Very Secret Doors
You guys remember the story about the trap door from way back in Trapfinding? Well it’s many years and many levels later, and that same group has finally come to the traps and puzzles themed level of the megadungeon. Their methods are every bit as refined now as they were on Level 1.
So no shit there they were, stuck in a creepy crypt with naught but their wits and their determination. The wizard had to work that day, the alchemist had called in sick, and the cleric was back in town making scrolls. That left a party full of full BAB types to find a secret door. In other words there was a shitload of determination in the party, but not a lot of wits.
Now it so happens that the party had recently acquired four adamantine glaives. The adventure specifically calls out the fact that this whole level is a long-abandoned secret tomb, so there aren’t any random encounters. That means there weren’t any penalties for making loud noises. Thus it was that a chain gang of warriors began prodding at walls, moving a few feet down, and prodding again. It was like the opening of O Brother, Where Art Thou? Much glaiving and a great many ruined crypt walls later, the party managed to stumble upon an actual secret door.
“It worked!” they cried. (See also clock, broken.)
Much to my chagrin, the next section of dungeon was an apparently pointless series of twisting corridors.
“Oh no,” I moaned.
“Oh yes!” they cried. The synchronized glaive team sprang into action once more.
For some inexplicable reason they decided that the trap door most likely lay in the ceiling. Once again using the few tools at their disposal, they decided to lie prone on the party’s 10′ x 10′ flying carpet, each man to a 5′ square, and creep along the ceiling one 10′ square at a time. Everyone took 20 for each individual square, taking no less than 70 minutes to prod at every square inch of the ceiling. Stone dust coated their faces. Blisters began to form on their hands. They were filthy. They were tired. They’d found freaking nothing.
As much as my players enjoy watching me squirm, even they were getting tired of the shenanigans at this point. The prospect of doing the same thing another three times—once for each wall and once for the floor—was not attractive.
“Is it even worth our time?” they wondered.
“Dude, just ask the once-per-day divination item.”
“I predict a high probability of success within the next half hour,” enthused the chirpy little construct.
And so, muttering mixed curses and prayers, they returned to their work. More interminable time passes in-game. The cavalier’s riding gecko has long since fallen asleep. The fightin’ gnome realizes he’s too small to use a medium sized glaive and switches over to a dagger. Everyone is covered in sweat and grime. Finally, about 8′ off the ground, hard against the ceiling and nearly impossible to spot from the ground, one of the glaives clunks into the secret door. It had been a DC 36 Perception check to find. The highest anyone could achieve by taking 20 was a 33. In my infinite mercy, I judged that the circumstance bonus from synchronized glaiving made up the difference. Also, I wanted to get on with the freaking adventure.
Question of the day then. Have you guys ever solved a puzzle through brute force? What was your solution? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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A similar thing happend to me. We stumbled upon an illusory Wall, and Found a Chest. In a Fit of Greed my Fighter went to every Wall and Floor and the Ceiling in the Room and tried to Disbelieve it. My DM said something like that:”Alright you walk to the Wall and Scream “YOU DON’T EXIST” at it!” Nothing changes. Me: “Alright again i must have botched my Will save against it!” However, i do not have that much Patience, after that one Rome i gave up searching. Respect to your Group tho, thats Heroic Determination!
Makes me wonder if there ought to be a “skeptical” feat. You get an automatic roll to disbelieve if you come within X feet of an illusion, similar to Trap Spotter:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/Rogue/rogue-talents/paizo-rogue-talents/trap-spotter-ex
Wait, a feat that makes you skeptical of *reality*? As in this guy: https://xkcd.com/331/ ?
Relevant XKCD strikes again!
As far as i know. There isn’t you could of course run around with a http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/rods/rod-of-cancellation/, rod of cancellation, touching everything but,… a mean DM could put Magic Items behind these Illusory Walls, which means both the Rod and the Item are wasted. I imagin it to be something like this DM:”Alright it dispells an Illlusory Wall, you see a Sword behind the Illusion. Make a Spellcraft check. Ah you succeeded good. you see as the Rod loses all Magic as well as the Sword which you now identified as +5 Sword, you touched it by Accident.”
Heh. The party in today’s story has been carrying around a rod of cancellation for about 7 levels now. It’s their phoenix down. I’m pretty sure it will never be used.
Strictly speaking, “I roll to disbelieve” hasn’t been a thing since 2nd Ed. Any time you are dealing with Illusions, it is important to refresh yourself on the rules for the different subschools of Illusion. Figments, (Notably Silent Image, Major Image and other wall creating illusion spells) only allow a save when interacted with. Looking at something is not interacting with it. Screaming at an inanimate object is not interacting. You would need to actually walk over and start pawing the wall or something (The way I assume most searches for secret doors actually go. You know, feeling the wall for inconsistancies in the stone, etc. ) Players from older editions make that mistake a lot.
Phantasms. Phantasms can be disbelieved. But most of them give a Will Save immediately, so “rolling to disbelieve” still isn’t a thing. The Illusion rules of 3.5/Pathfinder are actually pretty good.
Rules dump aside, I did run an adventure in 3.5 once that had a “trap filled section” in the ancient monastery to prevent invaders from getting to the room that held the sealed Fiend the monks had sworn to keep sealed. The Rogue called out that game, and the party decided to move ahead anyway despite my warnings. They were pretty high level, so the poisons and traps were not joking. They ended up reaching the Iron Golem fight at the end of the section with the barbarian being down 10 strength and several hp, the Monk was down several dexterity and was cursed, and the Undead Necromancer (who had patently refused to open the doors despite his immunity to poison…) freaked out because he had nothing for Golem. Fun times.
In 3rd edition, disbelief is an intelligence save. It is not a fort, ref kr will save.
In one campaign I played in the GM was overly fond of traps to the point that the thief’s chance of spotting them was guaranteed to fail between combat encounters.
Our solution was some makeshift adjustments to basic dungeoneering items. We had a set of chains with grappling claws at the end which were thrown down each corridor and dragged back, while ten foot poles with weights at the end were smashed down hard on every flagstone.
Yes, the noise kept attracting monsters. But the GM had put in so many traps that he’d not considered how the monsters were going to get around the dungeon. Whenever he had the monsters attack he either had to declare that part of the dungeon trap-free, had the monsters fall into a trap, or let us find out how the traps got turned off.
Initially he just had the monsters run unharmed through the traps which then caught us, but we called shennannigans on that. Then he’d have one monster lurk near a lever to turn them back on if the attack failed- and that’s when spells like Charm Person came into their own…
Adventurers are adaptable people. If they get burned they’ll come back with the right tools for the job. In my group’s case, that turned out to be a cleric with this spell:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/dungeonsight/
There was a big stone door in our way at one point. There was a puzzle that involved letting blood on some big pink crystals or something… but we had some prepared dimension doors and just *popped* onto the other side instead. Made escape tricky though.
Btw, who is that cutie in the purple?
Oh good, i’m not the only one who didn’t know about Oracle. I figured it was someone I had forgotten about.
Dammit… I’m going to get that Roll Call page up if I’ve got to use markers and duct tape.
That’s Oracle. She’s part of the anti-party. She’s introduced over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/anti-party
and gets a bit more screen time here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cleric-vs-oracle
Woo! I was going to make a request of you for this.
The DM had set up a puzzle in an ancient pyramid. It was a heavy pillar that could be spun via spokes set around the base; doing so would open the next door but close the door beyond it. There were various hints around it, presumably about how to keep both doors open.
However, I had some created some ghouls, so I just had them spin the pillar, wait until we got in the next room, and spun it again. We cleared the rest of the pyramid quickly and then had them open it back up for us again. Easy peasy. The DM admitted I had circumvented quite a bit of planning.
(Incidentally, that sequence had some other fun moments.
When I asked the ghouls to spin it, one spoke up and said “Which way, boss?” We all agreed that ghoul deserved a promotion, so we called it head ghoul and gave it plate armor as a reward.
Inside the room we unlocked were some intelligent monsters that had been stuck there for a long time. We convinced them not to attack us, but they followed us; more and more kept following us over time. This was convenient, because every encounter bunched up into one fun mega-encounter that we cleared with Fireball and Spirit Guardians.
The wizard was Geas-ed by the leader of the pyramid to attack his allies. He had been throwing Sculpted Fireballs at me, hitting everything around me without harming me. He simply stopped Sculpting the fireballs. We all agreed it was a clever workaround that fulfilled the request as given.
Our half-orc Barbarian began dating a Lamia that had been trapped in there.
When we cleared the place out, our Wizard turned it into a casino, and hired the aforementioned Lamia as general manager.
Fun times all around. :D)
Hard to get much more brute force than the undead. It’s literally what they’re made for! I’ve never done a full necromancer myself, but I’ve always wanted to play the most inefficient possible wizard.
“Undead minions! Disassemble the ballista! Excellent. Now carry it through the door. Undead minions, reassemble the ballista. Perfect. Steady now. Aim… Fire!”
I once set off twelve traps with my Alchemist by determining that they were all set off with a certain amount of pressure on the floor. Everyone evacuated the room and I simply tossed one of my force bombs in, closed the door, and waited for the sound of gnashing, whirring, and grinding to fade before we all looked in to see a huge amount of devastation that we’d completely avoided.
The traps all activated and destroyed each other, the swinging blades hit the spike wall and flew into the acid pool which then filled up when part of the ceiling collapsed, killing all the summoned snakes. Turns out bombs are good for more than just blowing things up.
Turns out your GM is Wile E. Coyote.
*remembers Chorus*
“Once there was a maiden who punched an iron wall…”
My Goole-fu has identified the line… But I can’t tell if you’re referencing the song’s chorus or Chorus of the Neverborn.
http://www.neverborncomic.com
Did “The Scripture of the One-Handed Maiden” ever make it into the comic?
Sure, it’ll be a door after enough damage, but I suspect all that will be behind it is another soon-to-be-door.
Which sounds okay in theory, but I hear that’s how John Henry died.
I think we’ve just invented a new kind of campaign. I shall call it…
https://minecraft.net/en-us/
Brute force is my party’s solution to everything, they have attacked every door that doesn’t open on the first try.
Your party in action: https://imgur.com/gallery/H9DlQWf
Gee, what was that youtube series? They left the Big Dumb Fighter alone and he stumbles his way through the riddle-filled maze with brute force? I’ll have to find that and bring a link. It’s way too perclfect for the story you told.
I’m a backer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i99jMtnE4vw
Love me some Glorion / Roderick buddy cop action. 😀
Ah that’s it! I need to catch up
We were in a puzzle room (this DM was annoyingly fond of puzzles). There were 12 doors, and each one had a riddle, a piece of parchment and a pen. If you wrote the correct answer to the riddle, the door opened and you got loot. If you wrote the wrong answer, you got a trap.
The first 3 doors that we opened, I walked in, saw the chest, and power attacked it with my maul as a form of improvised mimic check (since I didn’t know whether we had answered the riddle correctly), and each time it was just a normal chest. The rogue laughed at me for my nonsubtle methods, and when we opened the next door they went in first and began “running their hands around the chest to inspect for traps.”
CHOMP!
Sometimes, finesse is decidedly not the correct solution.
Once upon a time, my players were wandering a dead forest, searching for the crypt of a death cult. After fighting through hordes of zombies, they found a large dark tree in the center of a clearing. The trunk was marked with the symbol of the death cult, a triangular indentation with a pyramid of skulls. They recognized the symbol, having seen the cultists brandishing it during their fights, having no less than three such symbols in their posession.
Reasonably, they concluded that the crypt lay underground at that location. The entrance, I felt this was obvious, would be revealed if a symbol of the cult was pressed into the indentation. Their next call, which baffles me to this day, was that they should dig into the crypt from ground level. And so they did, with one shovel at their disposal, courtesy of a traveler’s any tool. It took them hours but they eventually dug their way to the stone roof, and then spent time breaking through that too. All in all, they spent the better part of a day digging, noisily. So doing, they alerted the cultists to their approach and annoyed the vampires sleeping below.
So… After the TPK, how did the next party of adventurers do?
I’ve had a bit of the opposite experience: the DM gave us a door we had to go through to get the mcguffin, but it was magically locked, and trying to attack it dealt no damage to it and massive damage to us. There was a numerical puzzle on the ground that we had to solve to get past. If we got the wrong answer we took lots of damage, so we couldn’t just keep trying numbers until we got it right. Cue the game grinding to a halt for the next hour while the high int irl people were trying to figure this thing out and the poor guys rolling fighters and barbs were seriously contemplating suiciding their characters trying to bash down the door. Eventually we solved it and made it through, but there was less a sense of satisfaction and
After that experience I tried to make sure any puzzle I put in the game is either optional or can be brute forced if need be, but is just much easier to actually solve the puzzle. For example, I ended up recycling that floor puzzle in one of my games, but instead there were nine doors with numbers on them that the party could choose from. The correct door could be found by solving the puzzle, and it had sweet loot behind it. The other eight doors all had shield guardians behind them, each with a different spell to keep things interesting. It gave the party the option to brute force while encouraging (but not requiring) actually solving the puzzle. To their credit, they did manage to solve it after only one incorrect try. And as an added bonus, when the bbeg fight was going far too easily for the party, I could just have him bug out, run to that room, and open all of the doors to instantly resupply with lots of powerful minions.
Wow. You learned that lesson perfectly. That is exactly my preferred style of puzzle design. Well done that man!
I recall, in my very brief foray into 4th edition, our GM threw a Balance Puzzle at us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_puzzle
Basically, the final door of the dungeon had a pile of special looking stones next to a large scale. We had limited uses of the scale to determine which stone was the right one to insert into the unlocking socket.
The GM pulled a specific kind of puzzle with a specific kind of answer, which I consider a no-no in retrospect. You either know it out of character and just bypass it as easy as an unlocked door, offering no action or growth for your own character, or you don’t know the answer out of character and to flounder until the GM lets you roll an Intelligence check to get the solution for free.
Or, if you’re like my slightly younger and frustrated self, you declare that your druid-who-plays-nothing-like-what-you-want-a-druid-to-be just crafts an improvised scale out of their own gear and brute forces the puzzle to move on with the goddamn adventure.
Now see, I don’t mind riddles or logic puzzles with specific answers. If you do it in moderation, I think that challenging players rather than characters is fine. If you do go that route, however, then you absolutely have to do the thing Bill said up above: Make sure the puzzle is either optional or can be brute forced if need be. It’s the difference between a hard barrier and a Gordian Knot.
While the balance puzzle you mentioned isn’t particularly inspired (why is there a basic logic puzzle in the dungeon?), I do appreciate that it allowed for a creative solution in the form of your own improvised scales.