Treacherous Treasure
Fighter has a history of missing his Perception check on mimics.
Fighter has a history of casting his companions aside for an upgrade.
Fighter gets no sympathy from me. If he hasn’t learned the most basic lesson of fantasy gaming by this point, he deserves what he gets.
Of course, if you wanted to throw the big lug a little sympathy, you might point out that the game is more fun when wacky random bad stuff happens. That 5e doesn’t let you identify curses with identify for a reason. And that pushing the big red button can often lead to the very finest in dungeon-based hijinks. Avoiding these things might keep your character alive, but spending hours on the paranoid approach to dungeoneering can slow the game to a tedious crawl. What’s a gaming group to do?
Differing schools of thought apply. If you’re going in with a Tomb of Horrors mindset, then matching your wits against the dungeon is the point. Thinking your way around impostor loot and oops-you’re-dead traps is part of the charm, and overthinking is an essential aspect of play. On the other hand, if you want your players to feel like big damn heroes, your deathtraps might become more minor inconvenience traps. That sword in Fighter’s hand makes a bite attack in the surprise round, then becomes a standard combat. The necklace of strangulation only chokes you until you pass out. The rot grubs of yore get the nerf bat, and a Wisdom (medicine) check plus a cure spell can eradicate them, no lesser restoration required.
There are all manner of variations between these extremes, but in all cases I advise a little up-front communication. If you’re the GM, let your players know whether you run a “paranoia” style game or a gonzo “audacity will be rewarded” one. That’s not a bad item to add to the session zero checklist. By the same token, if your style varies from session to session and encounter to encounter, make sure to throw plenty of “you get a bad feeling about this” checks into the mix. After all, risk and reward is only interesting when you have some idea what you’re getting into. Without that added info, you’re just pulling mimic swords blindly from the loot pile and hoping for the best.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk about that paranoia vs. audacity continuum? Do you like deadly surprises, or do you prefer a lighter touch? Is it the player’s fault for picking up a duck in the dungeon, or are those quack-based negative levels a case of GM dickery? Sound off with your own preferred approach down in the comments!
ARE YOU THE KIND OF DRAGON THAT HOARDS ART? Then you’ll want to check out the “Epic Hero” reward level on our Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Like the proper fire-breathing tyrant you are, you’ll get to demand a monthly offerings suited to your tastes! Submit a request, and you’ll have a personalized original art card to add to your hoard. Trust us. This is the sort of one-of-a-kind treasure suitable to a wyrm of your magnificence.
That sword mimic looks familiar…
https://mobile.twitter.com/_pocketss/status/1137874190390976513
I don’t think sword mimics are valid familiars, to be honest; but whatever your DM says, I guess?
That’s an insect short sword. This is a bird-like bastard sword. Completely different!
Ooh, like a prehistoric pelican?
I was running the Tessalhydra adventure for a group of players, and when they found a chest in the random dungeon, they spent a good hour picking the coins out of it with mage hand, one by one, in case I have invented coin mimics. Suffice to say, it was a totally innocent chest with totally innocent coins in a not totally innocent dungeon, and at the end of the hour I told the experienced players: “You see, mimics are rare, and a chest of gold is usually just a chest of gold.”
On the other hand, in a totally different campaign we entered a circus tent. Turned out it was a gargantuan sized circus-tent-mimic. That was fun!
(Also is there any reason you linked to the Lair of the Trapmaster episode of Oglaf from a “we share someone else’s property for them so we get the traffic and revenue” instead of the original one, apart from Oglaf being mostly NSFW?)
(Also, why is there a “Notify me of new posts by email” setting here if it never works? 😛 )
The cafe I was writing at yesterday had an NSFW block on.
Sounds like a personal curse. Consult your primary care cleric.
Yeah, Oglaf is usually quite NSFW.
….but… Circus Tent Mimic!!!
I think it’s all about setting expectations. Cranking up or turning down the difficulty is alright, as long as you somehow hint or announce it ahead of time.
Make the first whammy surprising, scary, and potentially painful, but not quite lethal. A flamethrower trap that lost all fuel from overuse here, a clearly higher CR monster tears a redshirt to pieces there… show the PCs that a misstep could mean certain death. The reverse is also true, but then the worst outcome is PCs overpreparing and looking silly.
I usually take the overpreparation route as a player, because I always have some dastardly, yet level appropriate, strat stewing in the back of my mind as a GM. Not that I’d use it right off the bat, but it serves to fuel my paranoia.
Today’s PSA: Shatter isn’t restricted to crystalline objects when cast as a targeted effect. A simple pouch or wooden case can be the difference between an intact spellbook and a very expensive pile of confetti. Until next time, friends!
I like this advice in theory, but in practice players can be a bit obtuse.
“You didn’t let that flamethrower kill us last time! Why the crap would I assume the next trap would be deadly? Unfair gotcha GMing! Everyone’s fault by mine!”
By far the funniest room in all of War For The Crown is the mannequin room.
The party opens the door, shining a light into the chamber, every surface covered in a thick layer of dust. This room has clearly sat empty for years. Thirteen mannequins stand in the room, all turned so that they look directly at the door the party enters through. Each is garbed in rich attire, each poised as if mid-step.
there is no threat in this room, and all thirteen mannequins are mundane.
If I were ever a lich, I would hide my phylactery at the back of such a room, secure in the knowledge that any adventurers opening that door are going to go “Nope!” and immediately close the door again.
I’m pretty sure that room is just the rest of the session. The Dread Gazebo checklist is a long one!
The worst part is it’s a set of 3 rooms, BOTH of the other ones are trapped and have an encounter right after. The mannequin room doesn’t have a trap or an encounter.
Though that dungeon does also have a rotgrub swarm that’s almost killed a pc every time I’ve run it. Rotgrubs are friggin’ spooky.
In my current game, we seem to be collecting evil artifacts… I think we’re up to one minor cursed item, one exceptionally dangerous chalice, and a talisman for summoning dark gods. As a 4th level party, this is starting to feel somewhat above our pay grade…
You gotta invest in a dark reliquary. Warding spells and guardian monsters and what not.
If I’m giving a party a really tough fight or dungeon, I try to telegraph the difficulty by giving the place a bad reputation (it’s an abandoned asylum, super-max prison, and Fort Knox all rolled into one) or let them find (and/or fight) the corpses of the last group to come this way. Sometimes the state of the corpses even gives a clue to the first trap.
Players can be taught. A simple encounter nearly became a TPK because everyone used light based illumination sources and no one had fire to fight a lowly centipede swarm. Years later, one of the players had a bard who always used torches “for nostalgia”–it was he who discovered that the air in a corridor was poisonous, as his torch kept mysteriously going out whenever he descended a certain staircase…
Gotta love those IRL caving hazards!
Also of note: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-06
The unique – and ironic – thing about this page is that Mr. Stabby is actively trying to prevent bloodshed. :p
Naw. Preserving Fighter’s life is a surefire way to cause more bloodshed in the long term.
Can’t the mimic and Mr. Stabby get along? TWF is always an option, and they both have an eye for the splattering of blood.
Mimic wants to kill Fighter.
Stabby wants Fighter to kill.
Fundamentally conflicting motivations.
Sure it’s a mimic, but how’re its stats?
https://swordscomic.com/comic/LXIX/
Adhesives swords function like locked gauntlets, right?
I think my feelings about being paranoid vs being audacious vary from game to game. If I’ve got an overly cautious group that will drag their feet on every decision if they think there’s any chance of anything backfiring on them, I would absolutely hate anything that can lead to analysis paralysis. It’s not even fun planning around a heist or something like that, it’s just panicking about having to make a fucking choice. I don’t mind roleplaying around difficult decisions, but there’s got to be a goddamn limit. Sorry, this is something that has made me feel incredibly frustrated when every decision has to be agonized over by other players.
~SPOILERS for Curse of the Crimson Throne below~
If I’ve got a gung ho and adventurous group, I think it’s fun to have traps etc that are punishing for us getting too audacious/not taking threats seriously. In the fifth book of Curse of the Crimson Throne, my magus got cocky and didn’t put up mirror image or blur before engaging a Death Knight. This of course resulted in my magus getting super murdered (two separate critical hits in a full attack action on my magus). In the final boss fight of Curse, we managed to get an ability to teleport directly to the final boss. It’s kind of a tossup on whether we would have had an easier time getting through the flooded dungeon with lots of monsters or fighting everything else at once, but as it was, due to the countdown on the blood pool thing, we ended up having to fight two separate taninivers, which was… not great. Especially with the boss constantly beating the shit out of our human ranger and my dwarf warpriest having to use the Heal spell on him twice to just keep him alive. I think I’ve learned through that AP that it’s sometimes better to be cautious.
Behold! Fanart:
https://www.deviantart.com/grendelkin/art/Pet-the-Halfling-moment-865280028
and also
https://www.deviantart.com/grendelkin/art/Size-Is-Everything-884474012
😀
That sword is a mimic? Lame 🙁
Better if it’s a sword of chaos, like a daemon sword or something like that. You know something that truly will make Fighter realize that picking it was a bad idea. A mimic is kinda like too obvious, not on disguising but as a monster on a dungeon. The paranoia is based on knowing what is dangerous and checking that, the audacity approach is based on overcoming what comes to you knowing you got a non-lethal umbrella over you. One is like seeing an horror movie, you know the tropes. The other is like seeing Indiana Jones getting on a trap. Had he died on the temple of doom roof trap the movie would have end up early, at least there wouldn’t be fourth movie. If doing it light they need to run risk but win otherwise it would fail. The other is a duel of wits between a single person and a bunch of people that not only knows their way of thinking but that also got “Paranoia” as their primary skill. Outwitting isn’t for everybody, even DMs. I got the adventage on outside-the-box and non-linear thinking. That “overthinking” trap is something i would do. So i would make traps obvious yet complicated. Remember back my riddle from a while ago 🙂
I feel like “mimic” is less of a specific monster at this point and more of a broad category of challenge.
Say that on Monster Manual face. Make it cry in front of its children. Cleric would look down on you 🙁
I’ve always been in the paranoia camp of things. Unless I’m sucking off the DM, doing lol so randum stuff usually just results in me losing money, hp, and contracting a debuff. At best I accomplish nothing and waste my time. So better to be careful and at least keep in mind that any gift or treasure I haven’t earned through combat or puzzle solving is likely a trap, or at least is not solely placed there by fortune.
I think there’s a reason that the deck of many things is designed like that. It less “do dumn stuff get punished” and more “push your luck.” If you don’t reward daring play, then your players will never be daring!
I think it all comes down to the specific game. In most D&D, you play as heroes, mighty figures of legend. Those kind of characters aren’t expected to die to some lousy pit trap. Inconvenienced certainly, but unless they are complete idiots, they will struggle through to victory. However, in say, warhammer fantasy, you play as random peasants who struggle to survive day to day, let alone actually win. This is the kind of genre where paranoia becomes neccesary when a simple goblin ambush can seriously threaten even the highest level characters.
Having just survived several hours of Vermintide II on high difficulty, I know that Warhammer struggle.
For me, it kind of loses the fun highjinks feel if the result is you lose a character you were attached to and have to spend hours making a new character that you feel less like playing.
I believe the discussion we had in an earlier comic about what different GMs/Modules train you to do causing lasting expectations misunderstandings in the community as a whole relates pretty well to this one.
“Whoops you’re dead” being baked into the premise of Paranoia (and I’m sure other games) is for a reason. Sure it can be fun, but it really depends on what you’re doing. Like anything else, it doesn’t work when you just throw it into situations at random.
Makes me wonder how different GMs can signal their varying genre expectations. Maybe there should be a standardized questionnaire for “how I would handle this call.” GMs fill it out, players review their answers.
Yeah… That sounds like exactly the sort of unfun busy work everyone will love!
I make a point of asking about these kind of expectations when going into a game, or telling players when I’m creating one. What does the game ‘feel’ like? Is it gritty survival? Or swashbuckling heroics? How much character death is expected?
I know what kind of game I like, so its super helpful!
My characters have an extra element in their DNA, pure Audacity. Either I live and it’s another chapter in a good story, or I die and that’s the final one. I’ll run a character that knows what they’re doing as cautious, like a seasoned merc or a ranger from deep in the cursed woods or such, but a green wizard fresh from a 3rd rate academy, or a sorcerer who stunbled down the stairs this morning and accidentally sat with the party, followed when they left town? They drink the unlabelled potion, trash talk the chained demon, and always go first through the door. It’s part of the fun. Just my two cents anyway.
I wonder if “always talk a big game” should be a handbook page?
I prefer to run higher action level games so of course I side with Audacity over Caution. However, I also reward the ‘proper’ levels of caution, that is checking for traps, but not going to extremes.
But if a tough as nails Enduring Hero wants to Barbarian their way through the encounter, I’m all for rewarding them //as long as they have more than just moxy//. Because along with my generous allowances for ballsiness will come poisons, diseases, crippled limbs, and possible death if the hero can’t back up their chutzpah.
Is there a type of play that you’re trying to support? I mean, how do you tech that tough as nails hero to go for the gusto when they poison diseased with cripple limbs?
I have always viewed traps and curses as potential punishment for carelessness – or rather, avoiding them a reward for being thoughtful, methodical, taking the game seriously, and general intelligent play. Also, when I played Tomb of Annihilation, our party was generally very careful, made copious use familiars to scout & trigger traps, detect magic, identify, etc. We only fell victim to a few traps, and those were only of the inconvenience variety. Not only did we have no deaths, no one even came close. The traps that were triggered by PCs, well, those were all triggered by one PC. Hilariously, that PC was built with the intent to avoid or be resistant to traps. The player just kept making very dumb choices, or being the victim of equally unfortunate and unlikely coincidences. His backstory stressed how he was a ‘trap-ninja’, and had a ‘sixth sense for traps’. It became a party joke that this sixth sense was used to trigger the traps. The DM even commented that he was thankful the player was intentionally triggering traps to keep the game lively. The player, however, vehemently denied it being intentional. I believe that was true, as sometimes I don’t think the player could have know their action would trigger a trap.
A different player lamented that the party was ‘too careful’, and that ‘there is nothing wrong with having a character die from a trap’, and that we should just rush into places without knowing was was present. I suggested he show the rest of us how it was done – but it turned out he only meant this advice for other people – not his character.
Did our playstyle produce a game that was abnormally slow? Well, no – not relative to the alternative, that is. It seems like we averaged somewhere around 4-5 hours of real-life time per floor of the Tomb of Annihilation – and we seemed to pretty much clear the dungeon. From what I could tell of other groups’ games where our level of intelligent play was not exercised, they tended to take around double that that time – or more. That is because suffering the consequences of all the traps when not avoided tends to take longer than the caution to avoid them in the first place. So, in a setting like the Tomb of Annihilation, cautious play is both intelligent play – and in the long term – faster & more efficient play.
Haven’t read through ToA yet. Makes me wonder if the traps are any fun
Hmmm – to me, the only fun things about a trap are the challenge to avoid it, and then the satisfaction once it is successfully avoided. But, your mileage may vary.
I gave my group a sword mimic once. It was in for the long con. The barbarian never questioned why he occasionally got considerable damage bonuses (bonuses equal to a mimic’s bite attack), but the group started getting nervous when they noticed that, many mornings, there was a trail from their camp to the last pile of dead orcs they left and back again, and the bodies had a lot of bite marks they didn’t have before.
When the big reveal happened, the barbarian declared that Mister Chompy was his new best friend forever, and spent the rest of the campaign developing a fighting style for swinging a mimic at people. Mister Chompy stopped trying to hide, and would bite everything he could, change reach when needed, and lick the barbarian’s face like a big slobbery dog.
Have you got rules for that? Sounds like something worth copying!
I treated it as a nonmagic weapon that did the same base damage as a mimic’s bite, plus the mimic’s damage bonuses, plus the barbarian’s damage bonuses. It would change reach if he asked, or it thought that someone ten feet away looked tasty, but once it stopped hiding, it was too amorphous to count as any one specific weapon. It was a generic 2-handed weapon with no special rules or features other than the damage and variable reach. My reasoning on that was that longsword techniques were all developed with the assumption that the sword wouldn’t bend around a shield and eat someone’s face, forcing you to rip it free in a shower of blood and bone fragments.
The tale of Mr Chompy brings me joy
You’ll be happy to know that Mister Chompy and Goretusk the Unstoppable got a happy ending, retiring after killing a demigod and returning to life among the orcish nomads of the western plains. Mister Chompy got so large that he became Mister Yurt, and the Sons of Chompy led well-fed lives in the hands of a new generation of bloodthirsty orcs.
The rule is simple: Gag traps have gag consequences that can be brushed off with minimal effort. Traps that are genuinely serious and both the player and their character have had ample opportunity to learn not to push have the deadly/punishing consequences.
Super awesome.