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Message: <blockquote data-quote="olshanski" data-source="post: 5220296" data-attributes="member: 7441">Well, to counter Bullgrit, I do recall at least a few encounters where doing one thing was bad and doing something similar was good... In particular, the Tomb of Horrors had a whole sequence of secret doors that were tricky to open... some you had to rotate on their axis, some you had to lift from the bottom... things like that.There are a number of good reasons for the "turn the key one way you get your arm ripped off, turn it the other and things are fine"....You could find instructions on opening turning the key in some places.You could question a prisoner to find out how to get past a lock.You could force a prisoner to test the key in different directions.You could cast the VERY POPULAR 2nd level cleric spell "Augury" to help.You could hook up a 10' pole in order to rotate the key from a distance.You could get frustrated and go somewhere else.Basically, it was an opportunity to get creative or get frustrated.In the adventure "White Plume Mountain", I swear our party spent an hour of real-time trying to figure out how to get into the place... we were going crazy.  Eventually we found that a secret door was on the floor under a layer of mud (so elven secret-door detection wasn't picking it up).  I think we found it by accident when we used create water in an entry chamber for some stupid reason and accidentally washed away enough mud to see the secret door.I'd say that many of my favorite modules from the old days had one or more of the arbitrary elements/traps similar to what the OP describes. Particularly the "S" series, the Desert of Desolation series, I believe some of the Slavers series, and several of the "C" series all had elements of this type.  I would not be surprised if some elements of the GDQ series also had these elements... I seem to remember that there were some screwey eggs that only opened with very specific spells.Certainly there was a majority of ordinary traps, like pits or curses... but there seems to have been a higher portion of oddities like the OP described in the early AD&D adventures.It seems to me that there were far fewer (if any) of those elements in the BECMI modules.</blockquote>

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