess the DM’s plan.
Sounds to me like you found a plothole and your GM decided to punish you for pointing it out. I’m not sure that’s quite “lock and key” though. At least not the way I’m thinking of it.
Let’s pretend the GM wasn’t just being a jerk. For the sake of argument, let’s say they’d planned out the interaction as follows:
To me, this is old school “press your luck” gaming. Do you drink from the magic fountain or don’t you? Maybe you’ll be rewarded for your daring, and maybe you’ll be cursed. I think that’s a different class of animal than “lock and key” design for the simple reason that it’s optional. There’s clearly a correct answer, but the consequences are “get nothing” vs. “get rewarded / punished.” By contrast, in lock and key design you’re presented with a non-optional encounter with only one possible solution: guess the riddle’s answer or the door stays shut and you can’t progress.
In that sense, the difference is between access to a side-quest reward vs. overcoming a mandatory obstacle, even if the concept of “the one correct solution” is present in both. You’ve always got the option to not risk danger for a chance a treasure, so there’s a choice buried in the interaction. On the other hand, if the only way to kill Smaug is to give Bard the black arrow, it’s impossible to complete the adventure without implementing the designer’s pre-existing solution.
Does that make sense?
Makes a lot of sense. Damn, first time I comment and I use the wrong example! Maybe next time…
And I wish my DM at the time had framed it like you just did. Would have been a very different encounter, I think, but he was a bit too much an old school DM vs PCs type guy.
Not at all! It’s useful to see the similar cases and related concepts. 🙂
There’s a riddle in the Sunless Citadel (we were playing 5e with the Tales from the Yawning Portal book) where the answer is…
SUNLESS CITADEL SPOILER
…
…
…
The answer is “stars”. I forget the exact details of the riddle. Something about appearing at night and disappearing during the day.
One of my fellow players, upon hearing the riddle, immediately blurted out: “Werewolves!”
Our DM paused, considered this, sighed heavily, and declared “Technically I think I have to accept that”.
lol. Just cracked my copy of Yawning Portal. I think werewolves counts. Good on that GM for being flexible!
reminds me of an Oglaf comic…
Riddle: „what does my dick taste like?“
Answer: „sad tosser“
– „… technically I‘ll have to accept that.“
Hmm…there’s a number of undead that are severely impaired/damaged by sunlight and will avoid it, like shadows, vampires and wraiths. And though it’s not in 5e that I know of, the hellcat/bezekira devil is literally invisible in the light and only shows up in the dark.
While I don’t generally like fetch quests in video games, in TRPGs these lock&key type of quests are a godsend. No, really. It’s great that the game format allows for outrageous solutions, but more often than not I’ve seen groups (from DM and player perspective) being completely overwhelmed with the freedom of choice. And I resent the people making Choo-Choo noises when I profess that exclusive, unambiguously worded methods to progress an adventure (such as your lock&key quests) are the best way to get the group back on track.
My mildly disappointing run of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (cut short by the pandemic) would be example number one. During 20 or more 3h sessions (eight real life months) my group still hasn’t finished Chapter 1. And we’re still LVL 3 because the DM uses checkpoint progression. The DM also heavily believes that players should do whatever they want and refuses to give a much-needed clear objective to channel the PC’s efforts. And so we faff about, having no idea which course of action will let the plot progress.
Personally, I think it’s a module/adventure path writer’s top priority to provide one unambigious solution to the problem they have designed, without cop-out phrases that appeal to the DMs power of imagination (“Maybe the hill giant next door carries a scroll of reincarnation in his sock”; “The PCs could be rescued by an unusually friendly gnoll”; “Use however you see fit”; “You could…”).
It’s a given that DMs will cut and change any part of the module they don’t like, so it’s an exercise in futility to try and guess what they could change.
The PCs are hired professionals, they must do X (with Y (in Z time)). The writer tacking on alternatives (X2, Y5, Z7) is unneeded, as the DMs can extrapolate those themselves from the provided favorable solution.
Tomb of Annihilation is absolutely fantastic because it follows this advice to the letter. The PCs must end the death curse (by destroying the Soulmonger (in 79 days tops)).
Compare it to Out of the Abyss, which is nightmarishly unedited and gives the DM tons of homework and headache: The PCs flee the drow; they could go to Gracklstugh; or visit the myconids; or the deep gnomes; or go to the Darklake; or get captured and so on.
I think we’re looking at different scales of adventure design here. You’re describing macro-scale quests: Escape the Underdark. Stop the magical plague. Solve the murder. Sign-posting that mess is necessary if you want to progress. Otherwise you risk gamers wandering around aimlessly. Exhibit A:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/railroad
However, I’m being fairly literal when I talk about “lock and key.” There is an obstacle standing between the party and more content: a riddle, a literal door, or a mountain range with exactly one crossing:
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GloriousAcademicJaguarundi-size_restricted.gif
I agree with your assessment that module writers are well-served by including an unambiguous solution. However, I disagree that, “It’s a given that DMs will cut and change any part of the module they don’t like.” Of course experienced GMs will change the module to taste. But by the same token, new GMs need to hear that they’re allowed to do so. That doesn’t mean an obnoxious list of specific solutions (e.g. “They could also smash the chest’s lid, melt its hinges, or shrink down to fit through the key hole.”). It means presenting generalized problems (e.g. a locked chest, a river crossing, or a nobleman that needs cheering up.).
I’ve always liked phrases like, “Other solutions are possible, but DC X is a good baseline for any related checks.”
Ah, got it. Yep, totally misunderstood that. I thought of those lock&key quests as some high concept name for a way to de-escalate player shenanigans.
Such as the arcane proof massive gate with the ancient gnomish runes of PRI, ZENT, AI and DEE carved into the lintel, which will only open for the Chosen One’s correctly filled out paperwork.
That’s my fear every time I offer a solution in a written product. I want GMs and players to understand that I’m presenting a way forward, not the only way.
The main example I can think of me as a player running into a problematic only-one-solution puzzle was at the end of the first book of the 2e AP Age of Ashes, where you need to activate a magic portal with what is effectively a magic keycard that the boss you fought in the previous room was carrying. We keep poking the portal, and the GM keeps trying to hint at us to use the key, but what he failed to realize is because we’d ended the last session RIGHT after defeating that boss (and checking out his cool weapon), everyone at the table (GM included) thought we had already looted the boss, when we actually hadn’t. So the GM kept prompting us to use a key that we not only did not have, but did not know existed. Obviously we got it sorted out, but it was a pain.
As it so happens, last night one of the groups I GM for decided to continue their quest for the island’s mysterious sea cave not by questioning further the guy they know is hiding something, but by renting a rowboat and rowing around the coast until they found the cave. Which worked, but now they’re going in the watery way instead of the secret trail they were supposed to find. Oh well, they aren’t actually getting the drop on the boss (he’s had an invisible floating telepathic squid following them around the whole time), so it doesn’t change things too much. I did manage to make the rowboat into a puzzle because it wasn’t big enough to hold the whole party, which will have interesting ramifications since the two guys who stayed on shore ARE coming in from the land side. Also, fun fact, this ended up being the second time one of their plans resulted in an unexpected and comedic shark cameo, after “Operation Open A Bag In Six Steps.” So we have a new running gag, I guess.
Overall, though, I’m not too big on lock/key puzzles, at least in games I run. I think it’s because of my use of the “curator GM” philosophy – since I use a lot of sleight of hand tricks to manipulate the players and their actions in order to maximize the impact of the story, I like to leave puzzles and challenges open-ended to ensure that the players retain some agency. “I wonder how they’ll deal with this?” is a fun part of the planning stage for me.
Whoops. That wasn’t supposed to go there. Oh well. I will agree with Necrolai that most player groups benefit from a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. The problem should be getting over the hurdle, not finding it in the first place.
Love your rowboat problem. That’s a great example of open-ended problems, and I think those have the most potential for fun and creativity.
The key card thing is tough. When there’s an obscure magical device, you can’t even rely on disable device as the “second option.” Same deal with computers over in sci-fi games. The party manages the hack or… what? The adventure ends?
This is the part where Quest giver tells them their rewards is in the nearest guard station. Just wait a few minutes in those very secure rooms with the iron bars and you’ll get your reward.
Let’s hope the iron bars are fireproof.
I wonder red & green can get paid multiple times by swapping out their accessories and recoloring their scales to disguise as each other, turning themselves in a second time.
Now you’re thinking like a PC!
Also of note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkLzR_X-Dxw
Those are impressively accurate wanted posters, and yet the artist (not you, Laurel) forgot the most important detail – their scale color.
Maybe that’s why Fighter slaughtered a gold dragon so many strips ago?
Bearing in mind that most D&D worlds are pre-printing-press, every single one of those wanted posters had to be hand-copied. Colored inks are also hella expensive. The whole point of a bounty system is that it’s cost-effective.
“Sorry, adventurers. We blew your bounty on scrivener fees.”
Supposed scrivener’s fees = Casting the Scrivener’s Chant spell. Which is pretty much a magical printing press in convenient cantrip form.
Actual scrivener fees: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/pastimes
A friend of mine put together a one-shot dungeon for his first time DMing, and it was clearly structured according to the Legend of Zelda formula, including the giant ominous door with the giant ominous lock.
The rogue said he wanted to pick it, and my friend, suitably enough, locked up for a moment as he tried to process that. To his credit, he let it happen rather than give some excuse as to why that wasn’t allowed, or rigging the lock with some undetectable instant-death trap. We proceeded directly into the boss room, and the big bad began to deliver his speech.
The rogue threw a knife at his face midsentence, and everyone else piled on from there.
If nothing else, the DM learned a valuable lesson about how the conventions of one medium don’t translate well to another, and he’s gone on to head much more successful sessions since.
Well done that GM! I’d have probably resorted to “some excuse” in order to save my dungeon, but good on him for being flexible in his first outing.
The Zelda formula? Was there a magic item somewhere in the dungeon that would have helped with solving its puzzles and incidentally proven highly useful against the boss?
…Now I’m thinking of ‘how could a boss protect his door from intruders’. There’s putting a bell on the door, there’s adding an Arcane Lock and having the key (instead of a password) bypass it, maybe if they were higher level the boss door could be a boss, an adamantine Animated Object door that resists intrusion, or one of those organic door-blocker things like from Metroid (Gadora?).
Wait; Quest-Giver has eyes!?
I mostly encountered this when it came to locks. Is the locked door wooden/have hinges on the outside? Smash it/break the hinges. Eventually stuff starts being made of adamantine. No stealing doors due to the metallurgical properties of adamantine though. (Once it’s set, it’ll become unworkable, so unless people want exactly whatever was forged it’ll be impossible to re-sell)
The chest that “Devours all but the greatest of thieves” broke the thieves’ tools of anyone that failed to open it. However its top was quite smashable. The Rogue gave me the dirtiest look as they clutched their broken thieves’ tools.
I know, right? I put in the crack about peripheral vision before seeing the art.
In the megadungeon I’m always talking about, Monte Cook put in “blue steel doors,” which were impossible to open without a password. What’s interesting is that they served a specific purpose in his Dungeon a Day formula: since some people were playing the dungeon as it was being writting (one room per week day released online) it was important to make literal impassable barriers so that players didn’t get ahead of the dungeon. In most cases though, he would design an alternate route around the door as the dungeon developed, making them shortcuts rather than mandatory obstacles. I always thought that was a neat take on the trope.
He has eyes, but is there a mouth under that beard?
Presumably, since I’m pretty sure he’s ordered ale before. Unless he just osmoses (osmotes?) his beverages through his face or something.
I’ve mentioned here before that one of my past characters carried what I described as a “+5 adamantine lockpick”… a massive adamantine maul sized for the large character that he was. Very effective for opening doors, chests, walls… and of course, the skulls of enemies.
Ever run into the problem of the destroyed potion vials in those treasure chests?
Actually, not that I recall. But the game in question wasn’t particularly big on treasure chests and loot… and honestly, the character in question probably wouldn’t have cared.
Techincally he’s neither dead nor alive. 2 out of 3 isn’t bad though.
lol. Jeremy demands double payment!
So, one case where we unintentionally avoided the ‘intended’ solution happened early to us in Starfinder, Dawn of Flame.
Dawn of Flame spoilers below!
In the middle of a hostile paramilitary coup, we were supposed to enter a well-defended checkpoint to retrieve an NPC’s ex-lover who was held in custody. Beforehand, we got a spoken password that would let us enter the checkpoint without much of a hassle, thus intending that diplomancy would be the way to go inside.
Unfortunately, right before we went to the checkpoint, the DM made a note to inform us that our faces were now on the ‘wanted’ lists (due to breaking up some corrupt merc’s looting before that), albeit with very poor renditions of us, shown on the news. This was effectively fun flavor for our previous actions.
This news immediately put us on the defensive – they had our faces, if we just wandered into the checkpoint, we’d get arrested on sight, we thought! So we opted for a sneaky approach, breaking through the back, as going through the front would be nonsensical.
Unfortunately, a series of poor stealth rolls led to cameras noticing us as we took ages to cut through a fence and hack a door. Thus, when we entered through the back entrance, three encounters worth of enemies were waiting for us, arms at the ready.
We still managed to win the fight, but it was a clear case of an unintended method of entry – effectively we did the worst possible things, by accident (and bad luck), because of what was effectively flavor text.
I’d have thought groucho glasses were the correct solution.
Not when your party is a catgirl 24/7 livestreamer (Pahtra Solarian), a very religious bug (Shirren priest of Sarenrae), a hulking lizard merc (Vesk Soldier) and a robotic maid (Android Operative).
How about beating entire encounters with creative thinking?
Return of the Runelords spoilers below!
We were deep underground a BBEG’s lair, and entered a chamber that was full of dark, mucky tar, as well as an altar. A few high-level perception and arcana checks identified that hiding within the tar were a pair of very nasty worm monsters, currently in temporal stasis (meaning they were invunerable, but also stuck), as well as that the altar was a teleportation focus.
It didn’t need much guessing as to what would happen if we tried to approach or touch the altar – which we needed to do to progress. The moment we did the expected thing, boom, time to roll for initiative as the worms animate to kill us, and we kill them. Straightforward, right? So we thought about our options for a bit, how to prepare for the impending battle.
This is where my Ratfolk wizard’s spell list came in handy. Noting that all of the worms were submerged in thick tar, he decided to cast Polymorph Any Object to transform the entire mass of the tar into solid steel. When we approached the altar, the worms found themselves helplessly encased within several feet of durable metal they had no hope of breaking out of.
High level wizards, man. They’re nothing but lateral thinking!
Creative thinking and a week’s worth of careful planning of actions during a Time Stop allowed my Wizard to ‘win’ a CR20+ encounter.
Big spoilers for Return of the Runelords below!
We entered a chamber full of tar, guarded by a pair of Fossil Golems, who were between us and a very, VERY nasty Demilich – one that kept its intelligence and personality and very capable of instantly killing any one of us.
My wizard, recognizing the severity of the situation, and winning initiative, cast Time Stop immediately.
Then, the session ended, as we had run out of time, and I took a while to think out my Time Stop actions, only to realize that they would be ineffective due to missing a few lines of text on the Demilich’s description (namely, its immunity to magic). Thus I was allowed to retcon my time stop actions with new ones, which I had the luxury to plan out for the next week.
This week worth of time would lead to me destroying the encounter as I realized a few important facts:
1) Almost all of Demilich’s powers, spells, and abilities and such, are Supernatural or Spell-Like. This includes their ability to move (via floating).
2) Antimagic zone shuts off ALL Su and Sp abilities within its range, with no save.
3) Polymorph Any Object can be used to bury creatures, if cast on the roof of a cavern. And Golems have abysmal Reflex Saves.
4) The Demilich is a tiny-sized creature and easily carried.
Thus, come next week Time Stop is cast, and a master plan (which, in-character, my wizard’s absurdly high INT gave him every right to plan out in the span of seconds) is set in motion:
I teleport right next to the Demilich, then cast Polymorph Any Object on the roof above the Fossil Golems, to bury them (and buy me time to get the heck away from them), due to Time Stop, this effect will only activate when Time Stop ends.
I grab a mundane sack from my inventory and cover the floating Demilich with it, then hold the sack’s mouth, effectively blinding and ‘holding’ the Demilich in sack, even though it’s frozen in time.
I cast Antimagic Zone, centered on myself, ending the Time Stop.
End result: My wizard is on the other side of the room, holding a sack with a now completely helpless demilich inside of it, whilst simultaneously the roof collapses to bury a pair of Fossil Golems, preventing them from murdering me immediately in my magic-less wizard state.
I then call out to my True Name ally, a Planetar Angel, instructing them to carry me to safety (thanks to its nonmagical wings) and help me kill this temporarily-helpless demilich before the Time Stop runs out, or the Fossil Golems unbury themselves.
The following few rounds involve the party killing off the Fossil Golems whilst I let the Plantar Angel pulverize the helpless Demilich to dust with its innate martial stats.
There are few buffs more powerful than a surprise round. However, I think that one of them is a week to think about the encounter.
Correction, a week to OVERthink an encounter, against a monster you identify as ‘oh crap, we’re all going to TPK, how do I stop this in the span of three rounds?’.
the first of the PFonline kickstarter modules has a very offensive door a very evil (nearly) one way portal. I’m still scratching my head how get them through the first without making it too obvious and unfun und how to avoid a TPK on the second.
Sounds like some oldschool Tomb of Horrors design to me. I think the solution is to let the players just go for and then “yes, and” the shit out of their solutions. Chances are that the five of them will think of more creative shenanigans than the one of you. Just allow it to work when they come up with it.
the dungeon designers comment to the TPK entrance was „it’s kind of obvious that low level characters don’t want to enter there“.
For many doors, Fighter has a skeleton key, which leaves the door permanently unlocked and open. Doors too tough for that may themselves be loot, if the adventurers are able to pop the hinges.
Then there’s the whole glorious field of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DungeonBypass , which is a kind of expanded response to today’s topic.
When I come up with puzzles or challenges for my PCs, I try always to make sure I can think of at least one solution, and be prepared to offer hints to it if the players can not solve it on their own. This is with the expectation that they usually will find a way to beat it, and often not what I was anticipating (but it’s also fine if they think of the same solution I thought of).
As one of my players once put it, “When WC plays a game, he tries to break the game. When WC runs a game, he wants the players to break the game.” Which is true enough, for the right (enjoyable by all in the game) version of “break the game”.
This is, I think, a useful mindset for a GM. I find that it’s difficult to convey the style when you’re writing a module.
thealexandrian gives the good advice to built in at least three solutions to a problem, to make sure that the players don’t get stuck on a single item.
Are you referring to the “three clue rule?” I was under the impression that was specif to mystery design:
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule
„where is the key to this door“ is just a very specific type of mystery.
paradigmShift.gif:
https://media1.giphy.com/media/Y7sf6U3LLm6s0/source.gif
Our Pathfinder game wound up with a really out-of-this-world solution for a longstanding problem last week. We had a task to find a well-revered hero that has been missing for years, and it was only after encountering an ancient supertechnological empire’s ruler in cold sleep did she offer to join her on a cruise on her flagship while she reassessed her holdings… in space.
She asked if she wanted to bring any friends along by summoning them into the ship herself, so my side character (my main character was shelved for personal business) was like “You all mentioned you were looking for that Cid guy, right? This seems like as good time as any to find and get him”
That campaign has a long history of us doing the ridiculous and impossible though, from winning an unwinnable tournament to, well… All of my miqo’te’s shenanigans, as you may recall.
Well hey, if the super-ship can find anyone….
Reminds me of the time Laurel’s Abyssal character in Exalted just happened to have the cure for any disease riding around in her back pocket. Hadn’t used it all game. No idea she had such a power. Imagine my surprise when they meet the super-powered elder Lunar who had been mind-controlled by an “interrogation virus.” This NPC was supposed to shake it off, choke out a few vital words of warning, and then succumb to illness. That’s what my notes said anyway.
Guess who would up riding out of Hell on the shoulder of a behemoth ape instead?
Bringing themselves in? Now that’s an interesting situation.
My first reflex as a young GM would have been to start saying “Someone else should do the act of bringing you in!”
A less younger me would stop myself in mid-sentence, thinking, they are just going to swap their reward posters between themselves.
Today, I think (or I hope), I would just start smiling and finish my sentence. And then just watch what happens next. Go ahead, tell me who is arresting who first.
Second interesting question:
Quest Giver asks for an already-Undead creature to be brought to him, dead or alive. OK, no issue here, if it’s moving, it’s “alive”. It’s definitively not dead, it’s right in the description: un-dead.
But now, Quest Giver asks for a living creature to be brought back, and the bounty hunters bring it back as an undead.
Is the quest completed, or not?
The option “dead or alive” was here, but the reward is different, depending on the “live” status. Which reward should the hunters get?
The answers may be different if the undead is a revived, non-intelligent corpse like a zombie, or an intelligent undead, like a vampire.
I like the idea of a quest giver trying to welch on a deal due to the undead technicality, but I honestly can’t think of a way to phrase it without the PCs immediately getting suspicious.
Oh, I was more thinking about the metaphysical aspect.
Some people keep their persona/individuality while becoming undead (typically, vampires, liches), while other undead are literally another person, or not a person at all (skeleton, zombie). In one case, you bring back the correct person, albeit in a weird state, in the other you bring the vacated physical shell in the form of an animated corpse.
Depending on the quest, the distinction may be important.
Well, may varies depending on the universe.
Unless the people at the table want to go to bad-faith semantics, I don’t see any trouble with the PCs bringing back a wanted undead either undead or dead-dead. Even if the fact the target was undead was unknown to the PCs.
Well, plenty of RP/plot hook potential if there is such a reveal.
(“I asked you to bring back my niece. Here she is, a zombie. Fine. WHO DID THAT?”)
But now, let’s say the party’s Necromancer figured that the target’s corpse will be easier to bring back under its own locomotion. Kill 50 goblins? OK. Their skeletons will be outside your office in three days.
Or the PCs want to try to pass the walking corpse as the original still-alive person.
When the bounty was specifically for bringing back the target alive, for interrogation/punishment, or because it turns out it’s a relative of Quest Giver, I can see some heated discussion in-game and in the meta-game. Quest Giver may tell the PCs to finish the job, discounts a ‘inhumation/resurrection’ fee from the reward, or yell bloody murder.
It could be actually both very disruptive and very fun.
Back during my younger years of old, i was going to a technical high school. There i learned the forbidden and secret arts of the code weavers, the writers of programs, the creators of solutions. To end my learning i needed to create something unique, something made by me using whatever i have learned. The choices were a game or a chat program. I choose the game i and started the terrible and bloody path to achieve my objective a Blackjack game made in PASCAL. The suffering, the horror, the struggles. Creating a game is a terrible experience. A game is interactive, the player could do lots of things and mine was fairly simple. I needed to leave some things out. ASCII art is all i got for it. The only idea of programming everything, everything a player could do in any giving moment, the huge part of calculating who wins. Preparing for anything and everything is difficult. Think of making a campaign on the fly, needing to search the monsters on the moment, drawing the dungeon as the party traverse it. Real time dungeoning is terrible. I have got time to do things in order and needed to leave things out, solve last minute problems and compile and compile again. I don’t envy a DM work. I make the plot and setting he deals with the suffering of making things clock.
So i know how is to design a problem for others to solve. I know the need to think of the alternate solutions that may arise to allow or forbid them. Gygax think of people blowing the doors in the Tomb of Horrors, he didn’t think of people stealing the doors to sell them and live a good life. That is why i prefer to make solution, definitive, bloody solutions. Solutions and problems in TTRPG can be quite hard 🙁
So i know all of these things, and therefor i know how to find solutions. Analyze the problem, understand it and destroy it in the most overly complex crazy cool way. That is what i learned on school. And that is why my group and me we give our DM nightmares 😀
The duke ask for the head of his enemy? We bring him that, together with his enemy body and his armies too. He asked for a head, not for a severed dead head 🙂
Answer my riddle or you never will be free!!! Said the evil wizard. Yes was the answer since he didn’t demanded a correct answer 😛
The Daymio ordeded us to kill the forest bandits and clean it of those lowlifes. We torch the forest. No forest, no bandits now and never. He didn’t say anything about not getting the forest kami angry 😀
Abusing loop-holes, cutting knots and finding unthinkable solutions is something we know how to do. Our DM knows that and even after so much time together we still manage to screw over his plans 😀
Now here’s the million dollar question. Does your GM allow these solutions to work, or does the NPC just look at you like you’re insane and then say, “No. That… That’s incorrect. Now here’s your coupon for one free death?”
He allows it 😀
But still the NPC looks at us like we are crazy 😛
So… sometimes I think a brilliant, tactical plan is in order. These of course are great moments-the plan comes together, the event is triggered, it’s all brilliant, we have circumvented several encounters, saved the McGuffin, yaddle day.
But when I’m playing, and this is because I’ve GM’d. I know we spend hours and hours prepping all that stuff. Miniatures picked out. Maps charted. Fluff prepared to be read from the notebook. And sometimes… I’m like no. We’re kicking in the front door. We’re listening to the monologue. We’re giving a COUNTER monologue! We’re cutting through all the enemies.
Wizard would probably be proud of us.
So… true story? I actually prefer to play this way myself. I know that there’s a shitload of content that’s been prepped for me, and I want to get to see it without “glitching the game.”
I think you can have you cake and eat it too though. For example, I just wrote a dungeon where you’ve got to get an imprisoned NPC from Tower A safely across a river. All you have to work with is a bunch of non-magical adventuring gear in Tower B. You’re level 2 adventurers, so “I cast fly” doesn’t cut it.
These kinds of open-ended problems allow for the pleasure of lateral thinking without blanking all the GM’s hard work. (At least in theory. Still needs playtesting.)
Happened with my party in the most recent session. After fireballing a whole room full of skum cultists and stopping to collect the loot/offerings, the party was about to decide which tunnel exit to go through next. In teleports a recurring minor villain/plot device, an amalgam advanced succubus//nightmare.
She greets them cordially, having delivered a missive to the party for her master at the end of a previous chapter, then heads down one of the tunnels. She gets the huge water elemental blocking the way to move aside and heads in to the prison chamber to start interrogating a captured cetaceal.
Combat happens, and while the rest of the party is dealing with the elemental, the wizard uses shadow projection to drain the succubustaur’s str from 22 to 0. Once combat is finished, they rescue the cetacial, who tells them she doesn’t have much time left because the cultists had been injecting her with a powerful poison (a modified version of dragon bile made to be effective vs outsiders that had drained her con to 1 so far).
Now, I was expecting to have the cetacial use the last of her strength to give the party members a boon before fading away. Instead, the alchemist uses some divine healing feat and gets like a 40 on the check to stop the poison. Then, the wizard uses a spell to create a soul gem and pokeballs the cetacial getting ready to teleport her to a friendly temple. And for good measure they make a second soul gem to trap the succubustaur after the paladin hugs it to unconsciousness.
And that’s where we ran out of time for the session, so dealing with all that is where we pick back up.
See my Exalted anecdote in the reply to Temia Eszteri above. Crazy the way these situations recur across groups, lol.
In high school, I played a bit of Pathfinder Society on occasion whenever I could convince my parents to drive me over and spend a whole Sunday in Charleston. By necessity, the Pathfinder Society modules are pretty railroady and they don’t have much room to get creative. I don’t really begrudge them that because they’re meant to be relatively short adventures for random groups and if they were too open-ended it would be absolute chaos and nothing would get done in a reasonable amount of time.
However, one module I played with a freshly created Witch. I forget what the module was or what our goal was, but I remember that at one point we ended up in a trap. It was a pretty simple thing: the exits were sealed and the room was filling with water and we had to figure out how to turn it off. Pretty standard trap. However, the problem was, instead of being Rogue-y Disable Device kind of stuff, this trap required us to interact with a control panel left by a long-dead civilization, and instead of requiring a skill check to solve, we needed to make INT ability checks. IIRC, my Witch was the only INT-based character. In a party of like seven people.
The trap also required multiple successful checks to turn off, and failing the DC by too much would revert your progress. Of course, my dice being my dice, I was consistently rolling a 3. I think I rolled three 3s in like four or five rolls. Keep in mind, we were in initiative order this whole time as well, and most of our other party members had low or no INT bonuses, meaning they were likely to revert some of our progress if they did try to help.So basically we were all slowly waiting for our characters to start drowning. I guess the GM finally realized that we were going to have a TPK on our hands if he didn’t do something, so he decided that we could also turn the machine off with STR checks somehow. He never really explained how, and I’m pretty sure changing the modules like that is technically against Pathfinder Society rules, but we were suddenly in a much better spot because we had a handful of STR-based characters in the party. My dice decided to at least roll well enough to not revert our progress anymore and our STR-based teammates finally shut down the machine so we could move on. I don’t know what the module designers were expecting with that one, but at least we made it out alive.
Now, question for you: since you’ve been writing these little mini-dungeons, have you considered entering into the Paizo RPG Superstar design contest if they ever start it back up again? I don’t have much experience with game design, but I’m interested in at least trying my hand and seeing if I can come up with anything worthwhile. I’ve been reading through some of the winners’ designs and there was some really cool stuff that come out of those contests.
I could see myself giving it a go. If I’m being honest though, I’m better at adventure design than mechanical design. I’ve only done a couple of archetypes, a handful of creatures, and some very “plot device” type magic items. It would be tough to get through those early rounds, especially given my comparative lack of experience with 2e.
Oh, I recently ran into one of these. The backstory here is that my party had traveled to a far-off city to find a mcguffin, only to be thrown back to a time where the mcguffin was owned by a large nation that was unwilling to give it up, because they needed it to kill an extremely powerful devil. I had an awesome questline for them along the lines of “find information on where the mcguffin was going to be in their own time, traveling to an exotic city, tied in with one of my PC’s backstories.” It was going to be great.
So, of course, one of my level 6 PCs immediately asked “If we kill this devil, can we keep the mcguffin?”
I rifled through my notes, trying to find anything that I had previously said that would let me stop them from fighting the devil, who I anticipated being the end-boss of the campaign. Nope. They ended up fighting the devil, losing, but managing to steal the mcguffin anyway.