GMs are sub-standard dungeon designers

[fireinthedust]

I'm embarrassed to say that, even after all these years, I am a failure when it comes to designing the death traps and dungeons my players go through. Routinely, every one runs into the same problem, for whatever reason, by the time the heroes get to the end:

They keep surviving them.

Worst of all, my players enjoy the experience, every. single. time. They've laughed their way through innumerable sessions and come back demanding more. More! More! Of all things more!

The better I get at GMing, the worse I seem to be at making my players cry. Why, an eight year old is better at designing an efficient player-killing machine than I seem to be: I used to be able to draw corridors filled with rotating saw blades, spring-loaded spiked walls, and curling water slides lines with shark-fin-shaped blades. Now, however, I can only think of riddles or trapped boxes or locked doors.

I can only look at my copy of Grimtooth's and hang my head in shame, knowing somehow I've disappointed the dungeon masters of old.

 

[kitsune9]

I'm in the same boat Fire. I might as well put all my gamebooks in the center of my living room, pour lighter fluid on them, and set them free.

 

[Sorrowdusk]

I'm in the same boat Fire. I might as well put all my gamebooks in the center of my living room, pour lighter fluid on them, and set them free.

Set them free? You have demons bound in your books too?

Anyway- players could survive a dungeon IF and ONLY if it is in fact survivable. The only solution would be to make an unservivable dungeon.

Instead of putting the heroes in a Death Trap, perhaps...you should just shoot them? And if that fails well, you clearly need more dakka.

 

[bobhayes]

Sounds like you've grown soft, probably from affection for your players.

Penny Arcade! - The Old Ways

 

[TheAuldGrump]

The Auld Grump

 

[Reynard]

::slaps fireinthedust across the face::
Get ahold of yourself Man!

Now you listen here. You don't let those players beat you, you hear? You don't give up or so help me...!

Pick yourself up and set yourself down at your desk. Good. Now grab yourself a pencil. Got it? Okay. Now write down exactly what I say:

Encounter A1. Dungeon Door. Trapped. Poison. Death.

No.

Save.

Got it? Good.

 

[fireinthedust]

(slapped) ack! I w-will, I w-w-will!!!

 

[Zhaleskra]

At first I thought this topic was going to touch on different aspects of flawed dungeon design. Now that I know the true nature of this thread . . .

How about a pressure plate covered with Sovereign Glue, that doesn't need much weight to go down? Say around 90 pounds will do? The plate descends let's say about two stories, where the real death trap is waiting to be fired by a vaccuum no longer being one?

 

[Reynard]

A lot of GMs believe they have to create believable dungeons, ones that make some sort of sense or internal logic. What these poor, deluded souls don't understand is that a dungeon is not home or a vault or even a deathtrap. it isn't even a *place* at all.

A dungeon is a thing, a malevolent intelligence, an Elder Thing born of despair and pain and greed and hate, slowly incubated over centuries and millenia by the hateful things that have dwelt therein. It exists to tempt and to punish and it will do everything it can to crush not only interlopers, but all the hopes of all the people who know of the place. How can there be a force for good in the world when over there, beyond those hill, lies a bottomless pit of monstrous labyrinthine hell?

It isn't the orcs, or even the DM that crafts the insidious traps. It is the dungeon itself.

 

[Zhaleskra]

That sounds a lot like the "rogue Dungeon" of "Thy Dungeonman III". Except that dungeon also moves. While you start in it, you can't go back to it after escaping until an NPC tells you where he last saw it.