Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomBitonti" data-source="post: 4477111" data-attributes="member: 13107">Re: Having an axe killer behind a door.  I actually had close to this scenario, with a gorillion waiting behind a door.  The character opened the door, right in the face of the gorillion.  The character ended up being attacked with all four claw attacks flat-footed.  I think there were 3 hits including 1 critical, plus the rend damage for having a pair of attacks hit.  That took down over 75% of the players hit points all before the player could react.The scenario made sense: The party was blasting its way through the gorillion's lair, and the gorillion was defending its nest.  The gorillion, quite sensibly, was hiding behind a door, having made it's listen check.  The players were already in initiative when the door was opened.But the scenario was very unfun for the character, and it gave the player a very strong aversion to taking additional risks.---In terms of what does this scenario tell us, I don't know.  But what it taught me was to be very clear to convey to the characters the sense of danger that their players should realize given their level.  They players can ignore me, but at least I tried.  (If one of my players ever tried to wade through lava, I would check their wisdom, and unless there were exceptional circumstances, tell them what damage to expect and whether they were likely to get burned to death.)How does this inform the current discussion: I'm not sure.  I think that a scenario such as this one, and, generalizing to encounter design, shows the importance of encounter staging to player immersion.  Are we trying to convey a feeling of the player's characters exploring their environment?  Are we OK with going into a special "encounter mode" where the parts between encounters are a kind of glue that gets us to an artificial (but well tuned) battlefield?  How far are we willing to go to "bend" the environment to make it more playable?</blockquote>

Verification