Suspicion
Well well well. Look how the turn tables! We’re 822 comics in, and we find ourselves back at this age old conundrum. Do you pick up the duck in the dungeon?
You guys will no doubt remember a time 2,134 days ago when Fighter encountered this situation. I bet he didn’t hesitate to smite! Poor, naïve Magus was too trusting 1,119 days ago. And then Inquisitor was duped by her own catgirlfriend just 549 days ago. In all cases, letting your guard down was the wrong call. One has to wonder what Vengeance will make of theissituation?
Poor guy must have a lot on his mind! I mean, on the one hand you’re supposed to play your alignment. When you put on the golden armor (or the Blue Flames of Elysium as the case may be), you have to stand for certain principles. And if that means you put yourself at risk to do the right thing, then that’s the cost of doing business.
But on the other hand, being a hero doesn’t mean you have to play dumb, right? Maybe you’re morally obliged to ride to the rescue, but you can still assume an ambush! That’s why the gods invented 10 ft. poles, you know? You’ve got to prod those treasure chests to make sure they don’t have teeth.
So here’s my question to all you goodly gamers. When you’re running a knight in shining armor, and you suspect that your foe is using your own good nature against you, how do you get around it? Is this nothing but Gordian knot-cutting? Or are you sometimes required to make the sacrifice play? In other words: Should Vengeance kick that box before looking inside?
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My thought would be to look inside, but with a weapon close at hand just in case it attacks as you do so.
You have nothing to stab with, Vengeance.
Just open the sodding box!
You can go through life distrusting everything, just because you’ve been screwed over once or twice, but that is no way to live and it just dulls your shine. Use common sense, use sense motive, and wear a good suit of armour.
I am as a player utterly incapable of walking into what is a clearly haunted house in a TTRPG, due to trauma from an incredibly scary Call of Cthulhu game early in my role-playing career. Because I know deep in my core that it never ends well, is almost never worth it and that you should just either burn it to the ground from the outside or simply leave.
Which have caused issues sometimes, when one of my players DMs a oneshot. Because he is very bad at introducing the concept of the oneshot before we play and he really love haunted houses (He is a very fun DM however). Which leads to me either desperately wanting to avoid the central premise of the one-shot or me going through it smiling while every single danger signal in my brain is screaming at me to simply fireball the place from orbit and get the hell out.
And based on every single game I have played involving a Haunted House, nuking it from orbit should always be the answer.
Same DM also had the villains of some of his (unconnected) one-shots redheads. Which was unintentional as he didn´t even made some of them himself (Being either from modules or made by another player). But it has lead to me instantly being suspicious of every redheaded character in his games. And regularly being proven right about it.
My bet is that it’s box of abandoned kittens.
We all know Vengeance needs another adorable critter in his life.
Patches the Unkicked would want that.
If this were any other PC, I’d say let them play it safe and at least use some sort of multiple-armlength wooden implement to open said box.
But Vengeance? The man’s entire alignment shift was thanks to a pupper. He’s opening that box, and I doubt you can stop him.
My group are all pretty good at not metagaming like that. Out of character, yeah, we all know it’s a trap. And in-character, there’s always at least one paranoid in the party who’ll poke at everything with a 10-foot pole (or better yet, mage-hand).
But there’s also always at least one character — the player varies, but there’s always someone — who’ll loudly ask “what’s under this box?”, and lift the lid before anyone can stop them.
Fortunately, we all subscribe to a relatively benevolent GMing philosophy, so the consequences aren’t usually too bad. If they were, we’d no doubt see less of this kind of entertainment, which would be a shame.
this is what Mage Hand was made for.
This is what casting Fireball blindly is for.
I try my best as a DM to mix it up. That way they never know if they take the aggressive route, if they end up destroying something they desperately want. Or if they go the, “it’s all good” route, it ends up being something with teeth, BIG TEETH.
This is what Detect Evil (or Smite Evil if you want to cut out the middle man) are for. Now as to the question, being a goody two-shoes does not disallow you a Perception or Insight roll. In Dimension 20 ACOC, the party came across a pretty suspicious situation. The player playing the honorable and noble Gummi bear knight was clearly suspicious cause he made a roll, and he only proceeded to march forward and get tricked because he rolled a natural 1.
Oh god, that mouseover is traumatizing.
It’s in-character for Vengeance Paladin to check rather than smashing as an animal-lover.
Also “Flames of Elysium”? He jumped from CE to NG? That’s a huge jump.
Pathfinder’s Elysium is CG (at least until the remaster hits, when it will be some combination of holy and free but will not be called Chaotic Good for legal reasons), so there’s a chance he’s CG or a good-flavored CN instead.
That being said, Vengeance IS a 5e subclass…
> Vengeance is a 5E subclass…
If you want to cross the streams even further, the 5E Oath of Vengeance is a stealth-port of the 4E “Avenger” class which was a Wisdom and [Dex or Int] based class that was sort of like if you multiclassed the 5E Paladin and Monk but without the end result being a mess.
From Paladin it inherited divine magic, smiting, and giant weaponry. From Monk it inherited being Dex/Wis-focused, mobility, being unarmored, and lockdown capabilities.
He would open the box. Maybe with a sword point/pole but he would open the box. Being evil doesn’t mean you can’t save the orphans, just that you have ulterior motives for saving them (You need to get new recruits somewhere)
I’m so sorry, but Vengeance Paladin seems to be missing his gold accents again…
Rant topic: If there’s a chance that smashing a box will hurt an innocent NPC, I prefer to take the risky option, but if there’s been no indication that the box contains anything other than danger or inanimate treasure, I prefer the safe option. However, the character’s preferences generally take precedence over mine unless it’s something that really rubs me the wrong way.
Mouseover: damn, Claire, I’m usually ok with the idea of live feeding, but I think I got secondhand trauma from that. My sympathies to you.
To answer first I must ask: Are you Good?
Good does not blindly fireball the room, smite the box, or fire a pair life-draining crossbow bolts into the suspicious shadow behind the screen.
That way lies crispy peasants, an angrily injured Sheriff, and an undead Princess risen as a wight who will forever haunt you (at least until you put her down again). 1-800-ASK-ME-HOW-I-KNOW
No, if you are Good, you assess the situation, and if you have no better options to gather intel, you step into the trap. Good sacrifices itself.
Evil sacrifices others to save themself any inconveniences.
I sense several adorable new party members for Vengeance inside that box!
Oh, right, it can be multiple creatures. I was thinking: “Uhm, what can scratch opposite ends of a box at the same time?”
Catdog?
Hmm… I can’t actually think of any double-ended critters in DnD lore.
Left-and-right double creatures but not fron-and-back.
Strike ready, open the box. Y’know, just in case the DM filled it with TNT and cast Ghost Sound to make you want to kick it.
Sure, caution is relevant, but unless it’s a very peculiar campaign, characters die and people don’t. I usually find keeping the narrative flowing and the tension high is worth losing some hit points or catching a curse. Worst case I have to make a new character- though, usually saveless scenarios that instakill are frowned upon. A friend took 89 radiant damage from picking up an artifact and was 1 hp off instant lethal damage, but thankfully that was the roll- initially, the DM just said the average damage without rolling, and that would’ve been an instakill- while he was appreciative of the reroll and saving his character, he was salty for the rest of the night. I think it falls less on players to be less curious and more on DMs to paint the world and tell players about suspicions their characters would have, even when we IRL lack those intuitions.
Also, oml with Fang, I’m almost crying :'(
It is a cardboard box. Anything inside, if it was dangerous enough to seriously harm an adventurer after ~level 1, would likely have escaped the cardboard already.
Plus, in clearly an urban environment and the words “Free to a good home” on it, it must have been left there for a purpose. Sure, the wording is more suspicious than say “Please give me a new home”, but it’s still clearly getting wet in the rain and it is clearly trying to escape its confinement.
I say it’s worth at least opening it to see what is inside. Use caution, maybe use one of those ethereal chains first to drag it over out of the rain and see how it reacts, but the odds of it being a poor defenseless kitten or puppy are too high to leave it out to get pneumonia. Even if it is a trap, sometimes the best way to disarm it is to run right into it face first.
My thoughts on the matter are that yes, being Good does mean that if there are no choices but “take the risk on hurting an innocent” or “take the risk on getting hurt yourself”, you’re pretty much obligated to take the risk on yourself. However, there are generally precautions you can take to protect yourself without risking hurting an innocent. To apply this example, yes Vengeance is obliged to open the box without stabbing it, but he is perfectly free to put on gauntlets and armguards first.
Also, there can be exceptions to this rule if you have strong reason to suspect that the other party is not in fact an innocent. If the last three times you tried accepting surrender from Lady Duplicity she stabbed you as soon as you let your guard down, I would be a lot more willing to condone stabbing her even if she tries to “surrender” again.
Is it a baby Aurumvorax? It better be.