Stop Looking At Your Character Sheet

Player characters are wonderful things. They have an array of abilities, talents, and special powers that can deal with almost any situation. But not every situation needs the application of your favorite ability.

Sheet courtesy of Lubien Giagulliel​

Problem-solving can take many forms, and not everything is about what special abilities you have. With so many abilities, it is easy for players to fail to see the wood for the trees. So the Gamemaster should remind them sometimes that their characters can still walk, talk, and look at stuff without needing to make a dice roll or use a superpower.

The Dungeon Dining Room Dilemma​

What reminded me of this was a moment in my Dragonlance game. The player group were in a mystic dungeon being tested by the gods. They came across a dining room, the only exit for which seemed to be a plate section of floor that needed to drop down to reveal an opening on a lower level. The room itself was well decorated, with a hearth and a dining table full of food.

The way out of the room was actually very simple. Anyone eating the food would become magically heavy, and if enough of the characters ate something they could all stand on the plate and gently drop down to the exit. The effect would fade in about an hour. Did my players try that? Take a guess.

Now, to be fair, just as you learn “never split the party,” it’s a pretty good rule to “never eat or drink anything you find in a dungeon.” But there are plenty of times that isn’t true, and in module X2 Castle Amber the food gives you psychic powers! What became painful for me was that the players didn’t even consider the food to be an option and began staring at their character sheets to see what special power or ability would unlock this mystery.

Sure, the food might have been a trick, but while the player characters were happy to face monsters, dragons, and even an evil goddess, one of them taking a few experimental bites was considered way too dangerous. This was despite me reminding them that no decent dungeon would rely on one character having exactly the right spell or ability to allow them to pass. Yet still, they stared at their character sheets.

So, after what seemed like days, with them trying all manner of spells, abilities, gymnastics, and cheerleader-worthy attempts at piling people up, they finally found an answer. They used a high-level monster summoning spell to call the heaviest monster they could find, in this case a “Celestial Bison.” This poor intelligent beast was glad to be called to the prime material plane. He was ready to lend all his holy strength and power in the service of the good gods and do battle serving the greatest heroes of Ansalon…

Instead they just said, “Can you just stand over there, mate? Cheers.” Bound by the ancient pacts of service in the cause of justice and right, the bison agreed, and together with the combined weight of the PCs (and a GM at pretty much the end of his tether), it was enough to sink the platform. But the bison wasn’t happy about it (although, to be fair, it was funny).

Look Around You!​

So, what I’d like to remind players is that not every problem needs the sometimes rather blunt tool of superpowered abilities and magic. If you take a look around, and maybe experiment, the answer is usually in front of you. No Gamemaster worthy of the name sets up a room that you can’t get out of. In a sense, every dungeon is a series of escape rooms, so the clues are always there

Now, on the flip side, this means the Gamemaster does need to remember that the players are not in the room with their characters. They can’t see anything that the Gamemaster doesn’t describe. But even if you mention the dining table stocked with food, you might not have done it right.

Everything should be described with the same importance it appears to have in the room. You might not want to give things away too much by emphasizing the dining table. But if it is a huge table the length of the room, the characters will automatically notice it as important (or they should…).

As such, it is on the Gamemaster to spend some time emphasizing how large and noteworthy it is. It’s also fine to offer the odd clue for the same reason. While sometimes the players might be thick, they might also have made assumptions due to the description they had from the Gamemaster.

The Importance of Communication​

Remember that it is also incumbent on the players to ask the Gamemaster about their environment, not make assumptions when they have misheard or aren’t sure. So if the Gamemaster says there are windows in the room, ask how big or high up they are before you start talking about jumping out of them.

So, while communication is vital, and any situation needs to be clear for all parties, not everything is solved with a special ability. There is an old adage, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” and player characters are carrying a lot of hammers. So if you are having problems, stop looking at your character sheet and wonder what you might do in such a room if you had no abilities whatsoever; that might be the answer.

 

[Distracted DM]

Back on-topic, "stop looking at your character sheet." This really depends on the system, and how much the PCs care about succeeding- because their characters are good at certain things, and bad at others.

The simpler the system, the less there is on the character sheet, then yeah it's easier to just "be in the moment" and try stuff. But over time, over editions, we've codified the things that characters can do- given them cool abilities, features, the sort of things that would just be handed out or rolled for in simpler games. I don't think either is wrong- simple or complex sheets, but I can see why loving one means thinking the other is "the wrong path."

Some OSR games say "try things! Throw a barrel, or tell the GM that you want to trip your opponent instead of just rolling to hit them! Disarm them, swing on a chandelier!" The GM makes the call for the rule of tripping the opponent, because there isn't one. Our character sheets are quite light- they don't have such rules on them.
After repeat attempts, that rule is now codified- we know the process for tripping an opponent.

Eventually, editions later, we get 3.5e's Tome of Battle, or A5E's martial maneuvers, which give a ton of options, codified, to do cool things in a fight. Our character sheet is heavier.

A medium here is a game like Dungeon Crawl Classics: The warrior (and dwarf) have Mighty Deeds of Arms. Mighty Deeds says that the warrior can try pretty much whatever, and they roll- if their Deed Die is high, they succeed, and the GM adjudicates what the attempt actually does.
But ... well, "trying things" is honestly hard. It's easier to just swing your sword and hope to do more damage... so DCC gives us a good list, several pages, of example Mighty Deeds. The hope is that these are just some examples, and the player will over time use the environment and try things.. but trying things is hard, and it's unreliable- your attempt at a cool thing might end up being less effective than doing what's on your sheet.
And so we get a 3pp for DCC, the Book of Mighty Deeds! It's an entire book dedicated to codifying what you can do with the Mighty Deeds.

Yes, the things I'm talking about here are combat-related, but they're examples. We can look to skills for another:

Finding traps, treasures, hidden objects... this went from entirely player skill, not "looking at your sheet," literally having to ask "hey are there any holes in the floor? do i see any metal glints in the seams of the walls when i wave my torch around? is there the shadow of a wire under the door if i put the lamp down there? i move the tapestry aside, is there anything behind it?" to "I roll perception, do i see anything trap-wise? I roll investigation to find secret stuff, traps etc." (Yes, technically the player is supposed to first say "I look around for hidden stuff, and the GM then calls for the roll.. but after a while, the GM and players establish a repertoire and the players learn what rolls are typically called for what actions).

So the thief in DnD, with its introduction, was able to roll to find traps was sort of in-between those two... they had find and disarm traps as character features. (Ofc did this mean that the other characters couldn't find traps anymore, since that's literally what the thief did? Well, it meant that the characters probably didn't roll for such.. but the players could still poke about).

In short, and in my opinion... neither is "right," and it seems like we're trapped in a loop of starting with few rules, light character sheets, and winging it, but then we want things to be a bit easier to predict so we make more rules, with heavier character sheets... and then we have too many rules, so we want to go back to fewer rules.

 

[MGibster]

Hey now, the rat-bastard keeper in me is saying that should be a GROUP Luck check - and that means you use the lowest Luck score in the group.

I'd have the owner of the vehicle make a Luck roll because I'd assume they were the one taking care of it.

Yeah but is there a rule in Deadlands that suggests PCs automatically reload their weapons? Or during Session 0, did the group discuss weapons being automatically reloaded?

There are no rules in Deadlands suggesting PCs automatically reload their weapons. I'm sure such rule exist in some game somewhere, but I don't think I've ever encountered it in any game I've played. At the time this happened, I was running a one shot, but I probably wouldn't think to tell players in a session zero that I'll just assume they reload between fights. I'm going to cover broad strokes in a session zero rather than go out into the weeds examining weird edge cases.

Because of this, I do make sure to tell new players at one shots I'm running the following.

• I'm not a got'cha GM. I'm not going to punish you for failing to tell me your characters did very obvious things.
• I'm not out to kill your characters, but I like seeing big hits from both the PCs and the NPCs. I will celebrate a critical no matter who rolls it.
• Since a lot of you might be new to the rules, I pretty much use a simplified version of the basic rules just to give you an overall idea of how things work.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I get that food is often bait, as I mentioned. But I still think my point stands given that the very oddness of the food suggests it has some function to fulfill in the game. By all means be wary, by all means be careful. It could well be a trap and it’s fair to take care. But to just say ‘oh everyone knows you never do that’ and ignore it completely is not sensible. Any ‘rule’ about what you should or should not do in a dungeon can be broken at any time, often specifically because these tropes are so ingrained.

I don’t know the adventure but why was food involved in the riddle anyways? Like, what’s the story behind it?

If the dungeon was designed to trap a creature that hated prepared food, it would be a perfect way for “non-monster” types to get out of the dungeon while keeping the mouthless monster inside. And that could be part of the storytelling earlier in the dungeon so, when they arrive in the room, they can make the connection.

Maybe it is a reward for the people? You get to have a feast for accomplishing the dungeon? Shouldn’t there be a message specifically mentioning that?

Was there a clue of how the creator of the dungeon loved to share and eat food?

The thing is, if it’s as ‘simple’ as eating the food, and the creators of the dungeon didn’t care if people could get out, why put the riddle there in the first place? Just have a door that opens.

Which is why they looked at their character sheet. The food riddle is so random without an actual reason for the room to be set up this way.

Edit: if it was a test by the god Dionysus or god of gluttony, it would be a perfect riddle.

 

[MNblockhead]

Hey now, give me a break, I've not learned how to doodle in my mind yet!