Recent content by Celebrim

Finished Adventure #9 in the "Tales of the Dogfish" campaign (finally) Thought I'd collect all the 5 word summaries of the sessions in one place. Adventure #1: The Job Session #1: Canyon chase of Kobok pirates. Session #2: Lurrians welcome predators for study. Session #3: He's outside. Must...

Firefight during the fireworks display

This is not however a figure per trap, but a figure by career. Approximately 700 men served as Tunnel Rats. They explored 4500 tunnels, or about 6 tunnels per man. Since they generally went down in teams of 2-3, that's probably 12-18 tunnels each. Each tunnel would generally have multiple...

I have long held that the simple "search" check is the most complex thing in all of D&D and this doesn't really matter whether you are talking about "I check for traps' in 1e AD&D or "I search the 5x5 grid" in 3e D&D. The problem is we are trying to take something that is concrete and...

I agree. In a sense, a treasure chest, the door to something secure, an altar, an idol, or a tomb are all themselves tells. They are just places where you should think, "There is probably a trap here." Whereas, you are doing it wrong if the players think they need to search for traps in...

I've always loved how you could use the 1e Monster Manual (either the first or one and two) as a campaign world generator and actually be rather interesting. Just make a map, make some encounter tables by terrain and randomly fill in the hexes with encounters and lairs using the randomly...

I'd been thinking of buying TOR, and wow did you just completely kill my enthusiasm for doing so. Well, it's not the way they should be. I'm not sure I'd go that far but, it's very much not an RPG I want to play at that point.

I disagree, and notably so does The Angry GM. While the Angry GM doesn't well define what a good trap is and conversely what does make a trap sucky, he does admit that all of this discussion applies only to certain types of traps like "arrow traps" or "lightning bolt traps". He does admit that...

Because if you try to simulate the mental skills of the character then very quickly these will need to overrule or supplant the choices of the player, reducing the player to an observer of the character which would actually be controlled by the dice or game rules or the referee.

Because eventually if you follow that logic the player ceases to be the player of the character and becomes the observer. If you simulate the character too much, then the character starts making the choices. Perfect simulation is not only not possible, it's not desirable. Generally speaking...

Not sure about the rest of the thread, but I don't mean any of those things. A tell is best illustrated by the scene in "Monty Python's Holy Grail" where the knights have been told about a terrible beast and they get there and it's just a rabbit. But the "tell" here is "My god man look at the...

I went back and read Lanefan's contributions, and I think you are misreading him. Lanefan plays a game that is like mine bizarrely his own mechanically, but as far as his GMing recommendations go he and I seem to be in agreement on this topic (and in the exact area that I also agree with The...

Things are bad if I think you are too wordy. No, I really don't like his writing. I think he seems like he'd be an A+ GM, assuming he's not actually as pretentious as he comes off as in his schtick. I just hate his "I've Watched too Much of the Critical Drinker" writing style. I don't think...

I hope you aren't too offended if I am not that impressed with The Angry DM. There are a lot of nuggets in his essay that are important, but the way he presents them makes it easy to take the wrong lessons and hides the important take aways amongst all the rest. Aside from his "shtick" of...

Yes, but also no. An area with traps should have an early tell or else be the sort of place where you would expect to have a trap. Once in a "trap filled area" it becomes no longer necessary to telegraph the trap heavily. You don't need a pile of bones around the locked chest in the evil...