Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 7160455" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya!This is definitely a NS train of thought. A DM, imo, can virtually never "kill a PC by accident". The only time this could be an accident is if the DM rolls 1d8+2, gets an 8, and says "you take 28 points of damage" because he's distracted, tired or just had a major brain-fart (I know I've done stuff like that). That is an "accident". But, as an impartial adjudicator of the campaign world, I just roll the dice and describe results; if a PC has 2 hp left and just took a critical for 24...well, sucks to be that PC. Time for the player to roll up a new one. That PC's death isn't an "accident"...it was deliberate, as far as the monster is concerned.Again (imho), very much a NS thought process. A trap dungeon, by definition really, IS trying to toss in as many "gotchas!" as it can. The Tomb of Horrors is a meat grinder and has most players who know about it break out into a cold sweat when they hear about it. I'd say you are describing a more...."tricks n' traps" type of adventure. One where the designer is trying to test the skill/capability of the party...not necessarily kill them, test them. Some may die, but the clever, bold and lucky ones will survive. Tomb of Horrors is definitely a TRAP dungeon.I can completely see why you would think that. But I live in a small'ish city in Canada. Locking my door is one of those "try and remember, but if I don't, oh well" things. When I leave the apartment (ground floor), I never lock my door unless I'm going to be gone overnight...and that's only really because I've had two or three drunk folk mistake my apartment for the one above me. But "locking my door" isn't very high on my list of things to remember (even when I go to sleep at night).So...I think a PC's "common sense" things to do would depend on where/how the character grew up. Growing up as a noble, I'd guess the character probably wouldn't lock the door as a default. The PC would likely have never really need to do that; that's what the guards and servants are for...and the outer compound wall. However, a PC with a street-urchin background would probably always lock the door...or place a chair up against it if there wasn't a lock. Such a PC would be intimately aware of all the bad people out there because they had to live with them.That said...an adventurer would probably, after some time, be one of those types who rents a room, locks the door, puts a chair up against it and uses dimension door to jump into the next room to sleep in there. Adventurers get pretty paranoid... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />This falls into the old newbie DM mistake: "You see a hallway, 70' long with doors every 10 feet on both sides. All the doors are dark wood with bands of rusty metal. One door, the fourth up on the right, is made with newer wood and is lighter in colour with slightly less-rust on the metal bands". This is also fairly common in NS style adventures/play where the intent is to get the PC's to the "next encounter", as someone said above somewhere.Thats why I, as DM, try and give "equal amounts" of description, so...: "You see a hallway, 70' long with doors every 10' on both sides. They are mostly dark wood, some a bit lighter, some a bit darker, all with varying bands of rusty metal".With that description, it's up to the players to decide if the hallway is just a hallway, and if the doors are just doors. This is when the players ask questions...Do any doors stand out?, or Does each door have the same number of metal bands?, or Do any of the doors look like they are newer? Maybe like they replaced ones that had been broken down before?. That's a more OS style of play.This is most definitely a "play style" thing. One mans "boring" is another mans "engaging". I guess this would be the "different strokes for different folks". We (me and my group) have attempted to play through four Adventure Paths (3.x and PF)...never managed to complete one. They get, to us, ridiculously predictable. Like 'hollywood-blockbuster-movie' predictable. So much so that the DM had to outright cheat/insta-change/completely-rewrite things during the game session. When the players start to prepare, two 'modules' in advance, for something that they aren't expected to know/suspect...well, that's a problem.When it's easy to figure out "Ok, about to have a major encounter..." or "Oh, right, this is where we get background info for no particular reason right now...but next module it will be needed...got it...", well, the adventure becomes "..wasting time on boring things" for us. We/my players like to piece things together themselves, from all that "boring stuff", so that when they do come to a big encounter and are prepared for it...they know it's because they figured something out; not because they killed that one bad guy at the end of the last module and he had a piece of paper that had the 'big encounter bad guys' name on it.^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

Verification