Is this fair? -- your personal opinion

[Lanefan]

Raven Crowking has pretty much said, but more eloquently, many things I would have. A few points, however:

1. While "take 10" is fine, "take 20"...where you automatically assume you're going to do the best possible job regardless of luck and if anything's there you *will* find it...is a ludicrous rule idea. I could live with "take 18"; this tells me you're going to spend enough time to give it a really good look but there's still some unknown-quantity headroom left in case whatever the challenge is is simply beyond your ability.

2. There was a long involved thread last month (which might have spawned this one; I've been away for a few weeks) about what rights DM's have vs. what rights players have, mostly to do with campaign-level expectations and railroading...I see a number of the same issues arising here from a different angle.

3. Adventurers are curious. It goes with the job. Put a stray lever somewhere it doesn't belong and they're gonna play with it, pure and simple.

Now, remind me again what curiosity did to the cat?

Lanefan

 

[I'm A Banana]

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.

This is key. There is nothing about the lever to suggest "trap." The lever doesn't even have to be conencted to something in the same room, or to something in the same dungeon. Likewise, the secret door may not be a secret from a different side, or maybe is not really there (what better way to get the rubes to pull the lever than an illusory door?).

There's a million and one different possible reasons for a lever to be in a room with a secret door. Only a small percentage of the suspicious and paranoid would say "obvious trap."

It's NOT an obvious trap. If it was, this wouldn't be unfair.

But this thread doesn't seem to be about fairness anymore, but about what is "obvious," which is going to vary greatly from campaign to campaign and from player to player.

And just because others don't see it as obvious is absolutely no excuse to insult their intelligence or imply somehow that they don't have common sense. It's unwarranted, condescending, and insulting to somehow suggest that desiring a different experience or having a different expectation in any way makes the players or the DMs in such games inferior to your clever challenging games of wit and wiles.

And I have seen far, far too much of that in the last few pages to make it wise for me to continue posting in this thread [though perhaps it warrants a new thread].

But to answer the OP's next, related question:

In one game where I had a PC, we encountered a room known to be the “lair” of a necromancer we had previously killed. The room was filled with blackness we could not see through. We had no need or reason to go into the room other than sheer curiosity and/or greed to loot. The rogue searched the doorway and found no trap. The mage used detect magic and saw the darkness was magical, and he saw an unknown abjuration inside the room.

After much discussion, the rogue said he would enter the room. We tied a rope around him in case we needed to pull him out. We gave the rogue a potion of protection from evil, and he drank it before entering the darkness.

The rogue jumped in passed his save (because of the potion bonus). He fell to the floor and we dragged him back out. Prompt healing prevented his death.

We knew it was magically trapped. We knew it. We took precautions (rope and potion) to help the rogue survive the trap. Letting the rogue go in was stupid. Darwin Awards stupid.

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

Not nearly as much. An ominous black cloud in a necromancer's home is MUCH more suspicious than a lever in a room, and the fact that you "knew" (somehow) that it was trapped indicates that you were well aware of what you were doing rather than unwitting.

 

[Slife]

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.

In the type of game that has randomly trapped levers that can kill virtually anything, I'd expect about every statue I encountered to do something. As would I expect every tablecloth, table, and dias to do something.

If the BBEG has so much cash to burn, surely he could afford some permanent Animate Objects spells. It's a mere 3,000 xp and 2200 gp to get 20 small objects. Spend a bit more to put on some symbols of death and you're good to go. The symbols don't even need to be permanent - and as a plus they're autotriggered when the constructs are destroyed. No worries about friendly fire, and it costs less than a third of a single lever.


Couldn't the lever, you know, be a lightswitch, or something? If a lever is supposed to "do something", why is the conclusion immediately that it does something negative to the person who pulled it? How many are there IRL, including battlefields and maximum security areas? If you can give me three verifiable real examples I'll withdraw my complaints.

I wouldn't be suprised if the PCs stole the lever and used it as a weapon of their own later. Or just sold it for cash to pay for the monk's ressurection. A trap like that is worth a lot more than a rez spell.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As we see in the initial post, the party had "cleared the dungeon" and the only things they could find in the room were a secret door and an obvious lever. There is no place else for them to go except through the door.

To my mind, this is like when Captain Kirk asked "Excuse me, why does God need a starship?" The answer was that the being he was talking to was not God, was lying, and was quite dangerous.

So, why does a room (near the end of a dungeon) containing a secret door have an obvious lever as its only other feature?

1) its a trap
2) it triggers something they've already passed
3) it triggers something beyond the secret door
4) it does nothing
5) it triggers the door

I don't like most of the choices I see there. I'll leave the lever alone, and keep looking for other ways to trigger the door.

Couldn't the lever, you know, be a lightswitch, or something? If a lever is supposed to "do something", why is the conclusion immediately that it does something negative to the person who pulled it? How many are there IRL, including battlefields and maximum security areas? If you can give me three verifiable real examples I'll withdraw my complaints.

IRL, what would you do if you found a toy on the battlefield? LEAVE IT ALONE- its probably not booby trapped, but the consequences of it being so are lethal.

IRL, what would you do if you entered a room in a secure area of a military base that had an unlabled phone on the wall? LEAVE IT ALONE- if it were meant for your use, there would be a sign and/or you would have been told going in what the phone's purpose was.

IRL, what would you do if you were in a maximum security prison (just visiting) and you were left unattended in a room with a lever on the wall? LEAVE IT ALONE- you don't know what it does- it could be a power switch, but it could also open barred doors meant to be closed, or close those meant to be open.

 

[Nightfall]

I call shanngins on this thread!

 

[GSHamster]

As we see in the initial post, the party had "cleared the dungeon" and the only things they could find in the room were a secret door and an obvious lever. There is no place else for them to go except through the door.

To my mind, this is like when Captain Kirk asked "Excuse me, why does God need a starship?" The answer was that the being he was talking to was not God, was lying, and was quite dangerous.

So, why does a room (near the end of a dungeon) containing a secret door have an obvious lever as its only other feature?

How do you know when you've cleared a dungeon? Maybe this was meant to be a plot hook for the DM to introduce the next adventure.

"We descended into the crypts and slew the lich. However, in an older section of the crypts we found a strange secret room. Inside we found ..."

That's just as likely as a Save or Die trap. Secondly, Save or Die traps don't exist in a vacuum. They guard things. The party had not cleared the dungeon because they didn't find whatever the trap guarded.

 

[Nightfall]

Shannagins!!

 

[delericho]

I thought I was out. Guess not. Something I need to address:

1. While "take 10" is fine, "take 20"...where you automatically assume you're going to do the best possible job regardless of luck and if anything's there you *will* find it...is a ludicrous rule idea. I could live with "take 18"; this tells me you're going to spend enough time to give it a really good look but there's still some unknown-quantity headroom left in case whatever the challenge is is simply beyond your ability.

When I first stated this, I put on it the caveat "in a level appropriate dungeon". I later repeated that position. Allow me to state it again:

In a level-appropriate dungeon, a rogue who searches for traps in the correct place should find them. Certainly, it is unacceptable for him to miss a trap that the character with the best saves in the group cannot make the save against, and which kills said character outright.

Furthermore, having cleared the dungeon and recovered the McGuffin, the party should know whether they are in a level-appropriate dungeon or not. Either they've handled the challenges so far without inordinate difficulty (in which case they are), or they have been in over their heads and have survived by luck alone (in which case they're not).

By removing all the caveats, details and exeptions from what I said, you're moving my position from the realm of the reasonable to some absurd stance that the PCs should never be at risk of failure or death.

 

[delericho]

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.

No, it's just stupid.

If you want to protect something by placing it behind a secret door, you don't tip intruders off to the existence of the secret door by putting a honking great lever in the same room as the door, with nothing else in the room to be controlled by the lever.

If you must have the door opened by this lever, and absolutely must have the lever in the same room, then you have the lever take three positions, only two of which are obvious. The two 'known' positions control some other mechanism that is also present in the room (I'm sure the designer could think of something), and have the third position control the door. That way, the explorer may not associate the existence of the lever with the likely existence of the door. (And, if you really must, you can still put a trap on that third position.) The key is, to protect your secret door, your first aim should be to avoid people from looking for it in the first place.

If you really want it to be safe, you put the secret door in the back of a storeroom that you fill with shelves. Basically, put the secret door somewhere that it is unlikely to be looked for. Hence 'secret'.

Furthermore, if you have the ability to build undetectable traps, you don't invest the money in an undetectable trap on the lever - you spend the money on an undetectable door. That way, your McGuffin remains safe.

Now, assuming for some bizarre reason you have the ability to construct undetectable traps, but not undetectable doors, and you absolutely must have the lever control the door, and you absolutely must have the lever in the same room as the door, and you absolutely cannot have any other mechanism in the same room, you still don't put your undetectable trap on the honking great lever.

You put it on the door. And you have it disabled by a code word that only you know, which you select such that it cannot be guessed but which you can easily remember. And you don't write it down. If you absolutely require that others be able to access the door, you choose some sort of secret tattoo for your order and require your followers all get it. Better still, have them get six, or choose one they already have. And don't tell them about the trap, or the significance of the tattoo. That way, if the intruders do manage to pull the lever using some clever mechanism that you didn't think of (like using a rope? Really, you didn't think of that?), the McGuffin is still protected, because they still can't get through the door.

Honestly, the only reason you would design the encounter described as it has been, and put that trap on the lever, is if the purpose of the secret door is for no other reason than to have the party pull the lever and be killed. Which is an entirely backwards way of designing a lair.

 

[MarkB]

1. While "take 10" is fine, "take 20"...where you automatically assume you're going to do the best possible job regardless of luck and if anything's there you *will* find it...is a ludicrous rule idea. I could live with "take 18"; this tells me you're going to spend enough time to give it a really good look but there's still some unknown-quantity headroom left in case whatever the challenge is is simply beyond your ability.

A 20 is not an automatic success on skill checks. If it really is beyond your ability, you'll still fail.

And since it takes 20 times as long as a normal check, there's a significant penalty for it in any dungeon that is not merely a static environment.