The Role Playing Public Radio Forums
General Category => RPGs => : dragonshaos April 21, 2009, 12:59:32 PM
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When I made a 'learning' dungeon for two of my players, I had a room with minions, and then a passageways with spear gauntlets (4Ed). Now I was expecting them to get through it with trial and error, and in doing so they came up with creative ways to bypass the traps. It was a Paladin and Warlock, the same ones playing my campaign now. They were running after an escaping Kobold, and when they got to the passageway they find it's dead bloody corpse. I want to mention that just before they entered, the Paladin unknowingly played with a bunch of levers he found and activated the trap after the Kobold ran away, killing it.
Now they knew there were traps. They failed perception, and didn't have any kind of Thievery skills. So what do they do? Just for the hell of it the room they were in previously was the mess hall of sorts. So the Paladin grabbed a table, and slid it across the floor of the passageway until the spears shot up and destroyed it. Then he just acrobatics checked over it. They would mark where they thought the traps were, and eventually they kept a few bodies of kobolds to heap on a square to see if a trap would activate.
They manage to make it through the whole corridor this way, and even when I threw at them a slinger or two at the end, they just grabbed a table and it provided some cover. I thought this was creative and I didn't even think of them using the tables at all. I just threw them in to give the room more personality.
So! I want to hear other experiences with traps or hazards, in any system. I want to know of creative ways players (or you) got through them in ways the GM didn't even see or think of.
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I don't my players have ever solved a puzzle creativally. They tend to fail whatever conventional methods one might use and them complain about the puzzle.
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make the npc rogue do it. That's it. They suck at traps. Puzzles they will figure out once I explain the premise slowly and carefully a few times.
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I was DM'ing an Iron Heroes game a few years back - the same game that featured the bloody map (http://slangdesign.com/forums/index.php?topic=110.0) - when the players tried to use traps creatively beat traps and to use them to their own advantage. Ross was playing a warlock who had a summon rat spell and figured out that he could summon rats in the middle of a hallway to see what happened. The first hallway exploded into a hellish fire storm frying forty or fifty rats to a crisp. But the second hall way he tried it in, the rats scampered off. This was because the rats were too small to set off the gas trap because it was weight sensitive and not motion sensitive so Jason's character steps into the hall and falls fast asleep. The other players figure he's set off the trap and physically drag his character to the next room. By this point in the adventure the players have had several encounters and decide to rest. During the night, a half-dragon giant bore sniffs them out. In combat, Dan's character leaps on the bores back and tries to control it. The other characters encourage Dan to take the dragon-bore through hall with the sleeping gas, which rouses an encouraging chorus of "Sleep with the Pig!" I give Dan an animal handling bonus if anyone is stupid enough to act as bait, which Jason and Karee readily do. They run down the hall, the bore with Dan on it's back in hot pursuit. Karee makes the fort save. Dan makes the fort save. The dragon-bore makes the fort save (which it shouldn't have had to attempt anyway). And Jason fails the fort save, again, and falls fast asleep. The bore at full gallop (do bores gallop?) snout-flips Jason's character over it's back and several yards behind him. While all this is going on, Ross's character is still in the other room chanting "Sleep with the Pig!"
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My friend Tim was the most creative player ever.
During the epic He-man campaign, he played a halfling and they were going into a city that was being protected by Trollans (Orko's race). I can't remember the full logistics of the situation, but waaaaay back in the first session, Tim killed a trollan and stole his robe and he had been carrying it the whole time. A wizard on the team was going to cast something to make him float, and someone else was casting an illusion to make it look like his party memebers were also trollans. They were going to infiltrate the city and burn down the building that the trollan council was inhabiting.
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Ah, the dressing up like a dead guy trick. My players have used that. Then they get asked for the password and their plan fall apart.