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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 1255834" data-attributes="member: 7464">I like creative solutions to problems.  For example, I had a complicated puzzle one time, involving using levers to open combinations of secret doors to rooms with more levers. It was fiendish and would have taken the party hours to map the interactions of the different levers with the different doors. The party, rather then spend all this time, deduced which secret door was most likely to lead to the next area and Stone Shaped their way through. I spent an hour coming up with a cool puzzle that they just bypassed, but I wasn't about to make it not work just because I planned on them doing something else.  Sometimes I don't know how to handle creative ideas, though. Just last night I was DMing for a brand-new player. She is playing a paladin and we're running the Sunless Citadel. The party was attacked by those little wood-creature things as they camped for the night outside the Citadel and the paladin couldn't roll well enough to hit the things. Consistently bad rolls. The things only do 1d2 damage and I was still having to fudge rolls just because I didn't want the adventure to end this way. Determined that her sword "wasn't working" she decided to have her character kick the beastie into the fire. I wasn't sure how to rule that, but she gave up on it when she saw the fire was behind her and she'd have to move around to the other side of the monster to do it. Whew! Saved from having to make a wierd-non-rules-supported DM call. But alas for me, she still is convinced her sword is defective and decides to "squash the thing with my shield!" "All right." I'm thinking, "That's an off-hand attack with a shield... Don't remember the damage, but with those penalties she's bound to miss. I let her try, and she rolls a 19. Even with the penalties, she hits. I couldn't remember shield-bashing damage, so I had her roll d4. She rolls a 4, but with her strength bonus it's enough to kill it. So I say, "You succeed and manage to squash the thing into a sappy mess with your shield." All well and good, right? Except she has now decided that her sword is an inferior weapon to this incredible shield-bashing and proceeds to try it in every encounter. When it didn't work against a trio of skelitons, she instead got the bright idea of lassoing them together. (After all, when all else fails, find ways to use your mundane equipment) I had no idea how to handle that, but talked her out of trying by pointing out that one of the skelis was behind her so she couldn't get a clear throw. The other player, more experienced but also rolling poorly, convinced her to give her sword another try (in the spirit of mercy I "forgot" to give the skeli's any kind of immunity to slashing weapons, lest she forsake the sword yet again) and the things were defeated. Remember, sometimes the cinematic, dramatic, incredible moves you see in movies are in actuality really, really, really stupid things to actually try. Creative ideas do not necessisarily mean smart ideas. The tapestry-jump-pull ploy above is a good example. Sure, if you succeed it was really cool. But if you fail, all could be lost. Gambling all-or-nothing just to get a bit of cinematic coolness into the battle isn't worth it, IMHO.</blockquote>

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