D&D General Schrödinger's Rogue

[Fenris-77]

I like having a little list of habitual actions for a party. Standard marching order, standard watch rotations, standard room clearance, shizz like that. It speeds things up more than you'd imagine and it mirrors pretty well how well trained groups of professionals tend to handle routine tasks.

 

[iserith]

It also helps if you're telegraphing threats well. Players can pick up on clues as to when they should be more cautious than usual or whether everything looks pretty clear. And even if they don't manage to pick up on the clue and run afoul of some hidden threat, they can't say you didn't drop any clues which preempts perception of the challenge as a "gotcha."

 

[Nikosandros]

You should put a double door for each room and put a rogue-detector on one of the doors.

 

[jasper]

Kill the rogue if he is outside the room
Kill the rogue if he is inside the room.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Honestly, I don't think I'll have to do anything...on his first session, while everyone else was short-resting after the battle with the flaming skull and swarms of undead spiders (shudder), during which he just hid (at the time, I thought he was preparing for a solid sneak attack, but no, he just stayed hidden and did nothing), he decided to go explore the Tomb on his own. I kept expecting him to turn back, but no, he kept going until he nearly fell to his death, then proceeded to fall for the classic mimic-as-a-treasure chest. It's a small miracle he survived that.

Kill the rogue if he is outside the room
Kill the rogue if he is inside the room.

 

[Krachek]

Kill the rogue if he is outside the room
Kill the rogue if he is inside the room.

Standard quantic application, since the rogue is at both place you have double occasion for killing him!

 

[Fenris-77]

Standard quantic application, since the rogue is at both place you have double occasion for killing him!

Double XP for everyone! Yay.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Anyone else experience this?

Old as the hills.
Well, hills formed in 1970s Wisconsin.

 

[Lanefan]

After last night's Tomb of Annihilation session, I've observed the following phenomenon that I'm going to call Schrödinger's Rogue. Some time after the party enters a room, a PC (often, but not always, a rogue) will declare that they did not in fact enter the room. However, after nothing terrible happens to the party, they will start asking questions about the room, despite not having said that they went into the room to see any of it. So the rogue is simultaneous in the room and not in the room.

Anyone else experience this?

Yes, sadly.

Fortunately we use a grid-and-map much of the time, so it's easy to see where PCs are; but if (when) I see character pieces suddenly being retroactively repositioned at the first sign of danger the DM smackdown hammer comes out in a hurry.

As for the Rogue here, asking questions is actually OK (s/he could always be calling into the room from outside "What do you see in there?" "Did you check so-and-so?" etc.) but if s/he actually starts interacting with anything in the room while at the same time not being there then we have a problem.

 

[billd91]

You need this thread:

D&D General - DM tip - ask everyone what they're doing before you resolve what each person is doing

I find this is really common and feels frustrating as a player. Combat ends and the DM asks "Ok, so what is everyone doing?" and there's always that race for the least shameless player to declare "I rush to the corpse / vault / etc." and the DM will often follow with "OK. You find this, this and...

www.enworld.org

Pin the players down on what they're doing and where they are when one PC starts to do something before you adjudicate what the outcome of that PC's action is