Recent content by Lanefan

You answered your own question with the bolded words. It doesn't matter that the expert lockpicker will eventually open most locks. The only thing that matters is whether said lockpicker can open this lock, right now, and that's what the roll is for. All those other riders are separate issues...

You seem to be talking about DM-side mapping here, while designing the adventure. The rest of us are, I think, talking about player-side mapping while exploring said adventure.

That would make a difference, yes. Most dungeons I run are in the 30-50 area (or room) range, as Jacquaysed as I can get 'em, and occasionally I'll throw in an actual maze (yes, little twisty passages might be there too!) and-or teleporters; which means that it's quite possible to get lost or...

All true, and that's just how I like it. Those hazards you note re Poly Other were an excellent deterrent to casting it on your allies, and it's the removal of that deterrent that broke Polymorph. The price for this high degree of potential effectivesness is that in 1e there's no at-wills and...

Thanks to this, sooner or later Jethro the Troll is going to appear in my game. :)

To me the bolded is two different objectives concatenated into one: --- pick the lock --- be quiet about it And thus there should be two rolls, with four possible aggregate outcomes (or one roll on a sliding scale, perhaps): --- lock is picked quietly --- lock is picked noisily --- lock is...

"Confidence is high that there's nothing here". First off, for things like searches I-as-DM do the rolling, in large part to avoid that meta-tell you mention. If they don't find something, in character they can't tell the difference between a) looking in the wrong place and b) looking in the...

For me, these examples are just "skill" combining player and character together: the player is thinking as the character would. Great stuff!

They have to tell me they're hunting and pecking, and sometimes give some specifics as to how they're going about it, an then the dice tell us how they do. A socially-awkward player who wants to play a social character is IMO intentionally digging their own hole and has to live with the result...

I'll sometimes do post-mortems on adventures, usually if-when they're no longer accessible e.g. they were off-plane or the whole dungeon collapsed or whatever. In this case I reset the occupants, consistent with previously-known info as to who-what was intending to move in there once the PCs...

I'll rarely if ever do the second type of reveal unless I can somehow know for sure that no adventuring party is ever going back there. There's one adventure from a few years ago where a party missed a walloping great bit of treasure hidden behind a secret door; I never said anything about it...

When searching the Vizier's chambers, sure. Not much help with the secret door at the other end - which the party walked past on their way in - at the time they walked past it. And it's that one on the way in that's the key piece here: they have to look for it in order to even have a chance of...

Yes. As in, both in parallel: the players are experiencing the same puzzle the characters are.

Well, yes it does add to the verisimilitude of the exploration in that, unless the place is tiny, without a map they've a half-decent chance of becoming lost. Also, careful mapping is useful in that missing gaps can sometimes point out good places to look for secret doors. Here, it's usually...

One element I've put into dungeons a few times where the owners wanted some serious defenses are parallel passages each starting in, say, Room A and ending in Room B. One of the passages is obvious, but filled with nasty and noisy traps and has false marks at each end indicating frequent use...