Is this fair? -- your personal opinion

[Raven Crowking]

This sounds good on the outside looking in, but again I ask if you didnt know that this thread exists do you really do this for every mundane objects. I doubt it. I doubt most parties want to waste the time playing CSI for every room.

There's just no bait to make this level more than what it is and without bait its just pointless DM fiat.

By its very nature, a lever implies that, by changing its position, you cause something to happen. This makes a lever very different from, say, a raised dias, a table, a torch, or a statue. All of those things might do something; it is a far more reasonable (and obvious) assumption that a lever or a switch will do something.

(It might not, of course. It could be a red herring. The mechanism could be broken. However, even if you see no obvious result, it is safe to assume that throwing the switch/lever has had some effect that you should, thereafter, keep your eye out for.)

In the example room, there is a secret door. A secret door implies both a space beyond (although this may not be true; it may be a false secret door leading to a stone wall) and a means to open it (again, this implication may not be true; the secret door could be built in such a way that it has no regular means to open it, especially if it is intended as bait rather than as a door).

In the example room, we have a secret door with no means to open it, and a lever that does something that we do not know. So here we have two objects. One does something, the other needs the means to do something. The easiest solution to the problem is that the one object does the something for the other object. We do not think any further, throw the lever, and roll a saving throw.

But...hold on. Naturally, the lever could do a lot of other things. Moreover, the means to open the secret door might not be in this room. If you were going to the effort to hide a door, would you place the lever in plain sight? Probably not. Logic therefore dictates that the lever probably does not open the secret door. A moment's thought takes us past the simple "throw the lever, and roll a saving throw" result.

By this point, perhaps, the idea that the secret door is bait to cause us to pull the lever might appear. Certainly, we search the lever for traps, Taking 20 to do our best job. We find nothing. That still doesn't mean that pulling the lever is a good idea. It is possible to make a trap that we cannot find. After all, the DC has to be no more than 1 beyond our maximum result, and we know as a fact that this is possible.

So, what now?

We have the McGuffin. We could just leave. If we are on a tight schedule, this is probably the best option.

We could cast a simple divination spell to determine whether or not throwing the lever is a good idea. The more we think about this, the better it sounds....even if it means having to rest up first, so long as we are not on a tight schedule. If we have the time for it, this is the best option.

If we don't have access to the best divination spells for the job, we could possibly use detect magic. That would at least give us some more information. Not a bad option. It might, in fact, give us reason to investigate further before doing anything rash.

We could also consider using a summoned creature to do the dirty work.

As a final option, we could just pull the lever. Doing so, after all, might grant the person doing the pulling a wish. Probably not. For all kinds of reasons, this is simply the worst option to take.

RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

And none of this addresses why someone would spend 50k or more to death trap a lever that can be bypassed by a simple rope. The point of a trap is not to allow "smart" playing to get them by it. The point of a trap is to kill people.

I think that the answer is obvious -- something like 55-56% of all adventurers would have pulled the lever, thus safeguarding the McGuffin for another day. If this thread has shown nothing else, it is that this is a very, very good trap design that will kill more people than it fails to kill.

In fact, it is a much better trap design that the ones that would have been "fair" according to some.

RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

Letting the rogue go in was stupid. Darwin Awards stupid.

None of us thought the scenario was unfair. Was it?

Absolutely not.

BTW, this thread ought to add some ideas to your "old school/new school" thread. These scenarios are absolutely fair in an "old school" game. To me, "new school" implies whininess.

(The 3.X rules are not inherently "new school" to this way of thinking, but they could sure do with some of the advice from the 1e books!)

RC

 

[Someone]

Then repeat for every single doorknob encountered.

And thus 20 minutes of fun in 4 hours of gaming is born.

It reminds me of an adventure I played once! It was the closest thing to Hell I know, after perhaps a lifetime sentence in a Brazilian jail.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Then repeat for every single doorknob encountered.

And thus 20 minutes of fun in 4 hours of gaming is born.

Different strokes, etc. I often find other peoples' gaming styles unbearably dull, so it's not really surprising that you have a similar reaction to mine.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

But...hold on. Naturally, the lever could do a lot of other things. Moreover, the means to open the secret door might not be in this room. If you were going to the effort to hide a door, would you place the lever in plain sight? Probably not. Logic therefore dictates that the lever probably does not open the secret door. A moment's thought takes us past the simple "throw the lever, and roll a saving throw" result.

That was my train of thought, hence my "Fair" vote.

Of course, there is always "The-obvious-lever-in-the-secret-door-room-is-trapped?-That's-just-what-he-WANTS-us-to-think" counterpoint...

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

And, yet, there is not a single shred of useful knowledge or logic to say that this has less of a chance of disintegrating you than actually just using your hands to pull the lever. Or is it a known fact in this campaign world that magical effects are blocked by rope or thick gloves?

Were I the rogue's player, I'd have no idea. These are merely the minimum logical precautions I'd take before pulling the lever.

(Assuming that I were a good-aligned rogue, of course. Actually when I play rogues, I tend to play them as selfish neutrals on the border with evil, or as straight evil characters; what I'd do in that case is go and take a prisoner and make them pull the lever while I watched from several dozen feet away...)

 

[DonTadow]

Different strokes, etc. I often find other peoples' gaming styles unbearably dull, so it's not really surprising that you have a similar reaction to mine.

Perhaps your style better suits a CSI team, but I can't seen a typical d and d group getting a kick out of dusting for prints in every room. Its just too tedious.

This argument is far to the extreme. I've seen this argument lower on the more "how often hsoudl traps be looked for scale" but suggesting every object be inspected like a fine tooth comb sounds dull.

 

[Falkus]

By its very nature, a lever implies that, by changing its position, you cause something to happen.

You're also forgetting that traps usually don't require the participant to play an active role in his own destruction, by the very nature of a trap. A trap should be set off by stepping onto a hidden trigger, or a tripwire, or hooked to a door, not a lever that the target has to pull.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I find it amusing that 10+ pages into this thread we still have people jumping to the illogical conclusion that lever is likely to be trapped because there is a secret door in the same room.

In game knowledge of magic and metagame knowledge of the rules both strongly suggest that this trap is an effect cranked up into the realm of a 9th or 10th level spell. While I agree that pulling the lever so quickly was unwise, to suggest that ropes, low level divinations, or summoned monsters would afford any protection against magic of this potency is pure speculation not supported (nor disproven) by any evidence presented in the scenario.