Challenge based on Party Creativity, or Give Me My Genitals Back!

[Rechan]

In the last session of my game, I proposed a different type of challenge for the party to deal with.

Petras, the Party's elf and swashbuckler, is a terrible, horrible lech. Sleeps with more women than GP in a dragon's hoard. He went to bed with the wrong woman, though; she was a Trickster Fae. And when he woke up, Petras was a she. The character, naturally, was rather distraught.

So after the party was done heckling poor Petras (now dubbed Petrina), they set about trying to solve the problem. They found a wizard who would help them find the Trickster, and the wizard explained the situation.

Trickster fae are very powerful in their own right. They play potent tricks on people they think deserve it. But the best way to nullify a trickster's power is to Trick them. You have to sucker them into a con, a ploy in some capacity. Once you have done this, it's like catching a leprechaun, or owning a genie's lamp; they are utterly vulnerable to you, and under your thumb.

Problem is, the party was reduced to thinking really hard on how to trick someone. This, from a group of PCs who are con artists and regularly scam NPCs.

Anyways, I liked this idea of presenting a problem to a party that could be solved by any number of ways. The limit is their imagination, planning, and anticipation of their target. It becomes a puzzle with unending answers. The problem comes when saddled with a group that isn't as imaginative, or stops thinking outside the box.

But now that I sit here and write this, I can't really think of any other good examples of Creativity Challenges. Yet, we can still discuss them.

 

[Whimsical]

Anytime the game involves breaking into a secure location, such as the kingdom's treasury in a castle, a high-security prison, or the headquarters of a thieves' guild, you can bet the players will spend hours trying to come up with ways to break in with cleverness and then end up doing a frontal assault once their fragile plan fails.

 

[carborundum]

The first one that springs to mind is a time limit before the bad army reaches the threatened area - kind of like Farshore in the Savage Tide.

The defenses are up to the players to invent, with plenty of ideas given. All those sandbox things are big on creativity.

 

[Old Drew Id]

In a low-level "D&D crime family" game I played in at one point, we were assigned a mission to steal a package that was being transported by a caravan which included a group of good NPC's, including a paladin and a wizard among others. The DM left the entire operation up to the players to put together. The starting conditions were such that we knew the caravan had not arrived yet but it would soon have a layover in our town for a couple of days before heading on to its final location. Also, the caravan had recently been attacked in another attempt to steal the package. Many of the mercenaries hired to the protect the package, including the wizard, had been killed. (Otherwise the caravan would have been so well protected that it would have been impossible to even consider stealing it.)

The great thing was how open the adventure was. It was a chance to really shine creatively, especially in a situation where a straight-up toe-to-toe melee would have been suicide.

The party consisted of several evil or neutral characters, including a bard master-of-bluff-and-disguise (my PC) and a gnome sorcerer who specialized in necromancy. We spent several days doing gather information checks around town to learn everything about the caravan and its members before they arrived. We knew that they had a contact with a local well-respected mercenary company that they would work with to replenish their guards, and that this company was smart enough to not hire on a bunch of new volunteers on something this important. So, we waged a public relations war. We arranged for several members of this respected mercenary company to be caught very publically in various compromising situations, including drunkenness and other debauchery. We crafted a song that we performed at several taverns which made a joke of their reputation. We then discretely hired other bards to repeat that song around town and to spread the news of this company's downfall.

In the meantime, we hired on with a smaller mercenary company that was the second-place company, and more willing to hire new guards. (Translation: more gullible and easily conned into believing that we were respectable people. ) I am pretty sure we got to take advantage of those rarely used Forgery skills to give ourselves references.

On other rumor we spread around town, and perhaps the most important: we let it be known that the local cleric was upping his prices on raise dead, and that there was a new discrete necromancer in town who could perform the same service at a much lower cost if anyone was interested.

When the caravan finally arrived, with their dead wizard in tow, and looking to hire new mercenaries, the trap sprung up perfectly around them.

First, they heard all around town about how their favored merc company was on the skids, and that a formerly second-rate company (the one we signed up with) was the new recommended vendor. So, they signed up to have us help guard the caravan.

Second, they heard about the new necromancer, and we (as their new loyal guards) recommended that they check it out to save some money on raising the wizard. A little roleplay later, and we're in the graveyard at midnight preparing to raise the wizard from the dead.

This was a low-level campaign, and this sorcerer had nothing like a raise dead spell. What he did have was a spell called Armor of Undeath or something like that. The spell would cause a corpse to animate, grab hold of the caster, and then act as a form of undead armor for a short time. As a bonus, the spell had a side effect of destroying the body so that it could not be raised by anything short of a true resurrection.

Now we're in the graveyard, and the NPC paladin is highly suspicious, but he is also greedy enough to want to save money on this whole raise dead business. And the bard and the gnome sorcerer are not evil, just neutral with some chaotic tendencies. So he agrees to let the sorcerer cast his spell. The gnome casts the spell, touches the body, and the wizard sits up and grabs the gnome and starts wrapping himself around the gnome's body.

At this point the gnome and the bard start screaming, "AAH! THE SPELL WENT WRONG! HE'S TURNED INTO A ZOMBIE!! RUN!!" and they take off running. The bard uses some minor illusions to make it seem like several zombies were starting to rise from nearby graves while they made their (eventual) escape.

So now the caravan has lost its most powerful protector, and has gained us as some of the replacement guards. From there, we also convinced the caravan leaders that one party member was not only a good guard but also a good cook. When we were about two nights outside of town with the caravan, they used the opportunity to poison just about everyone.

 

[Aeolius]

But the best way to nullify a trickster's power is to Trick them.

Have the party convince the Trickster that Petrina is now pregnant with her child.

 

[Mallus]

Proceeding from the premise that what a Trickster Fae wants most is another deserving victim, it strikes me that somehow duping an undeserving person into becoming the fae's next target is the best course of action.

Does the party have any enemies? If so, are are excessively, lawful, good, noble, religious and/or just plain nice?

Two birds, one stone (and one set of stones gotten back...)

 

[Rechan]

Have the party convince the Trickster that Petrina is now pregnant with her child.

Ha!

Actually, the PCs plan at this point is to dress Petrina up as another PC, posing as Petrina's lover. Then go to the trickster and say 'I am so distraught, I need him the way he used to be!" and hope that the Trickster will turn Petrina (disgused as the female PC) into a man, as a 'haha, there now you can be together' trick.

It's funny, because all of my party (even the Barbarian) are con artist gypsies, but posing this challenge with a clear goal was a bit of a hurdle for about five minutes.

 

[Piratecat]

This is my favorite kind of game.

I did something similar, in that I had a challenge with no clear answer. An insect-phobic PC learned that he was technically engaged to a nice halfling girl, locked into an arranged marriage from when he was a boy. Back story aside, it turned out that the nice halfling girl was Mog, a powerful instect-themed fiend, and didn't know it. The PC's choice? Marry the embodiment of the thing he hated the most, keeping her mortal and innocent, or spurn the engagement and let her revert to the monster she used to be.

The resolution of this turned out to be really interesting, with a lot of hard decisions for the whole party.

 

[Peni Griffin]

I have never played a satisfactory game that wasn't a player creativity challenge. If the DM knows the one and only way to solve the problem, where's the fun in that? If the DM thinks he knows the one and only way to solve the problem, and the players come up with something different (which they will) - well, the DM had better be a good sport and admit that it will work, or has a chance of working.

I am of the opinion that the best challenge for PCs is the one that the DM doesn't have a solution in mind for. "You're on a sinking ship. What do you do? You have been unjustly imprisoned on an island fortress. What do you do? You are in the path of an army of intelligent velociraptors. What do you do?"

Then sit back and let them blow your socks off with solutions you'd never have dreamed up in a million years.

 

[Rechan]

I have never played a satisfactory game that wasn't a player creativity challenge. If the DM knows the one and only way to solve the problem, where's the fun in that? If the DM thinks he knows the one and only way to solve the problem, and the players come up with something different (which they will) - well, the DM had better be a good sport and admit that it will work, or has a chance of working.

The one problem with a game that is completely player creativity challenge, is "How do I determine if they succeed?" And also "How do I make it look like they're not getting a cake walk?"

For instance, the game I mention, the players are all con artists. And they come up wiht some odd cons, like, "I'm going to convince this superstitious apothecary that his shop is possessed. So he will pay us lots of money to exercise the demon." So what do you roll for that? Just some bluffs?

Often I find myself just letting the PCs succeed, but sometimes throwing a monkey wrench into the situation. Such as the PCs disguising themselves as maids, slipping in among the staff of some wealthy individual, start stealing things - and getting caught by a maid, who expects payment in exchange for silence.