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Boris the Spider (the Who) - king of the giant spiders Bullroarer (Midnight Oil) - huge bull with a sonic attack Dream Weaver (Gary Wright) - another spider, touching this one's webs gives psychadelic effects and hallucinations; its main attacks are illusions and psionics Puff the Magic...

I thought about Man on the Silver Mountain and decided it sounded more like an NPC than a monster. Ditto The Wizard (Uriah Heep), Holy Diver (Dio), and a bunch of others. King Crimson would fit this bill too. If we're allowed to get modern enough to include the early-mid 2000s a bunch of...

If henches (and-or other NPCs) can die to traps then PCs can die to traps; never mind that after the first hench dies to a trap no other hench in that party will take point even if directly ordered to.

Sorry, but it's the former. Yes. An analogy: Let's say that on my way to work each day there's a little cat I sometimes stop and pat while walking down Street X, but only sometimes as the cat isn't there every day and there's no real pattern to it. Which means, if I walk down Street X...

Note also this means ex-member of the community not by their own choice, as opposed to those who have simply wandered off (or in some cases, sadly, passed on).

More I'm saying "If you're careful and spend the time it takes to search, you give yourself a not-guaranteed chance of making things easier on yourselves; if you don't, that chance disappears." This assumes they didn't find the other end of the passage while searching the chambers for the...

To me there's always an element of luck in D&D, otherwise it wouldn't use dice. And if you're going to use enough dice rolls to in effect allow the bell curve to almost complately negate luck then why bother? There's going to be times when there's no way the character can know the stakes...

Apropos of nothing else, this is the best line I've seen today! :)

How would you compare them, then? What 1e level is a 4e 19th comparable to, and what 4e level is a 1e 7th comparable to?

Not from the perspective of "It's what the characters would do", which is always my starting point. I first and foremost want the characters to be played like real people, and real people usually* have a fairly keen sense of self-preservation. Searching carefully for hidden hazards in what is...

Ooh, this sounds like fun! SONGS: Is it too obvious to suggest Rock Lobster (B-52s)? Beast of Burden (Rolling Stones) - not sure how "monstrous" this would be, but maybe they stampede? Lady in Black (Uriah Heep), a ghostly apparition that when she appears might bring weal, or woe, or...

Not all traps have to be deadly. The best traps IMO are those that aren't deadly but cause the PCs serious headaches now or later: party-splitting traps, severe-delay or resource-consuming traps, traps that alert the inhabitants to the PCs' presence, and the like. In fact, I can think of one...

Characters getting into the habit of looking in every spot isn't bad design philosophy in the slightest: if it's what the characters would do in reality then it's what they should be doing in the setting. As for the other things, I don't subscribe to the "gotchas are bad" take that seems so...

Even from a game-play perspective, a tell isn't always necessary; sometimes the point isn't the choices to be made as to what to do about the trap but more what to do after the trap has been set off. One of my favourite traps is the one-way chute trap where the first (or first few, if not in...

That's a pretty solid review, though I have some issues with the reviewer's preferences (some even relate to the thread topic!): --- not all traps and secret doors should have a "tell" or clue that they exist, as hiding them is supposed to be the point --- the reviewer complains about noting...

Yes, that's the buildup and foreshadowing piece I'm talking about. Your end-stage save-the-world adventure isn't going to include that stuff properly unless it builds in the whole campaign that came before it (i.e. it's a whole adventure path rather than just one adventure), meaning it's left...

A few things to this: 1 - most "If we don't stop X, the world as we know it will end" style adventures are - or work much better when - bespoke to the specific setting and campaign they appear in. The best a generic adventure of that style can hope to do is give some DMs some ideas that can...

It would be an interesting exercise sometime to throw various combinations of parties (or even individual characters) of the same level but from different editions into a pit and let 'em fight it out, using a system-agnostic initiative system. For example, and assuming initial core release...

Or maybe some thing in the setting just aren't meant to be defeated, or even fought for that matter. Deities*, for example, shouldn't be defeatable by anyone who isn't also a deity. And if you want the PCs to become deities two things need to happen: the game needs clear guidance for how...

Or just makes them considerably more challenging. You still design for higher levels so DMs have the means to build these high-level villains and NPCs, you just make it clear that PC play isn't expected or intended to get to those levels and that if you try to push play beyond level [10? 12...