This Must Mean Something
Inquisitor can sense a subtle wrongness in the room. It’s almost as if an air of palpable evil pervades the place. No doubt it’s thanks to that diabolical chair — the only distinctive object in the place! — and has nothing at all to do with the avatar of Evil currently body-swapped with her girlfriend. Magnifying glass notwithstanding, I’m beginning to think that Quiz might not be so hot at this whole investigator thing. But then again, we’ve all been there.
This the power of flavor text. As a GM, I love launching into elaborate room descriptions. It’s an opportunity to set the stage, foreshadowing monsters or hazards while simultaneously giving your PCs a sense of place. You’ve also got an opportunity for misdirection baked into these moments. It’s the old magician’s trick of making ’em look at the distraction (a shining golden lamp) rather than the real magic (your own shadows coming alive to strangle you).
Unfortunately, players have all seen The Last Crusade. They understand that the innocuous can conceal the miraculous, and are justifiably reluctant to look where you want them to look. Here’s the opening room from my own “For Rent, Lease, or Conquest” as an example:
The front door creaks open at a touch, and you find yourselves in a well-appointed entry hall. The furniture is made from expertly carved dark oak. An expensive rug runs the length of the hall, ending abruptly in the middle of the room where the staircase ought to be. Looking up at the mezzanine of the second level, you can see the grand staircase thrust out into space, stretching uselessly up to the intersection of wall and ceiling. Clearly, this architect was something of an eccentric.
If you’ll forgive the spoilers, I can tell you where interesting bits are. There’s a pit trap beneath the carpet. Climbing up to the mezzanine is a simple skill check. The staircase conceals a major secret. The architect is a check to recall lore. And the ‘expertly carved dark oak furniture’ is nothing but meaningless dungeon dressing. No points for guessing which details my play testers decided to interact with.
To some extent, this is the same problem as the Boblin phenomenon. Players don’t want to talk to your quest giver. They want to talk to the awakened raccoon hot dog vendor that you just improvised into existence. And when that happens, you can make the raccoon / chair / object of your players’ interest interesting… Or you can just wait until they tire themselves out rolling checks in its direction. That second option represents its own gazebo-based RPG tradition.
So for today’s discussion, let’s talk about all those times your group inexplicably focused on some random bit of meaningless dungeon dressing. Why did it attract your attention? How did you investigate it? Were your suspicions ultimately confirmed? And for you GMs out there, how do you help your players move on when they’re stuck nosing at dead ends? Tell us all about your own expertly carved oak chairs down in the comments!
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The back rest of that chair is smaller than the seat, it must be a clue to something! And its shadow is too small! And there are weird scratches on the floor and walls! And the window shutters lack any form of handles or latches!
Also, shame Bad Cat doesn’t have some funny/obvious ‘tells’ nobody but Patches notices, like a sentient/non-matching shadow.
Hmm, I wonder if having your body occupied by evil incarnate causes physical changes/corruption to said body over time… It deffo can’t be healthy to absorb so much evil radiation.
Every once in a while those “weird scratches” get us into trouble. I suspect you’re just being snarky, but those are the parchment effects that appear over the entire comic. You can see them overlapping Inquisitor’s leg, for example.
It’s not a bad idea giving Bad Cat some visual tells. I’ll have to noodle with that.
Make BadCat’s shadow be the tell… it’s simple, readily accessible to the viewers and doesn’t require strange art voodoo.
Works well with animated strips too – the shadow goofing about whilst it’s owner is standing still.
One would think that the blatantly out-of-character way she acts would be a tell. I can’t picture the real Magus grumpily complaining that a chair is just a chair. She’s just not a grumpy cat.
Oh it is. But then again, being a calculating and malevolent creature, Demon Queen is trying to act like Magus as well:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unhallowed-rites-part-8-plz-rez
That’s a fine line to walk in a visual medium like this. It’s why filmmakers do that goofy cinematography thing of holding just a second too long on closeup to suggest corruption hiding in a character’s expression.
I yearn to see how Woolantula and his (her? Its?) new mistress are adapting to each other’s novel situation.
The semester ends next week. I think (I hope!) that I’ll finally gain the time and space to write out a full arc in the next month or so.
Poor ‘Quiz. Love is giving her situational blindness.
Magus is the investigative genius of the group, after all.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/to-catch-a-killer-part-2-wild-accusations
Love is amongst the worst conditions. Disadvantage on friggin’ everything!
Advantage on charm, hanky-panky and hay acrobatics checks, though.
No, Badcat, I’m pretty sure it’s a sitting chair.
For a fucking chair, you’ll have to check out the other handbook.
Save vs. obtuseness!
I’ve got a current one for this! Murder mystery; the party revealed that one count murdered the other, but has yet to determine where the widowed countess fits into things. The party overheard a conversation where she asked the prince to support “our cause,” and fixated on her use of ‘our’ to mean she was secretly in league with her husband’s murderer; despite all other clues pointing elsewhere.
So now, I could correct their misinterpretation of what this random sentence I had her say meant, or leave them free to make their own incorrect conclusions.
This was a vagaries of language thing? As in, the phrase “our cause” references some charitable organization the widow and her late husband supported, while the players are reading “our cause” as a conspiracy?
If that’s the situation, I’d be tempted to shoot for a comic misunderstanding. Set up an overheard, “Tonight, all of our plans come to fruition!” moment. The PCs storm the “ritual chamber” with swords drawn, only to discover that it’s a charity ball for underprivileged unicorns or whatever. Yeah it’s an extra session or two, but you can continue setting up other clues in the meantime so they can pivot easily from their mistake.
I’ve got one! Party was walking down a road towards a major city, passing by farms and plains of grass. In the distance, they could see a single dead tree. They debated for several long minutes whether to abandon their quest and stray off the beaten path to check out a tree. In the end, they decided against it – not because they had no reason to and it made no sense in-character, but because the last time they strayed off the path to check out a tree, it turned out to be a treant and nearly killed them. (This one was literally just a tree.)
That quantum ogre is wearing a treant costume!
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2b3qsx/the_quantum_ogre_a_dialogue/
For real though, it is HARD to stay quiet in these moments as a GM. I’ll just be sitting there like, “It’s a tree you guys. A friggin’ TREE!”
As a GM, my best way of not-subtly implying that there is nothing to see, is if players ask to investigate something, look it over, etc., I just won’t even ask for a roll, I’ll just give them a description of the object in greater detail.
That or I ask, “How much time will you spend investigating this?” And then that much time passes. Sometimes they might get more details, but 95% of the time, if I’m asking how much time they’re spending on something, they’re either doing something that is a dead end, or something that would take so long to get information that it is impractical (like looking for a specific piece of information in > 1,000 years of highly detailed city records, when they don’t know what time period to look in).
Very nice. The subtle meta techniques can be tough to articulate, but the lack of a roll or the specific “How much time will you spend investigating this?” make for tipoff outside of fiction without breaking immersion. Genuinely clever stuff right there.
I feel like Magus being the voice of reason should tip Inquisitor off that something is definitely wrong.
Whether she assumes it’s something with Magus or something with the chair…remains to be seen.
My head canon is that Inquisitor is generally competent, and so believes that she’s proficient at Investigation. She is mistaken in this belief.
Well, yeah, investigation’s not even a skill in Pathfinder.
What makes you think this is a Pathfinder comic? 😛
Here’s three:
1) I had one party spend an hour verifying that the elk in the area were, in fact, individual elk and not a “glitch in the matrix” illusion of one elk replicated a million times. I’ve told the story here before, but the deer were supposed to be just the setup for a brick joke at the end.
2) I had a paid DMing gig get pseudo-derailed– The players loved my setting so much, they spent 3 of the 4 hours we’d reserved the in that space just hanging out in the village, meeting people, buying stuff, and partying with the NPCs. A great D&D time was had by all, but we had to cram the actual adventure into a hurried 90 minutes (while begging the venue operator for more time).
3) My brother and nephew spent 30 minutes pointedly NOT letting any party members climb an obelisk that clearly was meant to be climbed in order to find the next objective in their quest, because “Well, obviously it’s trapped.” (It wasn’t.) They inspected a statue thoroughly (and repeatedly) for the same reason (also just set dressing). They then attempted to yank open the doors that said explicitly “You’ll be punished for opening these doors without paying a toll.” (They also objected to giving up any money if there was nobody there to collect it.)
Related to that elk thing, I have a running gag of the party spotting suspicious goats in the distance when they are scouting or on watch. The goats never DO anything (but sometimes vanish when no one is looking), but they always creep the party out.
In fairness, the PCs have encountered both a druid who sometimes turns people into goats (and sometimes goats into people) and a troll druid that ambushed them while Wild Shaped into a goat (“The goat casts Fireball”), so they have some reason to be skeptical. Also, one PC is a leshy (plant person), so he was afraid of regular goats to begin with.
I don’t remember the brick joke. Where was that comment?
December 31, 2021– In response to “The Long Con” https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-long-con
The heroes eventually discover a wishing ring that would grant 3 wishes to three different people/groups. Two groups have accidentally activated the ring before the heroes arrive and set in motion some of the events of the previous session:
1.a) In the heat of an argument, was transformed into a *bag of endless dung*
1.b) During the same argument, was transformed into a *pouch of endless hammers*
1.c) Fled from the above argument, was said to have died in an “anatomically implausible manner”
2.a) Was rewarded with a Leprechaun Bard with a tiny piano-forte (a 12″ pianist)
2.b) Was rewarded with “100 bucks” –hence the profusion of exclusively male, adult elk suddenly in the region (the delayed punchline to the initial brick joke)
2.c) Wanted trade goods and wished for “A hunnert rolls a’ silk” –was rewarded with Hunter Trolls (who drove the elk into the region, then slaughtered the inhabitants of the tavern) and a lovely silk dress that the silly dwarf was still wearing when the trolls killed him.
The PCs killed the trolls, saved the lone survivor (and her dog), then buried the cursed ring DEEP before it could respond to their idle talk in its presence. One player said that a 6 hour build-up to lame puns was Spider Robinson worthy.
So now that I’ve binged up to the current page, I gotta ask for continuity’s sake, does Wizard and Thief just not wear their rings to avoid losing them?
They go Frodo most of the time:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/pjmidearthfilms/images/3/34/Frodo.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20200725035857
For Thief, that serves to keep her fingers free for the delicate touch-work of trap disarming and lock picking. For Wizard, it’s because she hopes to have a bullet or an arrow deflected by the “power of love” one day. She’s got a whole speech prepared for the occasion.
Unfortunately, Wizard will get killed by Thief instead of the arrow/bullet, for letting her priceless gift get damaged.
Hmm, I wonder how Wizard would react to their spellbook being what stops the bullet/arrow. Those things are thick!
> Those things are thick!
FemFighterJoke.exe
My players went very off-script once, as they teleported themselves far into the ocean (Still not entirely sure why they did that). So I had to improvise, which resulted in an island where the local Yuan-Ti were being controlled by a colony of mind flayers. Adding to this were a short timeframe between sessions and a busy schedule, resulting in me having only time for the barest of preparations.
To give my players a fighting chance I had a group of shipwreck survivors and Yuan-Ti rebels tell a legend about an ancient ruin that the Mind Flayers and their servants avoided at all costs.
It was, as a matter of fact a great Githyanki ship, that had crashed there long ago and the inhabitants had gone into stasis. My intention with it was that the ruin was a pretty straightforward dungeon with some critters in it, ending up with them finding the Githyanki who could serve as allies against the mind flayers. Enemy of my enemy and all that. To give the place a bigger sense of scale, without having to do too much prepwork, I had several hallways and doorways being caved in, which would take hours to clear. Reckoning that the players wouldn´t waste time doing that, due to the pressure of having to find help quickly. Sadly I had forgotten that the Wizard had stoneshape. A spell they had only used once before in the entire campaign. And for some reason they decided that they wanted to go through every single blocked up tunnel and doorway…
While it was fun to basically improvise the other half of the dungeon, boy was it tiring.
I am always fascinated by the way a party can make something that was supposed to take an hour at most last an entire session, and something that were supposed to be the main focus of it last only 10 minutes.
How did you go about improvising? Did you just roll with it and pull some electricity traps and angry robots out of thin air, or did you have to pause and prep?
It was over two sessions, when the arrived and when they went into the dungeon. But with life being as it is, I had roughly forty minutes to sketch out the dungeon map and write my notes on it.
For the Island itself, communities and Yuan-Ti temple, it was a lot of pulling shit out of thin air, and taking a quick gander through my folders of old dungeons that my party somehow managed to completely bypass, with some change of names. Also taking a discrete look through some of the monster manuals during the food prep break.
For the unexpected areas in the dungeon it was completely pulling shit out of thin air, which meant I went straight to the Mobieus/Giger/40k parts of my brain. Meaning a bunch of eldritch terrain and science-fictionish parts that I described as freakishly as possible, to make them stand out more to the typical fantasy stuff. I also improvised a long dead Githyanki navigator, still sitting on his throne, wearing his spelljammer helmet and being connected to several wires through his spine and skull. Had thought to use it as just a nice setpiece, but then the fuckers went and cast speak with the dead for the first time in the campaign and suddenly I had to make up a bunch of gith navigator lore.
> but then the fuckers went and cast speak with the dead for the first time in the campaign and suddenly I had to make up a bunch of gith navigator lore.
EVERY FREAKIN’ TIME!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/supernatural-man-of-mystery
Good on ya for working hard to keep the veil. I have a hard time maintaining kayfabe and not telling my players, “I haven’t prepped anything for this.”
I think being able to go “Lets take a break, while I figure this out” is an important skill, and it is one I am trying to train. But it can be fun having to think of cool sounding stuff in the moment. Fun, but very exhausting.
Once to solve a murder we interrogated the cutlery and food at a fancy feast. One of the glasses got an affair with the roses in front of the fork! The ham was hard to interrogate but we get to know who poisoned Poisoned Dude 🙂
I’m glad Disney didn’t use your draft of the script.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b6/BeautyBeastCharacters.jpg/300px-BeautyBeastCharacters.jpg
Personally no, I’ve never managed to fixate on the wrong things, actually I’ve usually ended up doing the exact opposite, especially when the GM really, really, really wishes I wouldn’t I didn’t spot the BBEG right off and become fixated on figuring out everything that NPC was doing, why, etc…
My Players on the other hand will do this about half the time, and I either let them be wrong, or if their idea is cool, wacky, whatever enough I pivot to make them correct. Sometimes I’ll toss a die and let RNGesus decide.
I swear one of my Players knows that planning things is anathema to me so he does this on purpose knowing that I’m just as likely to go where he’s decided to lead instead of where I’d had plot heading…
> Personally no, I’ve never managed to fixate on the wrong things
> if their idea is cool, wacky, whatever enough I pivot to make them correct.
How do you know that SUSPICIOUS NPC WHO TURNED OUT TO BE BBEG wasn’t exactly this kind of pivot from your GM?
i mentioned before that i did a gig teaching 3.5 D&D at youth centers (got paid to game 🙂
word to the wise, if you have ANY young girls in the group, and the game lesson is timed, do not include any pet shop in the town. it ends the game sessions right there even if you just started it.
I’m not sure what Latinate word means “enjoyment from puppies,” but it ought to be on the list:
https://sites.google.com/site/amagigames/the-what-i-like-glossary
Maybe she’s just grumpy because word on the abyssal grapevine is that the demonweb pits are looking more like an endless series of yarn balls these days.
You say “giant yarn balls,” I hears “the spiderweb pits implausibly balled up into a rolling sphere of planar invasion.” Like if the Technodrome were made out of spider silk!