"It's not a question of where it grips it..."

[Morrus]

I once had a 2ndEd game in which the player of the thief (Hah! Yes! A thief! Not a namby "Rogue!" ) wanted to know if he could carry around some soap.

Okay, I said. Usually I take my PCs' cleanliness for granted, but if he wanted to buy soap, well, it was on the equipment list.

All was fine until the party needed to get through a locked door. The thief turned to me and said, "I take out my soap, stick it into the lock to make a mold of the key, pull it back out, and then make a copy of the key out of wood with my trusty dagger."

"No," I said. "You've got lockpicks; roll against your Open Locks skill."

That's exactly what the open locks skill represents. The exact details are irrelevent - it may involve lockpicks, or it may involve a bar of soap. The important thing is that an open locks roll represents the character doing his best to open the door with the means at his disposal. Your player just happened to add a little flavour to a standard mechanic. If he makes the roll, you say "You successfully open the lock with a bar of soap and a bit of wood". If he fails the roll, you say "No, it didn't work [for whatever reason]".

It's like disable device checks. You ask the player to make the roll, and he responds by saying "I just plug the holes" or whatever. Well, that's what the roll represents. If he makes the roll you say "You successfully disabled the device by plugging the holes".

 

[Pielorinho]

Incidentally, I think the soap-lock guy needs to reread The Great Brain at the Academy. The way you use soap in such a scenario is this:
1) You get a copy of the key.
2) You press the key into a bar of soap, forming a perfect impression of the key.
3) You later carve a key out of wood or something similar, matching the impression in the bar of soap.

A PC should be allowed to jam a bar of soap into a keyhole, but the only effect that will have will be to jam up the keyhole and anger the rest of the party.

Same thing with the napalm: a player is welcome, in my game, to mix their soap and their lamp oil together. The likeliest result will be that the lamp oil will float on the soap, not mixing at all, and now they can't wash up effectively or keep their lantern lit without sputtering. If they make a craft (alchemy) check, they might know that the soap must be treated and purified through an alembic for nine days, and then mixed with essence of quicklime and purified sow's blood before it can be combined with the oil, at which point the addition of mare's urine followed by a sedimentation of cedar sawdust will create a substance that ignites on contact with air.

In other words, MacGuyver this ain't .

Daniel

 

[Quasqueton]

Making "napalm" without an Alchemy roll or opening a door using a bar of soap without an Open Locks roll is very similar to letting a character/Player talk someone into aiding him without a Diplomacy roll or making someone surrender without an Intimidate roll. And there's apparently many DMs who allow Players to make their social "checks" without rolling, and in fact beleive that is the best way to do it.


Way back in the 80s, I had a Player occassionally play with us (maybe 3 times) who always used his "genius" to do things in game. He was in his late 20's among us teenagers, and had army survival training. He knew how to make traps, purify water and food, etc. All his characters used this knowledge, and it made me mad -- as a young and new DM, I didn't know how to tell him no when he described it in detail (and there were no skills in early D&D to pass it onto). I once commented that he'd probably try to build an atomic bomb. He said, no, he couldn't build one in D&D because...and he described the proceedure and how D&D tech couldn't create the necessary materials.

In the 90s, I had a Player in my game who complained about a former DM who was a horse riding expert. He required the Players to explain exactly how they saddled their horses, mounted up, and rode. He ruled riding in minute details, having PCs fall off because of misadjusted saddles, horses get injured because of mishandling, etc. Insanity.

Quasqueton

 

[thalmin]

Just what is lamp oil in your world, anyway? Is it kerosene, a petroleum product? Or is it vegetable oil or whale oil? I don't believe mixing the latter two oils with soap would make anything close to napalm. (Nor would they burn any cleaner )

 

[iwatt]

In the 90s, I had a Player in my game who complained about a former DM who was a horse riding expert. He required the Players to explain exactly how they saddled their horses, mounted up, and rode. He ruled riding in minute details, having PCs fall off because of misadjusted saddles, horses get injured because of mishandling, etc. Insanity.

Quasqueton

Lol. That must be fun. I guess DMs suffer from these issues in the same way lesser mortals do...

On a similar vein though...
I once ran a modern game and decided to have an adventure in a Hydroelectric power plant. One of my players is an enginner and I forgot that somewere in his past he actually did work at a similar plant. After her corrected me for the thrird time about some technical detail, I took him aside and asked him to please put his knowledge aside when I presented an erroneous description. I did encourage to use his knowledge for them to develop good tactics though...

 

[werk]

Just what is lamp oil in your world, anyway? Is it kerosene, a petroleum product? Or is it vegetable oil or whale oil? I don't believe mixing the latter two oils with soap would make anything close to napalm. (Nor would they burn any cleaner )

Sure make some nice ribbons of black smoke tho.

When I first started playing (way back in the day) I was guilty of using player knowledge kinda like this. I had a copy on the anarchists cookbook, and we were in a sci-fi setting, and I was a weaponscrafter, and the rest kinda wrote itself...

I then tried to do some of the same tricks in a vampire game and blew up 3 out of 5 of the party when we got shot wandering into an ambush.

Wait, is this the stupid things I've done thread?

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Lol. That must be fun. I guess DMs suffer from these issues in the same way lesser mortals do...

On a similar vein though...
I once ran a modern game and decided to have an adventure in a Hydroelectric power plant. One of my players is an enginner and I forgot that somewere in his past he actually did work at a similar plant. After her corrected me for the thrird time about some technical detail, I took him aside and asked him to please put his knowledge aside when I presented an erroneous description. I did encourage to use his knowledge for them to develop good tactics though...

In a d20 future play by post I had the explosives guy stick a cone shaped wad of c4 to a big bug and blow it. when I said "you know the blast includes your friends, right?" he explained that the cone shape funneled the force inward and this was how anti-tank charges worked. I politely responded that this was not how the d20 mordern weapon called c4 worked, and I had to go by the rules.

He accepted this ruling, and I followed up by suggesting two possible mechanical implementations of the cone charge based on his character having maxed out demolitions skill, and we agreed on one that had both in and out of game logic. I was willing to bend a little not bcause of his real world expereince, but because he had spent the points for his character to have such expereince.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

In the 90s, I had a Player in my game who complained about a former DM who was a horse riding expert. He required the Players to explain exactly how they saddled their horses, mounted up, and rode. He ruled riding in minute details, having PCs fall off because of misadjusted saddles, horses get injured because of mishandling, etc. Insanity.

Quasqueton

Well, that's about enough to justify setting fire to his DM's screen. What a loony. I've played with DMs that would ask the question "what, exactly, does your character do," which would send chills into the room because we knew that there was no right answer, except perhaps for "back away slowly". But you've got to be some kind of idiot to not know that player knowledge /= character knowledge, and characters usually know quite a bit more about riding horses than players do.

 

[RillianPA]

That's exactly what the open locks skill represents. The exact details are irrelevent - it may involve lockpicks, or it may involve a bar of soap. The important thing is that an open locks roll represents the character doing his best to open the door with the means at his disposal. Your player just happened to add a little flavour to a standard mechanic. If he makes the roll, you say "You successfully open the lock with a bar of soap and a bit of wood". If he fails the roll, you say "No, it didn't work [for whatever reason]".

It's like disable device checks. You ask the player to make the roll, and he responds by saying "I just plug the holes" or whatever. Well, that's what the roll represents. If he makes the roll you say "You successfully disabled the device by plugging the holes".

Has anyone checked the SRD for disable devices lately

OTHER WAYS TO BEAT A TRAP
It’s possible to ruin many traps without making a Disable Device check.
Ranged Attack Traps: Once a trap’s location is known, the obvious way to ruin it is to smash the mechanism—assuming the mechanism can be accessed. Failing that, it’s possible to plug up the holes from which the projectiles emerge. Doing this prevents the trap from firing unless its ammunition does enough damage to break through the plugs.
Melee Attack Traps: These devices can be thwarted by smashing the mechanism or blocking the weapons, as noted above. Alternatively, if a character studies the trap as it triggers, he might be able to time his dodges just right to avoid damage. A character who is doing nothing but studying a trap when it first goes off gains a +4 dodge bonus against its attacks if it is triggered again within the next minute.
Pits: Disabling a pit trap generally ruins only the trapdoor, making it an uncovered pit. Filling in the pit or building a makeshift bridge across it is an application of manual labor, not the Disable Device skill. Characters could neutralize any spikes at the bottom of a pit by attacking them—they break just as daggers do.
Magic Traps: Dispel magic helps here. Someone who succeeds on a caster level check against the level of the trap’s creator suppresses the trap for 1d4 rounds. This works only with a targeted dispel magic, not the area version (see the spell description).

 

[Arnwyn]

so you introduced a house rule on the availablity and price of standard DMG items and didn't tell anyone until it came into play... and then stated it as a obvious thing instead of a houserule... and its annoying your player.

One should never mistake a house rule for the campaign world laws, culture, economics, and demographics... and one should never assume that the players should be fully and entirely knowledgable about such things from the start, as opposed to appropriately learning that information during the game.

(Especially when availability isn't a "rule" in the first place.)