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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8620386" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I think "Orcs on Stairs" is being used to describe several problems in adventure design.  1) players who don't make actions anticipated by the writer.  Given that there are many, many, many actions a group can take, and you can't foresee what classes or abilities they might have, this one is almost forgivable.I was playing Fantasy Craft, and an enemy caster was up on a balcony while ordering his minions to and fro.  I was able to target him with that game's version of command, and told him to approach me.  He then stepped off the balcony and fell to his doom.  Nobody could have foreseen that.It's more when the players do something that seems logical, but the adventure doesn't take it into account.  Back in 2e, we were playing DLE3: Dragon Keep.  At the end of the adventure, Takhisis transforms her demigoddess daughter, Artha, into a chromatic dragon.  She has the same stats as Takhisis/Tiamat, but if brought to less than 40 hit points, drops, then rises again the next turn.The battle is supposed to be won by solving a puzzle.  My Fighter (Cavalier Kit) had a Dragonlance, so I did what my honor demanded and I got into a fray with the chromatic dragon.  Thanks to my high hit point total, I killed her like three times over before the party finally clued in, at which point it was something of an anticlimax.  Apparently the mod writer thought the answer to the puzzle was super obvious, and that a player armed with a weapon that deals in excess of 100 points of damage and has multiple attacks per round, was going to have trouble with a 128 hit point five-headed dragon!2) important details are missing.  My Murder in Baldur's Gate campaign ran into this halfway through, when my party chose the "wrong" faction.  The adventure never says this is the "wrong" faction- you need to read ahead to find that out, and I was running it week by week, so I didn't think I needed to.After session 3, the adventure was totally off the rails because it no longer had any tasks for the player characters to do.  Nor did it make it obvious that their employers were "the bad guys".  Similar to point 1, the writer just assumed no self-respecting murderhobos would go to work for wealthy legitimate authorities.  This now puts the onus on the DM's shoulders to troubleshoot the adventure for no good reason.3) the players manage to "sequence break" the adventure.  Most adventures are written with the idea that players will proceed from one area to another in a more or less linear fashion.  Dungeons have their areas numbered, and usually, the higher numbered areas have the more dangerous encounters.It's assumed the players will search the dungeon logically- and there's nothing really wrong with that, if the players skip areas, that's sort of on them.  But a few adventures present barriers to keep the party from advancing- a locked door that requires a certain key, a missing bridge, a collapsed section of the tunnel.  What makes this point different from point 1 is, the players might find a way to circumvent the obstacle with a lucky die roll, or worse, using resources in the adventure itself.  I don't remember the adventure, because this was a long time ago, but I was playing with some friends, and we came upon a portcullis that was too heavy to lift or bend the bars (remember when Strength had a feature just to do this?) and the only way we could see to raise the portcullis was a level on the other side, out of reach.  The adventure wanted us to take the long way around by eventually finding a secret door.But after an early encounter, we discovered a potion of gaseous form, so the magic user cast invisibility on our thief, she turned into a cloud of mist, waited for the potion to end on the other side, then, naked but invisible, crept to the lever and opened the portcullis, allowing us to bypass 25% of the adventure.  When we didn't have important information later, the DM said "well, technically, it was your fault for not exploring the lower levels before going through the portcullis".4) the players break the narrative.  This is, again, related to 1.  During one of the adventures leading up to Lolth's attempt to subvert the Weave, we were on a pub crawl throughout the Realms and ended up in Shadowdale, where Elminster telepathically contacted us and asked us to pursue the bad guys because he was "busy".In the final battle, there was a drow wizard on the other side of iron bars casting spells at us.  He was the big enemy, and apparently, it's scripted that he is meant to escape to reappear in the next adventure.  He gave his villain speech and said "hahahaha, you can't catch me!" and turned to go, whereupon which our Eladrin used his Fey Step to appear in front of him and cut him down.  "Where do you think you are going?"Needless to say, the DM of that adventure was nonplussed, but later said the guy was a decoy, obviously, lol.</blockquote>

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