I design very complicated chambers and
rooms: it’s one of my flaws. For example, a few months ago I had this one room
that was a huge natural cave full of stalactites
and stalagmites, with a drider living high up
on the ceiling, hidden among all the stalactites.
He fired barbed arrows at the PCs below as soon as they entered his line of
sight, but the PCs couldn’t spot him in the
gloom, with all those rocky fissures and spider webs. Only way to retaliate was
for the two magic-users to send their familiars – an owl and a crow – and have
them fly up close to the drider, in order to see it through the eyes of the birds – and then use that knowledge to help the
ranger aim and fire his bow in the right direction. But the closer the
familiars got to that elusive drider, the more vulnerable they were themselves
(an arrow can be lethal when you only have 4 Hit Points). I even made a little
chart for it. One familiar @ medium range = low chances To Hit, need 17. One
familiar @ long range = lousy chances To Hit, need natural 20. Two familiars @
close range = good chances To Hit, you only need 14. Etc,
etc.
What do you think happened? Players can’t
figure out complex shit like that right in the middle of a stressful combat
scene. In video games, sure, no problem: game release date is May 2,
and on May 4 there is already a teen somewhere in Philadelphia who
got to level 19 and figured out that “drider’s cave + familiars” thing and put
a 35-minute walkthrough up on the Internet for everyone to see.
But that’s video games. It’s different. It’s taken much more seriously, and
players are generally alone in a basement,
with ample time to think. But a bunch of forty-year-old guys around a table on
a Saturday afternoon, with all the excitement and Doritos
and beer and coffee and cigarettes? I don’t think so. Not a suitable
environment. Waiting for one of the magic-users to say: “Hey, I’ll risk my
familiar’s life and send it up the cavern to try and spot that damned archer!
Stand by with your own bow, my ranger friend!”
Not going to happen.
I had another room which I called “The
Ossuary”, and I didn’t even use it in a game. It was somewhat of an extreme
affair. Basically, it’s a regular ossuary, in which thousands of skeletons are
packed in tight niches and stacked on wooden
shelves – the skulls up front, facing outward, and the bones / ribcages behind,
in no particular order. When PCs enter that place, nothing happens. They can
explore the entire room, and even get to the treasure cache
at the far end. That’s when the monster awakens: twin skeletons, and they
instantly attack the intruders. Now, when these two special skeletons withstand any damage (half the damage with edged
weapons), they don’t crack or break, but instead, random ribs and femurs shatter here and there on the various shelves
of the ossuary. Fact is, ALL THE BONES in there are actual Hit Points (or
fractions of Hit Points) for those two “invulnerable” skeletons: the whole
Ossuary is just one nasty monster with 180 Hit Points.
The solution is for the fighters to tackle
those physical skeletons, while all the other PCs run freely around the ossuary
with their clubs and daggers and staves, and smash skulls + bones as quickly as
they can. I thought they’d each roll 1d6, every round. On a roll of 1, no
bones are smashed that round, and the PC takes 1d8 points of electrical
damage: the room’s Ritual tries to “protect” itself. On a roll of 2 through 6, I’d substract that many Hit Points from
the Ossuary’s 180 total.
A group of 7 characters have something like
50 Hit Points between themselves (level 2 or 3, let’s say). So, it’s their 50
against the room’s 180...
This picture shows how I playtested it all – twice! First playtest: I had the
players find the “trick” on round 2, and at the end of the scene, the cleric
was down, the Dwarf only had 1 Hit Point left, but the group survived. Second playtest: I only had the players find the trick on
round 6, and the PCs all died in the end. Having “the idea” is definitely key
here; figuring out that any character can start shattering bones in the
niches and alcoves really makes the difference
between Everyone Dies and Everyone Lives...
Too risky for my own taste. Seven player characters die because no one had the right inspiration at the appropriate moment? That’s crazy.
If you work at Blizzard, Rockstar, or whatever, do that: create complicated
puzzles, have fun with space, distances, time windows,
lines of sight, and all that. But if you’re a good old DM in a good old
tabletop RPG, calm down: just design a room with a pile of gold at the far end,
and monsters standing in the way; want the gold? fight the monsters! Puzzles
are unwelcome in tabletop RPGs, except maybe in Cthulhu because that
vibe is different and atmospheric. But in
D&D, anything past a basic riddle is a total waste of time, slowing the
game to a stall. Riven was very cool, but it was certainly no RPG. My
word of advice is simple: keep it simple.
