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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Omegaxicor" data-source="post: 6157715" data-attributes="member: 95351">Now firstly I know that 99% of bad player assumptions are down to poor DM planning (maybe not 99% but a portion, to be determined later) but there are times where players see something and latch on to it and go in the wrong direction. An example of this is: "You enter a Dwarven Stronghold that has been taken over by a Human Archmage a century or so ago. You reach a large door, immediately the whole room glows red and Earth Elementals begin to appear (in rising numbers and in power)"now you have two options:1) Fight 10 waves of enemiesOR2) Use Knowledge (Arcana) to try to unlock the doorand the player's choice3) Try Knowledge (Dungeoneering) (best I could think of off the top of my head) to try to see how the Dwarves would unlock the door. (and then I roll them a 1 openly or anything secretly)Now the bad assumption is ASSUMING one way or the other but in this case assuming the trap is a security feature of the Dwarves and not the Archmage.Now this is only an example but do I tell the players "No it's not a dwarven security system" flatly and without the usual DM's "you don't really know" edge OR do I just let them die in Earth Elementals? (or if there is a Player's Method (you know how they ALWAYS pick option 3) then I would still like to know what you would do to deal with this)The players suffered through several pointless fights before expending a lot of resources and losing a party member before killing all the enemies, this meant that the Archmage was too strong for them and killed all but one party member (I fudged the second-to-last guys death because I didn't expect anyone to live and then the last guy rolls a 20 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> )EDIT: throughout the thread the example became a large question which wasn't what I intended. The question is: if your players were stuck doing something in a corner and ignoring the door, do you say to them "There is nothing you can do with that focus more on the door that is unlocked and unguarded and waiting for you to go through for the past six hours! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" /> " <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> or just let them stay in their corner figuring out what to do with the corner?</blockquote>

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