Not necessarily. To put it in D&D terms, if the PCs involved are a Fighter, a Wizard, a Druid, and a Cleric, should you plan your dungeons assuming someone will have Trapfinding?
That’s roughly what happened. Imagine that party, and then halfway through the third dungeon a thief joins up and forces a rebalance.
Depends on how tightly you design your campaigns to your player group, too.
Well, there’s a Druid. You should definitely plan on him being able to do everything while out-damaging everyone and still finding the time to schmooze with dryads :D.
(remember, kids: if God hadn’t intended you to be able to set off traps in hygienic, eco-friendly yet entertaining ways, He wouldn’t have given you spontaneous Summon Nature’s Ally I.)
An AD&D 1ED druid probably isn’t going to be willing to summon up an animal for disposable trap detector duty. And if he is, he may find he has considerable difficulty regaining his spells…in my game, anyway.
[QUOTE=Oakminster]
An AD&D 1ED druid probably isn’t going to be willing to summon up an animal for disposable trap detector duty. And if he is, he may find he has considerable difficulty regaining his spells…in my game, anyway.
[/QUOTE]
Depends. What kind of Druid is your Druid ? Not every one of them is a retarded elf-agenda hippie type, “oooh lookit the kawai deer, we must protect the trees !”. Nature is nothing if not ruthless and hardcore. A Druid focusing more on “Nature in the service of Man” (which is the ultimate grounding principle of non-cuckoo real world ecology - not protecting the environment for its own sake, but because we need the environment in order to live in it), or even “Natural selection” aspects of his calling would have absolutely no trouble with conjuring up Fluffie the Hamster to go and see if that suspicious tile has an acid bath underneath.a
Fluffie dies ? Tough luck, but no big. Death is just a transitive state of being and an integral part of the grand wheel of life. Besides, is leading Fluffy to his death in order to save my life different from a lion killing a gazelle to save his ?
Fluffy lives ? Cool. That’s one resourceful hamster. Good strong genes. Fit for breeding. Gotta respect that.
Or you can go more whacky: I currently play a druid who’s along more traditional, “ooh lookit the kawai deer !” lines. Except that he’s a *Pathfinder *Goblin, and as such he’s culturally inclined to hate, fear and despise both dogs and horses. So he won’t summon a bear to trigger the trap, that would be cruel and disrespectful and stuff. In fact he’ll even have ethical/empathetical problems with summoning a bear to help him in combat - the bear might get hurt.
Dogs ? Summon 'em to torture them before you eat them alive. Filthy creatures. Off into the trap with you !
Which goes back to what I was saying in the OOTS thread: roleplaying comes in when trying to justify ridiculous stunts 
[QUOTE=soulmurk]
Dramatic tension is a product of storytelling, and it’s possible to be by-the-books and still tell a good story. They’re not mutually exclusive.
[/QUOTE]
Yes. And emphatic no.
It wholly depends on what one files under the “dramatic tension” header. In my experience, there’s an intellectual sort of dramatic tension, which stems from engaging plots, interesting NPCs and so forth. This is the part where your players are stimulated by your story, rather than the plot just being there as a backdrop for action. They, as individuals, want to know where this is going.
And then there a wholly emotional, or instinctive maybe, sort of dramatic tension which is much harder to achieve. This is when your players are hanging from your lips like so many 10 year olds being told their bedtime story, not only listening to the words but believing them, being a part of them and experiencing feelings that are tied to the story and their in-game characters in spite of the fact that they’re really 30-somethings chugging Diet Coke in a comfy living room.
I’m not sure I’m making myself very clear, here. To put it in other words: the first is like watching an interesting movie, the second is forgetting you’re not in the movie.
The second kind is very, very hard to generate. I won’t lie and tell you I can do it every session. It takes a lot of time and effort to make them forget who they are and where they stand, it’s almost an exercise in hypnosis.
But when it does happen it is also very fragile. Any distraction will dispel that kind of weird, fugure, enthralled state ; be it a 5 minute break to order the pizza or, yes, a mechanical reminder that they’re really 30-somethings playing make believe in a comfy living room. And that’s where rules and dice screw things up, because as soon as tactical, 5-foot square, obscure combat manoeuvre tables are involved they’re yanked out of it and into, as you say yourself, pondering tactical decisions, thinking about their next move in terms of rules and poring through rulebooks for their next tactical Eureka.
They’re back to playing a game instead of being in the game’s universe. The atmosphere is now quite dead. Good luck bringing it back once the Turn-Based Tactics part is over. You’ll have to start over from scratch and, as I said before, it’s already hard to get that mojo going at all in the first place.
It’s very similar to those Japanese console RPGs where you take 3 steps, a battle happens out of nowhere that is set in a sort of alternate, limbo combat land ; and when you win you’re taken back to the spot where you came from, all turned around and having half forgotten where you were going, never mind why you’re here in the first place. In the end, you’re either focusing on the story, in which case the random battles become an unwelcome distraction that you correct as soon as possible by using “no random monsters” items ; or you’re more interested in your characters’ stats and loot and numbers and strategy, and plot + cutscenes are just inconvenient and annoying.
But hey. If you do manage to mix and match successfully, more power to you. You’re a better DM than I am.
In an old 2Ed campaign, we had a druid who, upon being informed that the whole plane was collapsing and there was no time to stop and loot, shapeshifted into a kangaroo and dove through a mound of random treasure, hoping to scoop some into her pouch without losing too much speed.
She also came across a Tooth of Dalver Nah that conferred the ability to Mass Animate Dead. She promptly knocked out one of her own teeth to put the relic in its place.
Yeah, the player was the girlfriend of one of the DMs, and only played when he was running the campaign.
Quoth CandidGamera:
I’d go further than that: Artillery plus forward spotter is a standard enough combination that the game designers should have planned for it. Either there should be counterbalances already baked into the rules to keep that from being dominant, or it should actually be dominant, in which case you should be running into enemies using that same combo on a regular basis.
EDIT: There were Teeth of Dalver-Nah in 2nd edition? In 3rd, those are associated with Pact Magic, which (so far as I know) didn’t exist in 2nd.
Er, yeah, there were things in game to balance that. But not THAT game, because we had a bunch of melee and short-range mechs and one guy in a artillery mech and no spotter.
Just when I got enough scenarios planned and rolling smoothly taking into account the adjusted threat of artillery with fairly severe penalties, someone then joined with a targeting laser. facepalm Cue the rewrite of many of the battles.
Actually, now that you mention it (and I’m home with my books), the Teeth were in 1st Edition AD&D, though the campaign that one showed up in was mostly 2nd.
…and like all the 1st Edition artifacts and relics, what follows that description is a chart full of blanks, which the DM was supposed to fill (by die roll, whim, or plot demands) from tables of good and bad effects and powers, ranging from being able to Bless by touch or having acne to gaining the ability to simultaneously cast multiple spells or accidentally unleashing a demon that will devour his soul (no save) and use his body to try to kill all his friends and companions.
I think they’ve been retconned dragon teeth these days. Good luck fitting that set of dentures into a humanoid jaw.
In 3rd, their precise origin is left somewhat vague, though they’re definitely each associated with a different vestige (which, without going into more detail, are entities associated with pact magic). They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and they can all fit into a humanoid jaw, but it does say that some of them will be quite prominent in such a setting. I think they’re all considered minor artifacts, which means they’re not world-warpingly powerful like major artifacts, and there may be multiples of them, but no living mortal knows how to make them.
Why not? Find Traps was a 2nd level Cleric spell.
Besides, IMO tailoring dungeons to the party ends up cropping out certain kinds of fun outcomes.
So he just showed up one day and sat down at the table, shoved his character sheet under your nose, and said “I’m joining the game right now, or else?”
Well, here, I think, is the disconnect. I play roleplaying games because they are **games **that involve roleplaying. If you and your friends want to sit around and tell stories at each other, more power to you, but it’s not really a game at that point. I enjoy RPGs on both levels.
As for the claim that the dice hurt immersion - personally, my suspension of disbelief would be more hampered by my Mace of Disruption never managing to kill an important bad guy.
Look, man. If you had a guy who was a regular in your games for 10 years but couldn’t make it to this one because he’s scheduled to work that day/time, and he shows up at your door 6-8 sessions into the campaign with an appropriate character sheet for what you’ve been doing and says “my shift got changed again, can I get in on this?”, are you saying you WOULDN’T let the guy sit down and adapt your game to his presence?
This is a ROUTINE feature of DMing in my troupe.
I highly doubt it’s “never”, just “not on a balls-lucky first-round crit”.
I’d expect him to call ahead the day before. And even if something seems unbalanced with a ‘surprise player’ character for a session - so what? It’s one session. You can plan for it the next session.
Yeah, schedule problems are pretty much impossible to avoid when you’re trying to get half a dozen adults in the same room regularly, with their jobs and girlfriends and kids and so forth.
One of my mates managed to find a way around his frustrations at all the last-minute cancels by making it a part of the game itself and basically overbooking his sessions. We were playing an Unknown Armies-inspired homebrew game, with the twist that we were also in a sort of* X-Files *meets The A Team TV series, with beginning and end credits for each “episode” and so forth. He had like a dozen players all told, but rotated them in and out as chaotic schedules dictated so there were rarely more than 5 players at the table at any given time. The full roster was divided into a handful of core teams, each with their own plotlines that criss-crossed depending on who was “on screen” this week.
Sometimes it was hard to keep track of what the hell was going on (especially since, y’know, Unknown Armies. Incomprehensible confusing conspiracies is the name of the game), but I thought it was a pretty cool gimmick.
I tried that once in a Secret Ops-style Star Wars campaign, and ended up with a “season end” battle that was attended by 14 people in-character.
Uniformly regarded as the best single RPG session EVER by a majority of participants, I still never want to do it again.
I swear to you, I am not making this up, a member of my troupe for stupid landlord+poverty reasons) does not have a cellphone, landline phone or home internet access. He just shows up, or not, unless he can get to the library during operating hours and send an e-mail.
This is why I protest generalizations about GM style.
Unfortunately, in 3 & 3.5, the Find Traps spell simply allows said cleric to use his cross-class Search skill. With only 2+int (dump stat for clerics) skill points per level, he’s probably not putting too much into cross-class skills…it pretty much means he may have a 1 or 2-in-20 chance of finding said trap at best.
Today’s stupid WHFRP tricks:
If you find an incredibly evil and malevolent artifact of great power, hitting it with a hammer very, very hard might deflect the strike back at you instead of destroying it. Looks like my sigmarite priest can almost kill himself in one blow … almost.
Also, apparently just because a necromancer reanimated the dead legendary hero of a town and you killed both doesn’t make it cool to loot the hero’s armor and take it to the town’s blacksmith for refitting so you can wear it. Oops.
The 3.5 version also gives a significant bonus to the skill check. It’s not enough at high levels, but it’ll at least let you pinch-hit for a missing rogue at low levels.