Recent content by Lanefan

When searching the Vizier's chambers, sure. Not much help with the secret door at the other end - which the party walked past on their way in - at the time they walked past it. And it's that one on the way in that's the key piece here: they have to look for it in order to even have a chance of...

Yes. As in, both in parallel: the players are experiencing the same puzzle the characters are.

Well, yes it does add to the verisimilitude of the exploration in that, unless the place is tiny, without a map they've a half-decent chance of becoming lost. Also, careful mapping is useful in that missing gaps can sometimes point out good places to look for secret doors. Here, it's usually...

One element I've put into dungeons a few times where the owners wanted some serious defenses are parallel passages each starting in, say, Room A and ending in Room B. One of the passages is obvious, but filled with nasty and noisy traps and has false marks at each end indicating frequent use...

I'm a fan of secret doors (and traps, to a point) where you only notice them if a) you're proactively searching and b) your searching hits paydirt. In other words, if I put a secret door into a dungeon I'm doing so with a vague idea of whether they're likely to find it or not. A passage that...

Boris the Spider (the Who) - king of the giant spiders Bullroarer (Midnight Oil) - huge bull with a sonic attack Dream Weaver (Gary Wright) - another spider, touching this one's webs gives psychadelic effects and hallucinations; its main attacks are illusions and psionics Puff the Magic...

I thought about Man on the Silver Mountain and decided it sounded more like an NPC than a monster. Ditto The Wizard (Uriah Heep), Holy Diver (Dio), and a bunch of others. King Crimson would fit this bill too. If we're allowed to get modern enough to include the early-mid 2000s a bunch of...

If henches (and-or other NPCs) can die to traps then PCs can die to traps; never mind that after the first hench dies to a trap no other hench in that party will take point even if directly ordered to.

Sorry, but it's the former. Yes. An analogy: Let's say that on my way to work each day there's a little cat I sometimes stop and pat while walking down Street X, but only sometimes as the cat isn't there every day and there's no real pattern to it. Which means, if I walk down Street X...

Note also this means ex-member of the community not by their own choice, as opposed to those who have simply wandered off (or in some cases, sadly, passed on).

More I'm saying "If you're careful and spend the time it takes to search, you give yourself a not-guaranteed chance of making things easier on yourselves; if you don't, that chance disappears." This assumes they didn't find the other end of the passage while searching the chambers for the...

To me there's always an element of luck in D&D, otherwise it wouldn't use dice. And if you're going to use enough dice rolls to in effect allow the bell curve to almost complately negate luck then why bother? There's going to be times when there's no way the character can know the stakes...

Apropos of nothing else, this is the best line I've seen today! :)

How would you compare them, then? What 1e level is a 4e 19th comparable to, and what 4e level is a 1e 7th comparable to?

Not from the perspective of "It's what the characters would do", which is always my starting point. I first and foremost want the characters to be played like real people, and real people usually* have a fairly keen sense of self-preservation. Searching carefully for hidden hazards in what is...