Was I too vague?

[Question]

For the 2nd why didnt you just roll some knowledge checks and say something like "Magic seems to be holding these constructs together....perhaps a dispel magic or anti-magic field would disable them."

 

[Corsair]

Part 1: While I think your answers to the divinations were completely useless taken on their own, the fact that the Find the Path showed you could walk right through the wall should have been enough for the party to just walk through. Considering FtP avoids traps/glyphs/etc, that should have been enough of a clue for the party to just follow it through, assuming you and the players are both clear on how exactly find the path works.

 

[MarkB]

Part 1: While I think your answers to the divinations were completely useless taken on their own, the fact that the Find the Path showed you could walk right through the wall should have been enough for the party to just walk through. Considering FtP avoids traps/glyphs/etc, that should have been enough of a clue for the party to just follow it through, assuming you and the players are both clear on how exactly find the path works.

A Prismatic Wall spell is neither a trap nor a glyph, and find the path doesn't just fail outright at the first sign of danger along the way. If the only possible path out of the room leads through the Prismatic Wall, that's the way the spell will point, whether taking the path is harmful or not.

The first puzzle was needlessly hard, because it requires the players to assume that whoever put the wall in place deliberately chose to use a non-standard wall in order to provide an easy way out of the dead end. Unless the dungeon is deliberately deisnged as a test, rather than a trap, and the players know that, they have absolutely no reason to assume the dungeon's builder would do something so utterly illogical. Skirting around the truth with cryptic clues does nothing to alleviate those assumptions.

 

[werk]

I don't think you were necessarily vague, you were confusing. If you have experienced players, they know how the game mechanics work and usually use that meta-knowledge to influence the characters' behavior. That's fair, because the characters should know how to interact appropriately with their environment. But you changed how things are 'supposed' to work, and they didn't know it.

Case in point, prismatic wall. They saw it an said no way I'm going through that, it's a prismatic wall, I know what happens. Now you are confused why your cryptic messages wasn't enough to make them disregard everything they know about prismatic walls.

Same for the little construct thingys. Your players know that a dispel magic isn't going to do jack to a construct, so they don't waste time on it.

They are playing the way they think that they should, the way they think is best. When you run something differently mechanically from the usual game, I would hint at that. "This is not a normal prismatic wall/construct swarm." Something like that would probably help.

.02 for you

 

[KarinsDad]

For the 2nd why didnt you just roll some knowledge checks and say something like "Magic seems to be holding these constructs together....perhaps a dispel magic or anti-magic field would disable them."

Two reasons:

1) The Knowledge rolls might not have been high enough (or are you indicating that the DC should be purposely low or that the DM should fudge the dice?).

2) Again, what good is playing the game if you are going to tell the players the answer?

As a player, I would much rather figure things out than have the DM tell me the answer straight up. The OP appears to want to give clues/hints rather than blurting answers out.


The problem with a clue/hint type of solution (which IMO is more fun for the players than being told the answer) is that some days, your players might just not be firing on all cylinders. Hence, as a DM who likes to give clues, it is pretty important to have a few different ways in which the players can acquire some clues (but it is not important to have them acquire all of the clues that the DM creates).

In this type of environment, the players may also misinterpret the clues, but that is part of the fun. A DM should not "correct the misconceptions" of the players unless it is something that the characters themselves would not misinterpret (i.e. character knowledge would know which is correct and which is not). Otherwise, it's not much different than just blurting out the correct answer.

 

[IanB]

I agree with Werk here. The 2 scenarios (especially the 2nd) basically yank the rules out from under the players, without any context. Your first hint would probably have been enough for me, but the 2nd? Nothing in the 3E rules prepares you for a situation where the proper way to deal with what seems to be a construct is to use dispel magic. It was a pretty decent clue and might have been sufficient for some players, but I don't think that's where the mistake was made anyway.

Typically when I am converting 2E or 1E content and I come across something like what you describe in one of these situations, I ignore or change the parts that don't mesh right with the way 3+E works. It is more important to end up with a playable encounter than an exact replica of the original (often annoyingly arbitrary) prior edition content.

For the second example, I would have converted the creature to an appropriately-CRed swarm using the swarm rules. You keep the basic flavor of the encounter without adding extra weird mechanics that are inconsistent with the rules.

In the end I would say that your mistake was at that point, not with the clues you were giving.

 

[Nellisir]

I think everyone else has the basic sense of it. I don't think your hints were bad, but particularly the last two divinations were somewhat misleading. It's a tricky case. From the character's side, there were no harmful effects to bypass, but the divinations, in essence, confirmed that there were harmful effects.

Also, having played a wizard with a +28-ish Spellcraft score, I can identify with having it undervalued by a DM. Few things were more frustrating than rolling a good score to identify a golem, and having the knowledge broken up into the smallest bits (the DM considered every attack, special ability, and resistance a seperate item on the knowledge check, and since you only get 1 item per 5 points above X...my 14th level, 26 Int, max Spellcraft ranks, Skill Focus spellcraft, wizard was usually told something like "it is resistant to spells". Well, DUH!)

 

[argo]

With you first scenario I don't think the problem is so much with the clues you gave as the fact that the scenario makes absoluetly no sense at all. Here you've got a room protected by a powerfull spell wall (protected now, thats a key word, whoever put up that wall doesn't want strangers just walking about doing whatever they want) and they even went to the trouble of making the room teleport proof to make the wall more efficent. Then after your players walk through the wall (and in the process find out just how painfull and real it is) they find themselves trapped in a dead end. Obviously whoever designed this death-trap has got them just where he wanted them. Desperately they search for a way out only to find that the answer is... they can safely pass through the wall the other way?

You want your players to solve the puzzle using their own brains but the puzzle itself just ins't logical. You players were probably hopping their divination spells would show them the secret door that the dungeon designer built for himself or the switch to turn off the wall or something else like that.


Your second scenario I think was OK. Maybe your clues wern't perfect but then again maybe a player should once in a while say "eh, I'll throw out a Dispel Magic and see what happens". Most importantly though it is OK because you had at least one other simple and readily available solutioun, namely that they could just walk through and soak the damage. (you did impress upon them that animated objects wern't going to do them that much damage right? they didnt think that they were going to walk in and get blenderized did they?)


Later.

 

[Vanye]

As evidenced from the thread about riddles, riddles/problems are only fun if the players solve them. Quite honestly, reading through your scenario one made me angry because if I were playing in that game I would be very frustrated.

I was in a similar situation recently; the adventure my Loremaster was going through (14th level character) had a puzzle that depended on color theory to solve, but I have no frickin' knowledge of color theory. At all. The other players in the party got us through it, but my character, with his 23 intelligence, was of no use to them in that situation, which I personally found very frustrating....

 

[Space Coyote]

Thanks for all the feedback all.

Also, it is not necessary that your players figure out either one of these. Sooner or later, they will leave through the wall. Sooner or later, they will avoid the flying objects.

Right. This is what happened in both cases.

I don't think that was a fair answer. He didn't ask "bypass the harmful effects FROM THIS SIDE OF THE WALL", he asked "bypass the harmful effects of the wall". Which means your answer is false often. Stepping through the wall does not bypass the effects of the wall 50% of the time, it just does it from from one side. So the answer needed to imply that.

In addition, you said "the most difficult journey", which is again a misleading answer. It's actually the LEAST difficult journey.

I understand what you are saying, but I only stated it this way because I was trying to be "cryptic", as per the spell description. In the future I am just going to give the players a short, informative answer when they use Divination. After all, it is a 4th level spell and it is supposed to provide help for the party.

As a player, I would much rather figure things out than have the DM tell me the answer straight up. The OP appears to want to give clues/hints rather than blurting answers out.

Yup, thats basically what I was trying to do. In the first scenario I didnt want to just *give* the party the answer. Now, however, using this as an experience, I am just going to let the Divination spell provide help. In the second scenario, the situation was awkward because I was trying to use an encounter that I translated from a 2nd edition module. Once again, I didnt just want to *tell* the players what was happening and how to get around it, but just wanted to give them clues.

You want your players to solve the puzzle using their own brains but the puzzle itself just ins't logical.

Sorry for the confusion, I didnt give *all* the details of the room and module because I did not think it was necessary. However, the puzzle was simply getting *in* the room. It was not meant to be a problem getting out.