Category Archives: Advice

When should a game master call for a check?

In the early years of Dungeons & Dragons, players searched by telling the dungeon master where they wanted to look, and then the dungeon master told them if something was there. The game resolved most actions using back and forth dialog, plus clear cause and effect. Before skills and core mechanics, resolution relied on the on the logic of the game world.

Old-school gamers swear by this method, and with good reason: It grants players, and not the dice, control over their characters’ fates. It makes player decisions and ingenuity count. The details of the game world matter.

But some tasks demand a character’s talents to succeed, so this sort of resolution cannot cover every action: listening at doors, creeping behind an enemy, balancing atop a rope spanning a moat. Until skills entered D&D, the game relied on checks like the d6 rolls that tell whether you spot the secret door or whether you can hear anything behind it.

Once skills and ability checks entered the game, they began to spread. Sometimes a check can provide a shortcut for tasks that could prove dull. If the players want to search a cluttered room, but want to avoid the tedium of describing how they cut the straw mattresses, sift the dirt in the flowerpots, and so on and on, a search check seems like a time saver. (In an upcoming post, I will suggest how to run these scenes without tedium and without skipping to a search roll.) Fourth edition’s Streetwise skill seems contrived to skip all the urban role-playing that the designers apparently found tiresome.

Some players lobby for checks as a way to bypass challenges they dislike. More than once, I’ve heard the player argue that their character is smarter or more charming than they are, and so a simple intelligence or diplomacy check should provide a solution to a puzzle or to a role-playing scene.

As a game master, I steer the game away from activities no one seems to enjoy, but I feel wary of letting someone use a die roll to cheat the other players out of the fun of interacting with the game world and actually playing the game. However, if the entire table agrees, we can just substitute a Dungeoneering check for that trip to White Plume Mountain.

While some actions require a die roll to resolve, as often as possible, I prefer to rely the logical cause and effect of the game world. Players say where they want to look, and I say if something is there.

I have a confession to make. When I run a game with skills, sometimes I feel bad if I fail to let players use their skills. After all, the game says you can use Search to find stuff, Diplomacy to sweet talk the Baron, and so on. The players invested in these skills while dreaming of chances to use them.

To help me decide when to call for a check, I settled on two principles:

Limit checks to situations where no more description of an action can determine whether it succeeds or fails.
Clever and specific actions that would probably succeed, do succeed, even when a skill applies.

More than once I’ve seen a player make an impassioned speech in character, asking the Baron, for instance, to defend the settlers. The player’s voice trembles with passion as he speaks of courage, loyalty, and the honor of the Baron’s ancestors, calling their spirits by name. The player steps down from atop a chair to applause and tearing eyes. But then, feeling bound by the system, I ask for a diplomacy check at +2, which the orator flubs. Sorry, you fail.

No more. Screw the check. Now, I will rise to applaud, and in the character of the Baron, rally my men to glory!

In situations beyond diplomacy, specific actions can also trump skills. If someone taps the bottom of a chest looking for the secret compartment, skip the search check and just reveal the location. If someone describes an ingenious use of leverage to lift a gate, skip the strength check.

When you apply these two principles, the players will lose a few chances to use skills. Accept that. Skills like Perception and Diplomacy rank as the game’s most frequently used, so players will still get chances to use these skills in situations with no obvious outcome. As for Streetwise, good riddance.

Actions players always take and choices players never make, part 2

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This post continues a list I started in part 1.

Players will not mix and mingle.

Adventure authors come from a secret coterie of role players who enter a tavern or a royal ball and then spend the evening mixing and mingling with the non-player characters with no particular goal or objective in mind and certainly without ever rolling a die. I know this, because I frequently run into adventures that expect the characters to uncover clues and background as they aimlessly mingle.

I feel sure these dungeon masters do more than simply describe certain NPCs in enough detail for metagaming players to realize that they are supposed to meet. Whenever players do something because the metagame makes them think they are supposed to, the game suffers.

In Scourge of the Sword Coast, during the first session, players enter a inn that includes three non-player characters with information leading to adventure. The adventure suggests no way for the dungeon master to engage the players with these non-player characters, presumably because the writer just assumed the players mingle with the occupants of the bar.

In practice, as a DM, if I want the players to learn what these NPCs know, I must find ways for the NPCs to engage the characters. For example, Vosson Raker might learn of characters’ journey and ask if they saw signs of gnoll raids. Edic Tilveram might ask if they came from Julkoun. Ledoris eyes the characters, wondering if they meet the description of the adventurers who shorted Filarion Filvendorson. No, this isn’t a big job—less of a job than inventing those names, but its not too small a task for the adventure’s author. I paid for the adventure and I want it ready for play.

For more on this subject, see “What Murder In Balur’s gate taught me about engaging players in role playing” and “A priest, a warlock, and a dwarf walk into a bar and…nothing happens.”

Hint: In a place where news travels by word of mouth, the locals will ask visitors for news.

ADCP5-2 Best Defense Battle Interactive

Players will assume that they can defeat every monster.

Before the days of plotted adventures and balanced encounters, this bias did not exist, but decades of storytelling and careful balance has taught players to expect only encounters they can beat.

Sometimes I write adventures that include monsters more powerful than the player characters. Either the monsters act as obstacles to be avoided, NPCs to be met, dangers to add time pressure, or distractions that can be lured to fight other threats. In short, some monsters can serve interesting roles other than trading attacks for 4 rounds. But setting up these non-combat parts always poses a problem because characters assume they can beat every monster, and should probably fight.

Overcoming the players’ assumption that they will never be outclassed requires careful effort. I make descriptions that weigh heavily on the characters’ knowledge that a particular threat is overwhelming. The characters live in the game world and should have some sense of what menaces they could defeat—certainly more sense than their players do. Sometimes I drop a colossal miniature on the table to emphasize the point. And still, when I want to avoid the risk of a total party kill, I must plan a way for foolish characters to escape the deaths they richly deserve. Too frequently, the party includes a reckless instigator or someone convinced that it has to be an illusion. “That thing can’t be as bad as it looks! Charge!”

Hint: Players justifiably hate being railroaded into an encounter they cannot win. They hate being taken captive. And they hate hate hate when their captors take their stuff. But if you present them with an easily avoided menace, tell them that their characters know in their heart that this battle will overwhelm them, and if they still rush in, then you can take them captive. Just give them a chance to win back their stuff quickly. Not because they deserve it, but because otherwise it will take them too long to update their tear-dampened character sheets.

Players never settle for a partial victory.

Few players join a Dungeons & Dragons game expecting to make compromises or to settle for less than total victory. Who can blame them? One of the joys of D&D is the chance to play the hero: To escape the compromises and lesser evils of the real world and solve every problem with an cunning plan and a quick sword. Still the fun of a game comes from the choices. Some of the best moments of recent battle interactive events comes when the collected room debates a shared, ethical dilemma. Should we free the enslaved elementals, or become their slavers to advance our cause? Should we surrender our city to the advancing forces of darkness, or should we destroy it, denying it to the enemy? While your game table may not decide on the future of the Realms, these sorts of questions enable players to explore their characters and make the game come to life.

In CORE5-3 Lost Refuge, the characters find themselves trapped with some villagers in the heart of a camp teeming with cyclops. They face the choice of whether to make an easy escape, leaving the captives to their fate, or assuming the greater risks of taking the captives along. The adventure assumes players will wrestle with the choice, but I ran this adventure five times and no party gave the safer option a moment of consideration.

As long as a chance of total victory exists, players will always seize the chance. Only when the choices become mutually exclusive will players begin weigh their options.

Actions players always take and choices players never make, part 1

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At conventions and in organized play, I’ve served as dungeon master for a lot of adventures from other authors. Every adventure author makes certain guesses about what the players will do. Typically the authors guess pretty well, but sometimes they make guesses that are utterly wrong. Sometimes authors waste pages accounting for actions that no player will ever take, or fail to account for obvious choices, forcing the dungeon master to scramble to bridge gaps. Of course, many dungeon masters create their own adventures, so the author who guesses wrong is also the DM who wastes time prepping, or who winds up scrambling.

Even though no author or DM wants to run a railroad, even though seeing players make surprising choices ranks as one of the best parts of being a DM, we can all benefit by anticipating our players actions a bit better. Over time, I have learned some things players will always do, or never do, in a particular situation.

My list includes examples drawn from Living Forgotten Realms adventures. I selected these examples because I ran each of the adventures at least five times. Through several plays, missed assumptions about how players would act stood out. The adventures still worked. I can attest that I enjoyed running all these adventures and that my players seemed to like them too. I also pick on Scourge of the Sword Coast, simply because I just finished reading the adventure in preparation for Dungeons & Dragons Encounters.

Players never report back to authorities.

In CORE5-8 The Dantalien Maneuver, players take the job of scouting to discover if Thay forces have crossed the Umbar River to invade Aglarond. Once the characters learn the answer, they are to report back on their findings. The adventure puts that instruction in bold. When players report back, they get their next mission. I suspect report back appears in bold because as soon as playtest groups spotted the Thay forces, most started freelancing. Once players get a whiff of a problem to solve—those Thay forces invading—the DM will be hard-pressed to swing them back on course. When I ran this adventure, I had the patron repeat the crucial importance of reporting back without delay, yet all of my groups struggled mightily against the urge to act, and many went freelancing.

Players will follow every lead to the end.

ELTU3-6 True Blue also sends characters on a mission with instructions to report back on its completion. The players seek some notes and materials for Lord Krieger of the Iriaebor Council and Andrielle, a priestess of Chauntea. After gaining the materials, players learn that Andrielle might be doing something unsavory in her tower. With their mission accomplished, they face the choice of either bringing the notes and materials to Krieger or going straight to Andrielle’s tower. The adventure wastes several pages exploring what happens if the characters report back to Krieger first. I say wastes because no players ever report to Krieger first. Never.

As soon as players gain a lead—word of suspicious events at the tower—players follow the lead to the end.

The latest encounters season, Scourge of the Sword Coast, flirts with a similar problem. As the players complete various missions for the people of Daggerford, they discover clues pointing to trouble in a particular location. While the adventure assumes that players will wait to the climax before investigating the location, I suspect that most groups will investigate the moment they identify the location.

Next: Part 2.

How running an adventure eight times can be fun and educational

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As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I run a lot of games at conventions. Sometimes I run the same adventure as many as eight times. You might think the repetition grows tiresome, but I like it. Rerunning an adventure brings three benefits:

I like the fun at the table more than I like preparing to play. If I run an adventure more than once, I can invest a lot of time in preparing, and then see my efforts pay off in more than one session.
With each run through an adventure, my delivery improves. I emphasize elements that players’ like best and I polish or avoid the rough patches. Sometimes I learn things. This process mostly works in the players’ favor, but as I perfect the monsters’ tactics, the fights get tougher.
I can experiment with my descriptions and characterizations, and then witness how small changes influence the players’ decisions.

Any game master knows that something as small as the amount of description given to each item in a room can sway a party’s choices. I enjoy seeing how even small changes can influence decisions.

ADCP5-2 Best Defense Battle Interactive at Origins 2013

The lessons I learn make me better at influencing players’ choices. That sounds bad. I swear that I use any insights I gain for good rather than evil.

Running a convention game to satisfying conclusion within a strict time slot demands some finesse. I want to present the adventure so the players’ decisions just happen to follow the broad outline of the adventure. First, I never want to lead players off track. Every game master has seen bit of descriptive fluff lead players into a wild tangent. In a home game, you can run with a tangent, but not in a typical convention game. If players stray off track, I want to lure them back, gently. Despite all this, I never want players to feel railroaded. I would rather improvise than run a railroad.

Most adventures written for a convention time slot expect characters to follow a plot arc, but the good ones offer players some interesting decisions along the way.

I want the players to weigh as many choices as the adventure offers, and I want all the options to seem compelling. When players enter a discussion weighing the merits of two options, score one for me and the adventure. Whenever players speculate about how events might have changed if they had chosen differently, score another.

If the adventure offers a decision that the players’ never consider, then I need to adjust for the next table. For example, if the adventure intends for players to face a dilemma over whether to complete their objectives or to rescue some captives, but the players always choose one option without weighing the other, then I need to tweak things so the players face a thornier, more interesting choice.

If I do my job well, then during my next run of the adventure, the players surprise me and the session goes differently than the last. That is how the dungeon master wins Dungeons & Dragons.

A role-playing game player’s obligation

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“Always seek to contribute the most to the team’s success. From the players’ and the PCs’ standpoint any role-playing game is a group endeavor. Individual success is secondary to the success of the group, for only through group achievements can the quality of the campaign be measured.” – Gary Gygax, Role-Playing Mastery

Role-Playing Mastery by Gary Gygax

As I stated in “Why second edition Dungeons & Dragons dropped thieves and assassins,” I no longer see “I’m just playing my character” as an excuse for disruptive play.

As a player, your first role-playing obligation is to imagine a character who can cooperate with rest of the party to achieve the common goals of the game.

Your rogue can be the king of thieves, but you must find a reason not to pick the rest of the party’s pockets. Your assassin can be the prince of murder, but you bear responsibility to find a motivation that enables him to cooperate with the do-gooders in the party. And if you maintain a darker nature, please be discrete enough to avoid forcing the paladin into the uncomfortable position of playing dumb and oblivious. Finally, if you do find your agent of chaos confronted by the party’s do-gooders, find a way out—withdraw your character for the good of the game rather than bringing the game down for the sake of playing your character. If cannot meet this role-playing challenge, then you must create a different character.

Dungeon magazine issue 132

In the Dungeoncraft column in Dungeon issue 132, Monte Cook supported my perspective. “It’s a player’s responsibility to bring to the first session (or create in the first session) a character that fits into the DM’s world. The character has to be one that could conceivably work with the other PCs. The player should no more create a character that doesn’t want to work with the other PCs than the DM should force the PCs to fight a dragon with a CR of 15 higher than their average level in the first session. Neither would be fair, and either lends itself to a good roleplaying game experience.”

Your obligation as a player does not limit you to playing paladins and other milquetoasts, but it does challenge you to imagine and role play a character who can work with the party. If you need help imagining why your werecat might cooperate with the other players’ weremice, you can draw inspiration from this list of motivations:

A common enemy, cause, or goal
Loyalty to family, friends, or an organization
Fear of retribution from a greater force such as a powerful patron or a dangerous organization
An unbreakable oath
A magical compulsion

The Book of Vile Darkness offers more advice on finding ways for an evil characters to play nice.

Whatever your motivation to cooperate, you may not reveal your true nature at some climactic moment and deny the other players and dungeon master a satisfying conclusion. However, you can plan for a change of heart or a tragic end at that climatic moment. Such finales show the kind of hard-core role playing that enables you to win at D&D!

Gary Gygax may have had an impish streak, but he (mostly) met the challenge of taking a difficult character and contributing to the party. On EN World, Gary wrote, “When I played a barbarian, I would indeed attempt to get at the newly discovered magic items and rid the world their bane, and if some mage was foolish enough to flaunt such an object before the character, and he could lay hands on it then… Because the Barbarian was otherwise cooperative and put the overall interest of the party first he survived quite a few adventures and his demise was not at the hands of a fellow PC. Some monster got him, which I don’t recall but it seems to me it was a basilisk. No cleric or mage in the group was much interested in helping the poor chap return to life.”

Why second-edition Dungeons & Dragons dropped thieves and assassins

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I have only run an evil-themed D&D campaign once, and only because Wizards of the Coast cornered me. They released the Drow Treachery cards and the Menzoberranzan campaign book and promoted the products with the Council of Spiders season of Dungeons & Dragons Encounters. I’ve served as a dungeon master for every season of Encounters and never considered skipping Council of Spiders, but I questioned the wisdom of promoting an evil, backstabbing campaign, especially in a program geared for new and returning players. My concerns proved valid. Two of the regulars at my table seemed uncomfortable with the evil theme, and one player, call him Benedict, embraced the spirit of the treachery too well.

Lloth and Drow at Gen Con

In the final encounter, Benedict joined the season’s villain and killed the rest of the party. “It’s not personal. I’m just playing my character,” he apologized. Over the years, when someone excuses their character’s actions with “I’m just playing my character,” I’d grown to expect trouble. This time, two regular players from my table never came to encounters again. Maybe they had other obligations, but I suspect the unsatisfactory season contributed to them moving on.

I cannot blame Benedict. Like him, I started in the early years of the hobby, an era that celebrated a character’s ability to attempt any action, and where simulation dominated role playing. How better to simulate an imaginary world than to portray characters of all stripes? By this early ethos, total immersion in character trumped everything. If you failed to play your character to the hilt, then you did the game a disservice. Any game master who interfered with a player’s freedom of action was guilty of an abuse of power. If the player’s actions defied her alignment, penalties might be in order, but if not, anything goes.

And the Council of Spiders Encounters season encouraged treachery.

Still, I should have discouraged Benedict’s betrayal. Some players relish in-party conflict, but unless everyone at the table welcomes such conflict, in-party feuding just encourages hard feelings and lost friends. Folks who welcome treachery should play Paranoia, a game invented for the play style.

Before second edition, D&D promoted classes that fostered party conflict. With thieves and assassins, the trouble begins with class names that encourage bad behavior. What sort of thief fails to steal, and who presents richer targets than the rest of the party? What sort of assassin fails to murder?

As soon as thieves and assassins reached playtesting in 1974, Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign saw trouble. On the EN World forums Gary reminisced, “One or two assassin PCs were played, but the party was always chary about them. Minor pilfering of party treasure was tolerated but having a PC offed by an assassin was most annoying. That happened once, maybe twice, with the offending PC then leaving the game, the player returning as a different character.”

Even as late as 1985’s Unearthed Arcana, the original barbarian class provoked trouble: “Barbarians in general detest magic and those who use it. They will often seek to destroy magic items, and if successful, they receive an experience point award as if they possessed the destroyed items.” What could possibly go wrong?

The designers of D&D’s second edition started moving away from classes with names that encouraged trouble. In a podcast recalling second-edition’s design, Steve Winter says, “The assassin went away because we had seen through letters from customers and talking to people so many cases of assassins ruining campaigns. People who played assassins felt like that was carte blanche to murder their fellow player characters. We got all the time letters from people asking what do I do with this player? He wants to play an assassin, but he keeps assassinating the other PCs.”

In third edition, “thieves” became “rogues” to discourage similar mischief. Steve Winter explains, “When you’re sitting around the table and the thief player is getting a little bored, and there is another PC standing right in front of him… I can’t count the times that I was at the table and somebody was like, ‘I’m going to pick his pocket.’ And right away everyone is like, ‘Oh don’t, please don’t,’ because everyone knows it’s just going to cause problems within the party.”

Of course, you don’t have to play a thief or assassin to “just play your character,” and to instigate fights among the party. In the Legacy of the Crystal Shard Encounters season, one player embraced the corruption of the black ice and seemed tempted to disrupt the party. This time, I felt willing to forbid any action that would make the players war amongst themselves. But first, I set in-game events that challenged the character to choose between the black ice and his other loyalties, and to the player’s credit, he chose to cast aside the corruption.

Games of Paranoia aside, I no longer see “I’m just playing my character” as an excuse for disruptive play.

[February 15, 2014: Updated to indicate that “thief” became “rogue” in third edition.]

Next: A role-playing game player’s obligation

How D&D Next almost made knowledge count (and then backtracked)

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Have you ever seen the Antiques Roadshow on television? Folks bring in curios from grandma’s attic, and then an expert explains the history of each piece and assesses the item’s value. If the real world worked by the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, the show could dispense with the experts. The producers could simply round up a panel of yahoos from the Jerry Springer audience in the next studio, show them an 19th century jardinière (a flower pot holder, for those of you who just whiffed your knowledge check), and let some knucklehead roll a 19 or 20. “The distinctive crosshatching shows a genuine example of 1890s, New Orleans Art Pottery by George Ohr,” he would say before asking another panelist to flash her boobs.

In every D&D game, this pattern repeats with each check that allows the whole party to participate.

I did not write this post to gripe about lack of realism; I’ve praised unrealistic game mechanics before.

I want the game to reward players who invest in knowledge skills. Instead, the moment the dungeon master asks for something like a history check, everyone at the table jumps in to roll. More often that not, the player who invested in history rolls too low to determine the nature of the ancient battle standard, while some bozo with an intelligence-8 dump stat rolls a 19 and starts reciting the history of the old empire’s vanished legion. Once again, the party’s scholar feels like a chump for staying in school.

If everyone in the party can attempt a knowledge check, the five or so rolls ensure that someone in the party will luck into all but the most difficult checks. Why bother investing in knowledge skills? Someone will hit anyway.

You could bar party members without training in an area of knowledge from making checks. Third edition imposed such rules, but I favor the fourth edition approach of allowing everyone to participate, even if they stand little chance of success.

The August 2, 2013 playtest packet included a Lore rule that offered a solution: Characters who knew some field of lore gained a +10 to intelligence checks rather than the +5 advantage typical for similar checks in 4E. The +10 bonus reaches high enough to grant the scholar a significant boost over the rest of the party. The rule yields two advantages:

The party’s expert stands a better chance of making a knowledge check than the rest of the party.
Knowledge checks can be hard enough to reward knowledgeable players with information that would otherwise be out of the party’s reach.

Despite these advantages, the published version of D&D Next will probably omit Lore for two reasons:

The designers favor a simple scale of difficulty classes that applies at every level, throughout the system. When characters gain a +10 for lore rather than the small bonuses for skill proficiency, the difficulty of knowledge checks must be set higher than suggested by the universal DC scale. If I wrote the Dungeon Masters Guide, I would simply coach DMs to favor harder DCs for knowledge checks.
The designers seem enchanted with the notion of using as few types of bonuses as possible. I suspect they would see a different lore bonus as clutter, not worth its benefits. The final playtest packet aggressively pushed all skill bonuses into a single proficiency bonus, while eliminating lore from the game. See “Proficiency and bounded accuracy” for more.

Assuming the design goes as I expect, and knowledge skills deliver the same, small bonuses as other skills, I plan to run knowledge checks using the following procedure:

Allow everyone in the party to make the knowledge check.
Give the players some minimal amount on information based on the (probable) success of someone’s roll.
Ask for the check results from anyone with the applicable knowledge skill.
If any experts succeeded on their rolls, give deeper information.

This method rewards players who invest in knowledge skills with an advantage, even though the rules as written rarely offer a benefit.

5 reasons someone might build a dungeon filled with clues and tests

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In “Puzzle traps,” I explained how the most fun traps come with clues that alert players to the danger. I listed a few reasons why clues might accompany traps even though their builders want them to be unnoticed.

In addition to the accidental clues I suggested for puzzle traps, Dungeons & Dragons features a long tradition of tricks and puzzles constructed in a dungeon builder’s effort to test and confound intruders.

C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness

Most players enjoy these sorts of conundrums. Funhouse dungeons filled with odd challenges such as White Plume Mountain and Ghost Tower of Inverness rate as some of the most beloved adventures of Dungeons & Dragons’s golden age.

But why would any dungeon builder construct a room that forced intruders to answer riddles or to move like chess pieces on a huge board? Traditionally, dungeon authors provided one of two answers:

“The builder was crazy.”
“Are you going to keep asking annoying questions or are you going to play the game?”

Unless your players signed up to play in a game set in 1978, dungeons built by insane, magical pranksters no longer seem fresh or plausible; the life-size chess boards and reverse-gravity rooms can feel tired and silly. Also, while the crazy-wizard premise offers dungeon authors complete freedom, it gives little backstory to serve as a source of inspiration.

Still, Keraptis, Galap-Dreidel, and I all share an affection for pitting adventures against a strange and confounding room, so I will list some other reasons why a dungeon’s architects might build in clues and tests for intruders.

Some of these reasons assume that a dungeon exists to help guard or defend something: treasure in tombs, powerful or dangerous items in vaults, creatures in lairs or prisons. These dungeons’ built-in challenges allow worthy intruders through, and tempt the unworthy to die trying.

A test of merit

From the sword in the stone to the quest for the princess’s hand, fantasy offers plenty of examples of tests to reveal the worthy. A dungeon’s challenges could be constructed to reward the worthy and slay those lacking.

In the 2013 D&D Championship, players needed to solve three puzzles to retrieve three magic staffs. The puzzles were created to prevent the addled, insane cultists of Zargon from seizing the staffs before worthy champions.

Dungeon Crawl Classics 15: Lost Tomb of the Sphinx Queen

In the Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure, Lost Tomb of the Sphinx Queen, the tomb is a prison for the evil Sphinx Queen. “The labyrinth below consists of a series of guardian creatures and traps, designed both to test the party (to ensure that they’re powerful enough to destroy Ankharet and her crown) and to teach them of the now-forgotten glories of the Sphinx Empire.”

The clues tempt intruders with false hopes for success

The dungeon includes clues and puzzles so that the any survivors who escape will spread tales that serve as a challenge, tempting more adventurers to test their meddle.

The original The Tomb of Horrors acts as trap to capture the souls of the strongest adventurers for some wicked purpose. The ambiguous clues written on the tomb’s floor seem almost as likely to lead to death as to success, so could they be a lure for more victims?

Challenges taunt intruders with the builder’s genius

The dungeon’s builder is like the serial killer who leaves clues because he wants to flaunt his genius over the cops pursuing him, or because his name is Edward Nigma so what else? This premise works as a more plausible version of the insane prankster.

The 2010, fourth edition Tomb of Horrors says, “It’s not enough for Acererak to win; he has to to prove his superiority by by saying, ‘I gave you a chance, and you still weren’t smart enough to beat me.’”

Someone wishes for the dungeon to fail its purpose

During a dungeon’s construction, something may have worked to sabotage it so that it ultimately fails its purpose. This sabotage can come from a few sources:

psychological conflict. We’ve all heard stories of the killer who secretly wished to be caught. Suppose a dungeon builder’s inner demons—or real, live demons—drive her to create a dungeon’s death traps, but her better nature, or some compulsion, or even a foe’s geas drives her to bury clues with the traps.
architects and workers. Most dungeon builders recruit architects and workers to construct their vaults. The patrons always boast of retirement plans, while they plan to slay their workers to preserve the dungeon’s secrets. But suppose the architects added clues as a means of revenge on their overlord? This results in a dungeon filled with clues subtle enough to escape the overlord’s notice, but within the grasp of clever adventurers.

Buyer beware: Charles IV of Spain and his Family paid for a portrait that flattered them with glittering jewels
and finery, but the family’s dead eyes reveal them as foolish and banal.
bargains. Fantasy includes many examples where bargains with mystical powers give a scheme an Achilles heel. Here, the dungeon’s weakness comes from the same, mighty powers called to help construction. Great magic often comes from a source with its own, unknowable motives.
In the Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure, Tears of the Genie, the Grand Caliph binds a djinni in his dungeon, but the gods of Àereth force the Grand Caliph hide the means of freeing the djinni within the prison.

Dungeon crawling is a sport

XCrawl

If adventurers crowd the streets and dungeons lie under every mountain, then dungeon crawling could become sport. This premise supports the six Challenge of Champions adventures that appeared in Dungeon magazine. Pandahead productions combined dungeon crawling for sport with all the posturing and pay-per-view rights of professional wrestling to create XCrawl. This premise abandons the mystery and enchantment of the exploring ruins, and replaces the thrill of confronting evil with artificial challenges and, in the case of XCrawl, humor.

If mortals can find sport in dungeons, then gods can too. Beedo from Dreams in the Lich House imagines death mountain, a place where the death god Hades can lure the land’s heroes, and then collect their skulls as trophies. This concept fits with the Olympians’ penchant for using mortal proxies as toys. “The other gods, for that matter, are greatly entertained when heroes overcome the machinations of the death god, and have gone so far as to sprinkle Hades’ sprawling dungeon with divine boons, godly weapons, and hidden shrines and sanctuaries where their beloved champions might gain a small respite.”

A religion or cult demands it

When Mike Shel decided to write an adventure inspired by Tomb of Horrors, he realized that the original tomb failed to provide much justification for its built-in clues and challenges. For The Mud Sorcerer’s Tomb, he created a cult of mud sorcerers, who “delighted in riddles and conundrums, disdaining those who couldn’t equal their mental prowess.” And then he gave them a reason for planting clues. “It may puzzle your players that Tzolo would leave hints lying about for would-be grave robbers. However, the clues were intended for for her liberating servants.”

Mike Shel was on to something. D&D’s assumed background needs a cult or religion that provides a ready-made excuse for dungeons that test characters with puzzles and strange obstacles. The mud sorcerers point the way, but their plan seems flawed. Why build clues for your servants that could also aid meddling do-gooders?

I propose a new creation.

The cult of Seermock, god of wealth and power through cunning

Seermock serves as a secret patron to those of wealth and power who earned their status through scheming and manipulation. Although few know of the cult’s existence, Seermock gladly spurns the common herd that he deems unworthy. Seermock upholds these principles:

Wealth and power exist as a reward reserved for the cunning, while those of lesser intellect deserve impoverishment, servitude and then death.
The weak minded who wish to claim wealth and power must suffer punishment for their presumption.
Bequeathing wealth on the unworthy only rewards the foolish. Those cunning enough to join Seermock after death must strive to protect their worldly gains from those of dull wit.

Like many figures of wealth and power, followers of Seermock strive to memorialize their achievements with grand tombs. But followers of Seermock build their tombs to test those who attempt to seize the riches inside, rewarding the clever while slaying others presumptuous enough to seek treasures they do not deserve.

Puzzle traps

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In my previous post, I introduced gotcha traps, the first of my two categories of traps. This post reveals my second category.

puzzle traps

While characters must search for gotcha traps, puzzle traps always come with clues that signal their presence. With puzzle traps, the fun comes from either deciphering the clues to locate the trap or from working out a method to evade the trap, or both. The details of these traps matter. Because puzzle traps exist as tests of player ingenuity rather than character skill, the party’s rogue probably lacks any special advantage. Players rarely disable a puzzle trap with a quick check, rather they work out the game-world steps required to circumvent the threat. For more on the sort of game-world problem solving encouraged by puzzle traps, see my post, “Player skill without player frustration.”

Puzzle traps work like other obstacles that demand player ingenuity to bypass, but they bear an extra burden to be fair because of the danger to the characters. If an ordinary obstacle proves inscrutable, the game just slows until the players go another way—or the dungeon master has something come through the sealed door from the other side.

On the other hand, the stronger the warning signs that accompany a trap, the more you can increase the trap’s peril. If the players find a gem surround by a ring of blasted corpses, they will accept a certain lethality. Everyone loves to see a reckless instigator get zapped.

“Gee guys, something about that gem just seems a little off to me.”

To make puzzle traps work in the game, players must see evidence of their presence. Include clues that hint about the traps. Make the clues just subtle enough so the players either feel clever for figuring things or chagrined because they missed all the hints that now seem obvious. The last thing you want is players feeling they’re characters are dying because the DM wants to prove his superior ability to add arbitrary traps that kill characters.

For example, if the players spot a shaft going up with spikes at the top, they will fairly expect a trap that flings them up using, say, a sigil of levitation. But if the shaft is covered by a hidden trapdoor and players only find the smashed helmet of the last guy to crash up, the clue rates as too obscure.

Trap builders seldom advertise their work, but clues can come for other sources:

Earlier explorers leave signs that a trap has been triggered or bypassed. For example, the characters enter a room with spikes driven into the stone walls at ankle height. When triggered, the bottom of the floor opens to a pit. The spikes gave prior explorers a place to stand.
Disabled, tripped, or obvious examples of a trap appear earlier in the dungeon, revealing tell-tale signs of similar traps later on. For example, statues of warriors poised with real weapons line a passage. Midway down the passage, a decapitated skeleton reveals the two statues rigged to swing their swords. Later, the party finds a similarly decorated passage, but this time the trap triggers two statues bearing crossbows.
Maps, rumors, or hints reach the players from earlier expeditions or from other dungeon residents. These sorts of clues can bring social skills underground. Can the players trust a captive to lead them past a trap, or to lead them into one?
The dungeon’s builders built in puzzles or clues to test intruders’ cunning. For example, the entrance hall of the Tomb of Horrors includes a lengthy clue written into the floor. (Too bad Acererak’s obfuscated, ambiguous clues are almost as likely to send characters to doom as to success. Do avoid anything green though.)
Current denizens left evidence of the methods they use to bypass a trap. For example, players wade through a partially flooded passage and find a broad plank near a door. Unknown to the players, the door opens onto an unflooded stairway down. Opening the door causes a rush of water to sweep the the players down the stairs. Before opening the door, the dungeon’s inhabitants block the water by setting the plank across the bottom of the door, and then they step over the plank.
The trap gives signs of arming arming before it triggers. For example, someone steps on a floor tile and hears an audible click. This forces the rest of the party to search for a way to disarm or avoid the trap before the unlucky character raises a foot.

Usually, with puzzle traps, using the clues to decipher the nature of the trap leads to fairly simple countermeasures. Don’t stand there. Don’t touch that. But sometimes evading a trap can present as much of a puzzle as finding it. For example, consider my reverse pit, with the upward shaft and the sigil of levitation. To bypass the trap’s obstacle, players might need to secure someone with a rope to be raised to a passage half way up the shaft.

As I wrote this post, I scoured some classic, trap-filled dungeons looking for examples of the sort of puzzle traps that I recommend. Even though the classics served as my inspiration, I found few examples that suited my principles. Are my standards for trap design overly high? What published adventures contain puzzle traps such as the ones I recommend?

Related: Ars Lundi did a post on traps that reaches some of the same conclusions as I do. In the post, Ben Robbins calls the two categories zap traps and interactive traps. I like his term of “interactive traps” better than my term “puzzle traps.”

Gotcha traps

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Longtime Dungeons & Dragons designer Steve Winter puts traps into four categories. While I like the ideas inspired by his story traps and back traps, I focus trap design on two categories.

Gotcha traps are the traps thieves can find and disarm. When triggered, they can deal damage comparable to the attrition of a combat encounter.
Puzzle traps are the traps that defy a rogue or thief’s skills, but that reveal clues to their presence. With strong enough clues, puzzle traps can be death traps.

Both categories under the umbrella of D&D traps, but they share almost nothing in common. Each contributes different elements to the game and requires a different approach to design.

Gotcha traps

Gotcha traps include things like trap doors, poison darts, and falling rocks. As my name suggests, these traps catch unwary adventurers by surprise. Typically, no one cares about the mechanisms and operation of these traps, so the rogue just rolls to disable them, or the party steps around them.

Gotcha traps contribute to the game in three ways:

They offer the rogue a chance to shine—and not by demonstrating her ability to backstab a magical crossbow turret for massive damage.
They add to the ambiance of the dungeon. I like my dungeons to feel like dangerous places where one wrong step can bring sudden death (even if it probably won’t). On page 6 of Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, Gary Gygax writes, “Besides those [traps] already indicated on the sample level, there are a number of other easily added tricks and traps. The fear of ‘death,’ its risk each time, is one of the most stimulating parts of the game. It therefore behooves the campaign referee to include as many mystifying and dangerous areas as is consistent with a reasonable chance for survival.”
They cool off the instigator. You know that guy who grows impatient with caution and planning, and so just opens all the doors at once? Everyone who enjoys a more thoughtful game and everyone who actually cares about keeping their character alive loves to see that guy get zapped.

To make gotcha traps work in the game, follow three guidelines:

Gotcha traps must appear in places that attract attention and in places where a trap might make sense. This means dungeon doors, chests, and mysterious idols make fair places for traps. However, if you punish players with a tripwire in a random corridor or a pressure plate in an empty room, players soon learn to check everything and play grinds to a halt. If the players stumble on a gotcha trap in a place they failed to search, they should feel guilty of an oversight, not victim of a pernicious dungeon master.
Gotcha traps cannot inflict more damage than a typical combat encounter. Blown rolls will cause players to blunder into some gotcha traps, so the effects cannot be lethal. You can read Grimtooth’s traps, but do not put them in play. In Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, Gary writes, “There is no question that a player’s character could easily be killed by falling into a pit thirty feet deep or into a shallow pit filled with poisoned spikes, and this is quite undesirable in most instances.”
Gotcha traps must appear infrequently so they don’t grow tiresome.

Next: Puzzle traps.

DMDavid

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