Third-level Midnight d20 campaign.
Players are searching a town (and doing a VERY poor job of it). They're not being systematic, not being creative, just blah. They make a couple weak attempts to find the correct path to take, and after some stat draining by some tiny monstrous spiders, I basically hand them the next step -- a tunnel to an underground cavern system inhabited by an ettercap and its spider pets, and well as a gray ooze and another baddie they haven't yet encountered.
So they when they manage to avoid the gray ooze and decide not to kill it, I'm getting more and more frustrated because the evening seems very dull. Before they showed up, I had rolled for all their items to see what would be eaten by acid and what would survive, if they struck the ooze, or the ooze struck them. *sigh* All wasted work. Anyway, they start wandering down the tunnels, trying to find a safer way out than through gray ooze and assassin vines -- I sealed them in with only one immediately recognizable way out. They start hearing the spiders skittering in front of them, and then they start hearing the skittering noises BEHIND them. This was all planned, due to the layout of the tunnels, which criss-crossed many times, and the very cunning (but lazy and spoiled) ettercap.
So instead of heading into the open cave for combat, they head into a dead-end tunnel so they can have their backs to a wall -- a relatively defensible position. Now I'm REALLY annoyed. I figure spiders are dumb, but who wants a frontal assault on pointy hurting food? And then -- REVELATION! I drew a 15-foot wide tunnel about 40 feet long. Then, at the end of the tunnel, with a different color marker, I "flatten" the back wall and side walls of the tunnels on the same map -- about 30 feet high (six squares. So now, I have what looks like a two-color cross drawn on the mapboard, with only the lower section of the vertical bar available for the players to maneuver in. The spiders, however, can maneuver on ANY of the surfaces. Plus, the spiders are considered to "occupy" 5x5x5 spaces, and can seem to move 10 feet around corners (side wall to back wall) if you aren't careful of their position.
For example, imagine standing on the floor, looking straight at the dead end of the tunnel. A spider clinging to the lowest square of the left wall is considered to occupy that square, the lowest left square of the back wall, and the leftmost rear square of the floor. Consequently, a 5-foot step could take it to the middle square on the floor (which is also the lowest middle square on the back wall), one square up from the middle square on the back wall (a diagonal 5-foot step). From the position of one square up from the middle square on the back wall, it can reach ALL THREE floor squares that are flush against the back wall.
I'm pretty sure we did this correctly, and it introduced a whole new level of tactics to occupy the players. Made up for the otherwise slow evening.
I cross-posted this on RPG.net. Anyone else use the 3E rules in creative ways, planned or spontaneously?
Players are searching a town (and doing a VERY poor job of it). They're not being systematic, not being creative, just blah. They make a couple weak attempts to find the correct path to take, and after some stat draining by some tiny monstrous spiders, I basically hand them the next step -- a tunnel to an underground cavern system inhabited by an ettercap and its spider pets, and well as a gray ooze and another baddie they haven't yet encountered.
So they when they manage to avoid the gray ooze and decide not to kill it, I'm getting more and more frustrated because the evening seems very dull. Before they showed up, I had rolled for all their items to see what would be eaten by acid and what would survive, if they struck the ooze, or the ooze struck them. *sigh* All wasted work. Anyway, they start wandering down the tunnels, trying to find a safer way out than through gray ooze and assassin vines -- I sealed them in with only one immediately recognizable way out. They start hearing the spiders skittering in front of them, and then they start hearing the skittering noises BEHIND them. This was all planned, due to the layout of the tunnels, which criss-crossed many times, and the very cunning (but lazy and spoiled) ettercap.
So instead of heading into the open cave for combat, they head into a dead-end tunnel so they can have their backs to a wall -- a relatively defensible position. Now I'm REALLY annoyed. I figure spiders are dumb, but who wants a frontal assault on pointy hurting food? And then -- REVELATION! I drew a 15-foot wide tunnel about 40 feet long. Then, at the end of the tunnel, with a different color marker, I "flatten" the back wall and side walls of the tunnels on the same map -- about 30 feet high (six squares. So now, I have what looks like a two-color cross drawn on the mapboard, with only the lower section of the vertical bar available for the players to maneuver in. The spiders, however, can maneuver on ANY of the surfaces. Plus, the spiders are considered to "occupy" 5x5x5 spaces, and can seem to move 10 feet around corners (side wall to back wall) if you aren't careful of their position.
For example, imagine standing on the floor, looking straight at the dead end of the tunnel. A spider clinging to the lowest square of the left wall is considered to occupy that square, the lowest left square of the back wall, and the leftmost rear square of the floor. Consequently, a 5-foot step could take it to the middle square on the floor (which is also the lowest middle square on the back wall), one square up from the middle square on the back wall (a diagonal 5-foot step). From the position of one square up from the middle square on the back wall, it can reach ALL THREE floor squares that are flush against the back wall.
I'm pretty sure we did this correctly, and it introduced a whole new level of tactics to occupy the players. Made up for the otherwise slow evening.
I cross-posted this on RPG.net. Anyone else use the 3E rules in creative ways, planned or spontaneously?
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