Self-resetting traps are entirely reasonable.
I agree that any discussion about “tiers” or the “viability” of various classes should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
But the idea that ignorance is bliss when it comes to game design is ridiculous. Understanding that one class is more powerful than another doesn’t make you a power gamer any more than understanding that a $20 bill is more valuable than a £5 note makes you a soulless money-grubber.
At the same time, the perfect game session is one in which every player gets a chance to shine, ideally in a unique, flavorful fashion.
Some recent examples:
-We entered a room with 40-odd trumped-up zombies in it. The fighters started hacking them apart while screaming for a haste spell so they could hack faster, but they were taking steady damage–until the cleric got into the midst of them, said, “be at peace,” and destroyed all but one zombie in a single round. Nobody else could have taken out so many enemies.
-We were facing a fiendish swimming dinosaur. As the party’s wizard, I blinded it–and when it began swimming to safety, I prevented it from escaping with a second debuff spell that left it dazed until the fighters could close with it. Nobody else could have prevented its escape.
-We were facing a lich who employed a bunch of giant speedy zombies as bodyguards, too large (and too bolstered) to turn. They’d all been a bit damaged, but they still created threatening obstacles at different places in the room, preventing us from closing with the lich–until the ranger managed a beautiful round of shots in which he took out all three remaining bodyguards. Nobody else could have done so much damage to multiple opponents in different places in the room.
-When we finally closed with the big bad, the big fighter broke out his holy two-handed sword with power-attack and (with the aid of haste) did nearly a hundred points of damage in a single round. Nobody else could deal so much damage to a single opponent in a single round.
Everyone does something that nobody else can do; everyone is integral to the group’s success. As long as that’s going on, it makes no more sense to say “the wizard is overpowered compared to fighters” than it makes sense to say, “fighter jets are overpowered compared to infantry”: each role is unique and necessary.
The problem with these two is “doing a lot of damage” isn’t what you needed to do. What you needed to do was to take out the enemies. Doing a lot of damage was one way to accomplish that, and the fighter and the ranger probably were more effective at that specific method than anyone else was. But the cleric or the wizard could also have done it, using other methods, while the fighter and the ranger couldn’t have taken over the spellcasters’ encounters.
How is that a problem?
It may not be at a specific table with specific players.
But it sure as hell is going to be at another table. Some players are, without trying, going to end up with super-casters who can effectively take over everybody else’s job. Even if they’re not intending to do it, they can hurt everyone else’s fun. The scneario outlined above can be true, but it’s also unfortunately not as common as one would like. All too often the player with more time, obsession, or interest will build a vastly stronger character. And then players who have had fun and invested in their character wind up feeling like they just wasted their time.
Again, this isn’t a problem, until a group gets together and some people are not amused. It’s also not simply a matter of one player versus the table; it’s a matter of degree and usually several players do this to different levels they are personally confortable with. Nor do they really have that much idea of what other players like.
In another context, I was in Star Wars game that (to my view) degenerated into long-winded sessions of other characters building ludicrously complex mad science gadgets and researching the underpinnings of the multiverse. I got really bored. This was a case where I felt left out because my character had no ability whatsoever of being a mad scientist, and I had no interest in making one which was. That wasn’t even the game I signed up for, much less the gameplay. So I sat around surfing the internet, and I showed up because the people there were my friends, not because I wanted that game.
Not, really, no. First off, it takes a lot of resources over time to do this, and second, it relies on having lots of traps. Neither makes much sense even in the cointext of a dungeon. I’m much more likely to put the dungeon in a hostile environment rather than fill it with traps, mostly because people don’t go where there are traps.
Barring the odd lunatic or paranoid dungeon-builder, people don’t put traps where they evcer want anyone going again. In which case, you aren’t likely to find a nice, open passageway beyond. Traps are there to hurt you, slow you down, and alert the bad guys you’re coming. Once they do that, there’s no reason to give you any method of progressing past the trap.
In short, I make games where people behave in more or less rational ways. In Shadowrun, that means that you don’t have to worry about random corporate autoguns suddenly hosing you down. It does mean you have to worry about the police suddenly showing up in the middle of your adventure, because you started filling an ofice building with lead. Roughly speaking, same thing in DnD.
I’ll grant that theoretically there were other means to do it, but the fighter’s method and the ranger’s methods were the only ones at our disposal.
I’m reminded of the maxim of a friend of mine on adventure writing: “Never write an adventure where the problem can’t be solved with a big enough pile of dead bodies.”
Casters are my favorite way to play, and believe me, I’m far and away the most obsessive member of my group. But I try to go for a theme, and that means I’m good at something in particular (in this case, illusions and summoning). When there’s a problem that can be solved with my schtick, it’s great fun.
But EVERY problem can be solved with the fighter’s and ranger’s schtick. Every problem can be solved with a big enough pile of dead bodies.
Edit: FWIW, Smiling Bandit, I find the idea of self-resetting traps entirely reasonable, and I’d hazard a guess that most other players do as well. Your view on what’s “rational” is far from universal.
The fighter’s and ranger’s schtick is one particular way of making big piles of dead bodies, and it’s not a way that always works, nor is it necessarily the most effective way, even when it does. And not all problems can be solved by piles of bodies, anyway, and in the circles I play in, it’s considered a poor adventure that can be solved that way.
As for not having any other tool at your disposal for those encounters, didn’t you just say that you had a bunch of illusions? Silent Image would have worked for those big zombie bodyguards.
Right - in other words, it’s not a problem at all, unless you have a GM who isn’t good at including everyone at the table. Which is a “problem” inherent in roleplaying games as a medium, and not with any particular system. Like your Star Wars example, where you ended up not enjoying yourself because of reasons entirely divorced from the rule set. LHoD’s example shows how well D&D works with a good group of players. If your* session isn’t working like that, it’s not because of the system, it’s because of the group.
If your group spends a significant amount of time worrying about power tiers, you’ve got bigger problems than the rule set on your hands.
As to the idea that resetting traps aren’t “rational,” I offer in rebuttal the first twenty minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Or, for that matter, the last twenty of The Last Crusade.) Which isn’t meant as proof that such things are realistic, merely that, handled well, they’re so cool that realism becomes, at best, a tertiary concern.
*generic, not specific.
Sure, it’s not always the best, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply it was; in fact, I intended to say just the opposite, in giving several examples of times in which other character archetypes shone. And my “dead bodies” quote is somewhat tongue-in-cheek; he and I ended up not writing an adventure together because I disagreed with the approach for all adventures.
Nevertheless, there are ways to develop encounters that let the sword-guys shine, and IMO a good GM will develop such encounters, and good players will step back and let the sword guys have their moment in the spotlight.
A silent image that could permanently remove three big bodyguards from play? Not likely–at best I could’ve gotten one or two to be fooled for a round or so, and much likelier would have been the lich commander directing the zombies to ignore the illusions. (And I say this with an eye toward good use of illusions and with a reasonably flexible GM–earlier in the session I’d successfully used silent image to cage a couple of wraiths in crisscrossing beams of sunlight that held them terrified in place for long enough that the fighters could take them out). The bad guys at that point had already killed off our cleric, and one of the two fighters was bleeding out (I spent my round doing the potion-heal instead of spellcasting), and the ranger had taken significant damage; having the ranger suddenly remove all the non-Big-Bad threats from the table was not something I could have done reliably in the way that he did, and it was vital to our eventual victory.
Precisely so, and I wouldn’t argue otherwise. However, GM’s cannot control everything; that’s not their job. And with 3rd edition they were promised something that Wizards could not, and did not, deliver. That doesn’t mean the Tiers don’t exist; they do. They’re simply important in some contexts and not others.
That would be my point, yes.
Nah. We raped the power tiers a long time time and decided that nothing short of Pun-Punw as worth out time. Too weak.
I consider realism within the context of a setting to be vital, because otherwise the players are just going from one mysterious and inexplicable even to the next. If traps just “happen” and have no grounding in the specific event, then they detract, rather than add, to the fun, no matter how “cool” they are. Hence I would be much more likely to use hazards than traps.
Essentially consider this: would you expend dozens and spells and employ hundreds of artisans on making mighty self-resetting killmachines to stop adventurers? Or would you just spend your money on ale and whores and drop whatever it is into a pocket plane or similar magic?
Now, to use the cases above, I would consider strongly a few traps set in very specific locations, as well as significant (and possibly man/elf/dwarf/demon/monster made hazards). If you are or can make yourself fire imune, or poison immune, then using those kinds of defenses makes sense. But there’s a differences between static defenses and traps which target one particular spot exactly 10’ away.
More to the point, my objection was to the idea that when the players use a counter to traps, the GM suddenly decides that all traps now reset.
(Actually, one GM I know used lots of traps to tell his players they were on the wrong track. The first couple of times, they insisted the traps were guarding something important and powerful. Then they realized that nobody sane would go through such danger to store some treasure.)
In that case your objection is totally off base and we have nothing to argue about, since only stereotypically devious trap makers such as dwarves and drow ever got repeating traps in my games, these traps only lead to areas that people rarely go too such as treasure vaults, and could be easily shut off… if you know the password/can get past the guards/are of royal blood/etc.
You can say that again.
In a universe where there’s magic, in particular, self-resetting traps should be more common than the other kind - do you want to haul your ass out to your remote treasure vault once a week just to make sure a raccoon hasn’t set off the incendiary cloud? No? Then just enchant it with a reset. Hell, if you bothered putting in a trap to stop one group of adventurers, don’t you want it to stop the group that comes in five days later and steps over the corpses of the first party?
It’s worth noting that the Dungeon Master’s Guide for the game in question includes self-resetting traps as an explicit option in the core rules. So it fits in the system, fits in the context of the fantasy world, and doesn’t seem to offend anyone’s suspension of disbelief but yours, bandit.
Yes, certainly. But it takes more effort to design those encounters, and the DM and players won’t put in that extra effort unless they realize it’s necessary. That’s why the tier system, or something like it, is important: Because it’s a way of letting everyone at the table know where they need to put in a little extra effort.
At this point I think our disagreement is pretty minor; I just don’t think something like the tier system is necessary if the players are good at sharing spotlight time. Whether your character is in a tier-1 or tier-2 class isn’t what’s important; what’s important is whether your character has been taking up an inordinate amount of time in the spotlight.
I don’t have a particularly effective wizard, for example, since I’m going the mostly-illusionist route. That’s okay; I get to do a lot of battlefield control, which I enjoy. The most effective thing I can do in most battles is to cast haste, but it’s boring for me, since it benefits everyone else more than it benefits me. However, if I’ve recently gotten to do something awesome, like stun-locking the big bad for the entire battle, or casting an illusion that thoroughly disrupted the tactics of the opponents, I’m a lot likelier to cast haste in the next fight. That’s not based on my tier, that’s based on applying general etiquette to the specifics of the gaming table.
While I’ve got no objection to mechanical auto-reset traps, spell-based auto-reset traps set a bad precedent. Anything up to the equivalent of a wand or staff (50 charges) or Eternal Wand (Lvl 0-3, twice per day) is fine, but custom magic items with more uses than that just screw everything up.
Dammit, long post eaten.
Blah, short version: if we want to continue the trap discussion, take it elsewhere b/c we shouldn’t hijack this thread, and yes I know it was as much my fault for doing so as anyone.
Second, While I laud **LHoDorkness’s **generosity, I noticed that the players who really dedicate themselves to extreme power builds and dominating gameplay are either tinkers who like playing with the rules, or social misfits who have a hard time reading and responding appropriately to others. Gaming in general has a lot of the latter, because it’s a structured and organized social situation which is already accepting of weird differences.
Five Geek Social Fallacies is an article that every geek should read. My rule is this: I’m not particularly accepting of folks who don’t know how to play nice together. My job involves teaching social skills and putting up with those who don’t really have them; no way in hell is that what I’m going to do with my free time.
Except that some classes are so powerful that a player playing them can end up accidentally stealing the spotlight. For instance, you might have a wizard player who’s trying to hold back their power by focusing mostly on illusions and things like haste, and thus actually end up being more powerful than they might otherwise.
People always say that wizards regularly steal the show by accident. I’ll be honest: I’ve never ever ever seen that happen.