Bad Player Trends

[ZeroGear]

Alright, I know that (for the most part) it is encouraged for players to think outside the box when solving problems.
That being said, there are some actions that just rub me the wrong way and I feel need to be discouraged.
For instance: you put a big adamantine door in the groups path and expect them to go and find the key, teleport/phase around the door, or just plain ignore it for the time being. Instead you hear the phrase "I'm going to take the door".
Ok, it was funny the first time, but now I would like to strangle the guy that started this trend because they have pretty much ruined the use/imposing nature of any adamantine door put into a dungeon.

Am I the only one irritated by this? And are there any other player trends that you all feel should be discouraged?

[VincentTakeda]

With the cost of adamantine doors these days, a resident is better off just taking the door out completely, putting in more wall, and buying a few scrolls to enter and exit his own abode.

[Yora]

What you should do is to no longer put adamantine doors in your dungeons.

[Wraith]

My bugbear, even more so that Star Wars and Monty Python quotes? "I attack the darkness!"

:smallsigh:

Fine, very funny, whatever; you waste your action this round, next player...?

[Surpriser]

What you should do is to no longer put adamantine doors in your dungeons.

This.

On one hand, adamantium (if not in weapon or armor form) is mainly a valuable trade good and only secondary an obstacle.
On the other hand, things like "indestructible" adamantium doors are a big sign of railroading in progress (whether it actually is or not) and many players will instictively try to break away from the rails.

From your description I gather that you expected them to find a way around/through the door anyway - so why not just use a regular door of reinforced iron? Still pretty solid if you don't have a Dungeoncrasher with you, but this screams "I am an obstacle" instead of "I am expensive loot".


To answer your general question about undesirable player actions:
These might be the result of in-game or out-of-game reasons and have to be dealt with accordingly.
In-game things like excessive resting or paranoid behaviour (trapfinding each 5ft, mind-scanning each NPC, ...) can be solved by first making sure that these things are not necessary to survive. The characters should be able to be successfull even without these things (multiple encounters are not so deadly, traps are only in places where they would make sense, most NPCs are trustworthy and so on). The second step is to impose consequences on these actions. If they rest or take too much time searching for traps, enemies move away, complete their goals, set up an ambush, ...

Out-of-game things like trying to deliberately break the campaign need to be solved out of game. Discuss the behaviour with the relevant players and explain why you think that it detracts from the fun for the whole group.

[Mr.Moron]

There is a certain minority of players that find any attempt at gating or direction to be viscerally offensive. In D&D (3.P) at least the rules to provide enough absolutes they'll be able some bit of text that provides a 0-effort bypass no matter what it is. You've really only got two choices in this regard assuming you're attached to the game engine you're on.

A) Don't play with those players
B) Understand that the last way past any obstacle attempted will be the most intuitive one. And more often than not they'll abandon an adventure rather than look for a key when they can't take the challenge "off the hinges ". This is because using a key you placed isn't them beating you, and anything that isn't winning is " railroading " in their eyes.

If don't you want players who are going to try and unfasten every bit of scenery, summon monkeys to trigger every trap, wand-of-vigor out of any possibility of attrition and scry/die every baddie your only real option is to play with people who share your tastes. Make your tastes public before the game and ask people to join only if they share them.

[Eloel]

If your doors are sturdier than your walls, you have a problem.

[chainer1216]

If your doors are sturdier than your walls, you have a problem.


It really does seem like a glaring design flaw doesn't it? I remember running into the same thing in RCR Star Wars D20, the blast doors were nearly impenetrable, the walls they were attached to? Not so much.

[Yora]

I saw that as a joke in a Robin Dubois comic from the 70s. It's really not new to D&D.

[Solaris]

What you should do is to no longer put adamantine doors in your dungeons.

This. There are a lot of other ways to make a fancy, more memorable door than making it out of a useful weapon/armor material and thus rendering it sturdier than the walls.

A narrow bridge over a yawning abyss, with a swirling rift of purple-black eldritch energies visible at the bottom, leading to a gateway that seems made of wrought iron but upon closer inspection is actually bone blackened by exposure to the dark energies, for example.


My bugbear, even more so that Star Wars and Monty Python quotes? "I attack the darkness!"

:smallsigh:

Fine, very funny, whatever; you waste your action this round, next player...?

I'm also very much over Monty Python quotes. Star Wars is less obnoxious, if only because the players won't then launch into skits and more of the lines from those movies can be seamlessly worked into D&D games.

[Thrawn4]

Am I the only one irritated by this? And are there any other player trends that you all feel should be discouraged?
Well, I recently had this adventure where the PC's freed several slaves on a ship and then started making plans to sell the ship for quite a lot, and they were willling to go the extra mile and organize the sell properly.
I could understand their reasoning, but I wasn't willing to change the style of the campaign that early (low level characters with a lot of money? no thanks). So I took a break for a few minutes and came up with several reasons why this wouldn't work out (the ship was damaged and the material old, the slaves were already directing their anger at their former prison) and I also told the players OOC why devaluing the ship was in the best interest of the campaign. It worked well.

tldr: I understand the players, but it is tiresome occasionally.

[Escapist]

Honestly an adamantine door is just silly. It's like asking for trouble. If you want a cool and imposing door make it out of white-hot iron that somehow doesn't melt or eternal ice or something flavorful like that and give it adamantine hardness if you must.

[Thrudd]

Alright, I know that (for the most part) it is encouraged for players to think outside the box when solving problems.
That being said, there are some actions that just rub me the wrong way and I feel need to be discouraged.
For instance: you put a big adamantine door in the groups path and expect them to go and find the key, teleport/phase around the door, or just plain ignore it for the time being. Instead you hear the phrase "I'm going to take the door".
Ok, it was funny the first time, but now I would like to strangle the guy that started this trend because they have pretty much ruined the use/imposing nature of any adamantine door put into a dungeon.

Am I the only one irritated by this? And are there any other player trends that you all feel should be discouraged?

Discourage it with in-game decisions. Ok, so how will you "take the door"? It will require some major stone work and tools to remove the hinges from the wall. It will take two hours of hard labor. You have a dwarf? Okay, only one hour. If it's underground, taking down a wall to get at a door might not be a smart thing, either. Maybe your dwarf can advise the party that taking down this wall will cause a cave in.

Even after you get it off, It weighs a half a ton, who will carry it? The noise you are making attracts nearby creatures. Ten minutes into the excavating of the wall, monsters attack.

Unless they have a specialized door-removing operation set up, with equipment and appropriate spells prepared at all times, removing such a door would not be a simple prospect. The people who installed such a door would have known what they are doing.

If the players want to change their party's focus to salvaging valuable metal from dungeon doors instead of hunting for other types of treasure, well, ok. They still have to get down there, face the wandering monsters and traps, and spend some amount of time camped out in the hallway deconstructing the place. Their challenges change to how to prevent cave ins, how to transport huge slabs of metal, guarding those performing the construction from the dungeon denizens. The point is, it isn't a reasonable impromptu action to remove such a door.

[Knaight]

Honestly, if the game is going to overtly encourage thorough looting (which D&D generally does, via the focus on treasure), players are going to focus on looting things. It's one thing if you're trying a high adventure game where something like stripping the dead for weapons and armor to sell at the nearest town is against genre, complaining about thorough looting in a game which encourages thorough looting is just silly. A big slab of poorly secured metal worth more than gold is so obviously valuable that it makes sense that it would be taken.

[Gritmonger]

For the adamantine doors issue, I use story engagement. With an open feeling world, the only obstacles seem to be finding the information they need to do what they want - and with an engaging story, plot elements that hinge on player backstories, window dressing that sometimes is important in itself...

I just have the "I shoot the darkness" issue on occasion, and the breaking of immersion by pun. Puns... tend to insert themselves at moments out of or in combat, especially since one of the players cannot ever name a character without it being a play on words. A definite OOC quirk that, once done and beaten to death in the first session, doesn't affect IC after that except on rare occasions.

[DontEatRawHagis]

Bad player vs bad group behavior.

Why not set fire to building?

"Let's plit the party!" Why do you have some pressing meeting or dinner date to go to? There is literally no reason splitting the party is safer than sticking together.

Or the dreaded my character goes right while everyone argues about which direction to go. I almost let one of my players die by mimic chest this way.

[Red Fel]

Am I the only one irritated by this? And are there any other player trends that you all feel should be discouraged?

Well...


What you should do is to no longer put adamantine doors in your dungeons.

If your doors are sturdier than your walls, you have a problem.

These. The problem is that you've decided to gate - that is, to prevent the PCs from moving forward until they have accomplished an objective - and you've decided to do so by using an object of substantial inherent value. Suddenly, the obstacle has taken on a greater value than the objective behind it. When that happens, you've shot yourself in the foot. Now, I've seen two solutions proposed here, that are particularly appealing:


If you want a cool and imposing door make it out of white-hot iron that somehow doesn't melt or eternal ice or something flavorful like that and give it adamantine hardness if you must.

Discourage it with in-game decisions.

These. Either make it so that the door's impenetrability - and thus its effectiveness as a barrier to progress - is not a function of its value (i.e. it's not adamantine, and therefore stealing it would be of no benefit), or point out the logistical issues with the PCs' action. Either one can prevent this sidetracking.

That said...


There is a certain minority of players that find any attempt at gating or direction to be viscerally offensive.

I wouldn't call it a "certain minority," as I don't know the proportion, but this is quite true. As a rule, I find that any challenge needs to have multiple ways of being bypassed, and with very few exceptions, I dislike offering challenges that must be completed for the game to proceed. If you were my DM, and placed an impassible obstacle in the party's path, I would likely be cross unless I found it particularly fitting with the theme and tone of the game. You need to make sure that your PCs are okay with the idea of you putting up roadblocks, or else you will find more attempts to bypass them.

All that said, a few points. Don't use adamantine doors. As Eloel pointed out, they are sturdier than the walls. That's just begging some wisacre to either steal the door, or break through the wall to get around the door. Pointing out how unbreakable the door is just begs the party to contrast it with the surrounding wall. The solution, if you must do this, is not to use unbreakable doors, but concealed doors. These doors are effectively part of the wall, which discourages stealing the door and accomplishes the same goal (i.e. stopping progress until an objective is achieved). Don't call it a "bad player trend" or one which should be discouraged. Your players, despite how they may act sometimes, should not be treated like excitable puppies who haven't been housebroken. You don't need to train or discourage them. What you need to do, as does every DM, is to sit down with your players, talk to them, and hit them establish common expectations. If one of your expectations is "I will occasionally put up road blocks; to pass them you need to accomplish something," you need to tell your players this. They, in turn, need to respect it. Failing to effectively communicate expectations, and then blaming the players for "bad player trends," is not conducive to a happy and productive table.

[oxybe]

The GM of the 5th ed game I'm playing in has begun making all doors open inwards, so hinges aren't seen.

Because any visible hinges are hinges we can remove and don't need to look for keys or waste spells on bypassing.

Note that players will often find value in the most innocuous things. In our 5th ed game, as we're a bunch of recently leveled 2 PCs, our wealth and accumulated treasure is something in the ballpark of "we each have less then 100gp". But we found ourselves a nice large cart with a cage (it was a merchant's cart they already wrote off as lost, stolen by some bandits and likely refitted so they could carry the trapped bear they had found/caught) as well as a rather nice heavy chest (which had nothing but a good lock on it, used as bait for dumb adventurer types who didn't notice the falling rock trap on top of it. we remotely activated the trap and then took the chests).

So now that I, as the group druid, can turn into a bear/draft horse I can pull the wagon and our secured treasure.

Finding a large adamantine door is imposing, but it's still a large slab of valuable material, definitely something our paladin would love to make a suit of armor or greatsword out of, and the halfling rogue wouldn't likely mind having a few daggers made from leftover scraps.

Even a door made of solid iron is something you can trade in for a few GP, which when you're struggling between the decision of buying a few healing potions for good health and getting rations/materials for the trip you're going on, you're going to go for every GP possible.

If you want to gate PCs, nothing stops and frustrates more then "large stone slab, set inches into the ground". You can't really open it with a key or lockpicks, a crowbar is an exercise in futility and if you smash it/the wall wrong you'll have to smash the whole way through as you destroyed the opening mechanism. Plus, it's hard to find someone who wants to buy a big slab of everyday stone.

Part of this is and issue (overall, not in reference to any particular poster) of conflicting ideas, where the GM didn't make clear what he was expecting to the players. The difference between adventurer and tomb-raiding murderhobo can easily become one of "how good is your PR department?".

Looting everything that isn't impossibly secure is a time honored tradition as old as written tradition. How many Egyptian tombs were looted of gold and decorations before they were rescued by museums? How many castles were left as was once they were captured and the inhabitants killed/run off/taken as slaves, instead of looted of anything they could bring back? You can't blame the PCs for taking off with a solid slab of quality metal that can be remade into tools, armor and weapons they can make use of instead of having to attempt to hunt these things down in markets, specialized shops and whatnot that may not have these in stock or the materials to custom make them in short order.

If you want to stop PCs from looting your doors, stop putting loot as doors.

[Mr.Moron]

If you want to stop PCs from looting your doors, stop putting loot as doors.

The problem is that everything (particularly in the 3.P world), -everything- and I mean everything, is loot. If it exists in the game engine it has player-visible printed price in some book somewhere, with payer-facing rules for selling it presented as default. Unless you're straight home brewing something there isn't game object, physical magical or otherwise that someone can't thumb at page and say "See, this is worth X". Then on the next page go: "Here are the DCs we need to remove it, here is what we need to auto-pass those dcs LETS GET THIS DONE!"

The only things that aren't loot are the things with so common or of such low value selling them is a losing time proposition.

The real solution is go to the table with people who share your expectations and standards. "Hey look, I'm looking to run a game here and the core engagement is meant to be this, and this and that. In general I'm not really looking to this, or that, or the other thing" and you get people who are on board with that.

This "Solution" is like the OP coming in going "The PCs are murdering all the NPCs at random to steal their gold" and coming back with "Stop giving the NPCs gold".

[Keltest]

The problem is that everything (particularly in the 3.P world), -everything- and I mean everything, is loot. If it exists in the game engine it has player-visible printed price in some book somewhere, with payer-facing rules for selling it presented as default. Unless you're straight home brewing something there isn't game object, physical magical or otherwise that someone can't thumb at page and say "See, this is worth X". Then on the next page go: "Here are the DCs we need to remove it, here is what we need to auto-pass those dcs LETS GET THIS DONE!"

The only things that aren't loot are the things with so common or of such low value selling them is a losing time proposition.

The real solution is go to the table with people who share your expectations and standards. "Hey look, I'm looking to run a game here and the core engagement is meant to be this, and this and that. In general I'm not really looking to this, or that, or the other thing" and you get people who are on board with that.

This "Solution" is like the OP coming in going "The PCs are murdering all the NPCs at random to steal their gold" and coming back with "Stop giving the NPCs gold".

Given the value of adamantine, its more like "Stop giving every NPC so much gold they can build a house or three out of it."

Seriously, its literally treasure barely bolted to the wall. A bowel full of diamonds couldn't scream "Loot" any more than a slab of solid adamantine. The only major difficulty is in transporting it. Especially given that unless the walls are ALSO made out of adamantine, such a door is going to be harder to bypass than just tearing down the wall most of the time.

[JAL_1138]

...seriously, given the size and weight of solid adamantine, that door is probably worth more than the entire rest of the dungeon loot put together. Imagine if it was "a solid gold door" (which is worth less than adamantine--cost for ammunition is +60gp per missile, meaning you'd save money by literally using gold pieces as sling bullets) and consider how odd it would be for the PCs not to try to steal a solid gold door.

Biggest obstacle is that it's still going to be a massively heavy door. Although that just gives them incentive to try to use spells, portable holes, teleportation, bags of holding, etc. to move it.

This was a known issue with the original Tomb of Horrors, IIRC, and later editions gave the tomb doors which only looked like (and had the properties of) such valuable materials but which would lose their enchantment and become worthless if taken beyond their immediate area.

[ZeroGear]

See now, this is the mentality I'm fighting. Adamantine doors are supposed to be big and imposibg, saying "I'm here to keep someone out, or in!" They are not meant to be loot, but are intended as barriers between low-level characters and high level areas.
As to why use adamantine over steel: a) show of wealth, b) I imagine adamantine is less likely to rust over the ages, and c) it requires special tools to get through. Also, not everyone who builds these dungeons is a wizard, and adamantine doors are the next best thing to a wall of force.

This is just one example of the "everything is loot" mentality I would discourage players having. Other mindsets I often find myself fighting include "I can be a muder-hobo for the greater good", "NPC's/dogs are expendable trap detectors", "murdering the king makes me the new king", "every female in the game needs to be seduced", and "I am the hero, there is no way he'll let me die".

The thing with the adamantine door is simply my biggest gripe.

And my question still stands:
Am I alone in this?

[icefractal]

As you mentioned right there though - they're a show of wealth. Because they're worth a lot of money, more than solid gold doors would be. So if finding treasure is part of the reason the PCs are there, why would they pass up a huge portion of it?

If they're not there to get treasure at all, then that's a different matter. Although you still have the problem that the surrounding walls are likely to be much less durable. And if the players are looking at it with a "realistic" PoV, rather than a "genre" one, they might assume that bypassing the door (as opposed to finding the key) is the only sensible way past. Because realistically, why would the foe leave an identifiable key around anyway?

Also I think it can come off as a "plot-driven door" thing. And a lot of players hate those.

[Surpriser]

See now, this is the mentality I'm fighting. Adamantine doors are supposed to be big and imposibg, saying "I'm here to keep someone out, or in!" They are not meant to be loot, but are intended as barriers between low-level characters and high level areas.

And right there is the mistake. Because adamantine doors say that only in the fine print. The big, glowing letters on every adamantine doors say: "Break me down and sell me!" And this is not even some bad habit of the players - just common sense. How would you react if you found a safe made from precious metals and studded with gems? "Meh, guess we're not meant to break into that" or "Awesome, lets pry those gems of and sell them"?

But in general, I see your point. My pet peeve in this regard is "Come on, it's just an NPC. So what if we brutally murdered him for not being nice to us?"
For these things you can talk with the players and discuss why they are doing it and why you don't like it.
Alternatively, you can impose in-game consequences for these actions. Murdering the king does not make you king - it makes you a headless corpse on the executioners block. Believing that there is no way they could die ends with them dying. Eventually they will get the hint, hopefully. But be aware that these things will not always work. Sometimes, talking ooc and formalizing the boundaries for PC (and DM) behaviour is the only solution (and if not even that works, well, time to look for another gaming group).

[Keltest]

See now, this is the mentality I'm fighting. Adamantine doors are supposed to be big and imposibg, saying "I'm here to keep someone out, or in!" They are not meant to be loot, but are intended as barriers between low-level characters and high level areas.
As to why use adamantine over steel: a) show of wealth, b) I imagine adamantine is less likely to rust over the ages, and c) it requires special tools to get through. Also, not everyone who builds these dungeons is a wizard, and adamantine doors are the next best thing to a wall of force.

This is just one example of the "everything is loot" mentality I would discourage players having. Other mindsets I often find myself fighting include "I can be a muder-hobo for the greater good", "NPC's/dogs are expendable trap detectors", "murdering the king makes me the new king", "every female in the game needs to be seduced", and "I am the hero, there is no way he'll let me die".

The thing with the adamantine door is simply my biggest gripe.

And my question still stands:
Am I alone in this?

Its not so much a mentality as an explicit part of what adamantine is. Again, the comparison to a door made of solid gold comes up, except its far more useful as an actual door as well. Heck, you flat out admit that the door is partly a show of wealth. If instead of a door made of adamantine, it was a door made of wood with diamonds studded all over it, would you be complaining that someone went and took the diamonds?

Also, if youre the DM, why do you need a door to keep low level players away from high level areas at all? You should either not be putting it there in the first place, or if the party went somewhere unexpected, find other ways to impress upon them how little chance they have.


The big, glowing letters on every adamantine doors say: "Break me down and sell me!"

Can I add this to my collection of Sig quotes?

[JAL_1138]

See now, this is the mentality I'm fighting. Adamantine doors are supposed to be big and imposibg, saying "I'm here to keep someone out, or in!" They are not meant to be loot, but are intended as barriers between low-level characters and high level areas.
As to why use adamantine over steel: a) show of wealth, b) I imagine adamantine is less likely to rust over the ages, and c) it requires special tools to get through. Also, not everyone who builds these dungeons is a wizard, and adamantine doors are the next best thing to a wall of force.

This is just one example of the "everything is loot" mentality I would discourage players having. Other mindsets I often find myself fighting include "I can be a muder-hobo for the greater good", "NPC's/dogs are expendable trap detectors", "murdering the king makes me the new king", "every female in the game needs to be seduced", and "I am the hero, there is no way he'll let me die".

The thing with the adamantine door is simply my biggest gripe.

And my question still stands:
Am I alone in this?

...Given that Tomb of Horrors had to be patched, probably in a minority.

I'm just saying. It's not necessarily "everything is loot" here. It's that adamantine, specifically, is loot, like gold or platinum. Adamantine is a material literally worth more than gold. You would save a lot of money on, say, sling bullets, by using actual gold. 59gp per shot, actually. How do you expect it not to be seen as loot? It's made of loot. It's like a chair made entirely out of Wands of Cure Light Wounds.

[Beleriphon]

It's like a chair made entirely out of Wands of Cure Light Wounds.

That's one way to treat that "issue" the king picked up last time he was in Waterdeep.

[sakuuya]

It's made of loot. It's like a chair made entirely out of Wands of Cure Light Wounds.

I hope you use the wand chair by smacking someone over the head with it. Healing!

[Mr.Moron]

Fwiw you can patch this by saying the value of adamantine is the workmanship. The material is common but working it finely is nearly impossible. A big dumb slab is doable enough, so only costs about 50gp or so. The scrap value is below dirt since it's mostly useless outside of doors and other "big dumb slab'" applications and it's everywhere. Weapons and armor are still expensive since in a generation the world sees 1-3 smiths tops that can work it into anything much more refined than a door and doing so decades a piece. Of course this won't stop the "cheated" players from killing the merchant and assaulting his family over the matter.

[JAL_1138]

That's one way to treat that "issue" the king picked up last time he was in Waterdeep.

That might take Cure Moderate, depending on exactly which part of Waterdeep.


I hope you use the wand chair by smacking someone over the head with it. Healing!

But of course! It's the bludgeoning-damage equivalent of 8-Bit Theater's healing shiv.

[JAL_1138]

Fwiw you can patch this by saying the value of adamantine is the workmanship. The material is common but working it finely is nearly impossible. A big dumb slab is doable enough, so only costs about 50gp or so. The scrap value is below dirt since it's mostly useless outside of doors and other "big dumb slab'" applications and it's everywhere. Weapons and armor are still expensive since in a generation the world sees 1-3 smiths tops that can work it into anything much more refined than a door and doing so decades a piece. Of course this won't stop the "cheated" players from killing the merchant and assaulting his family over the matter.

Or casting Fabricate a sufficient number of times and making a killing on manufactured goods out of it.

[oxybe]

http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111129072541/runescape/images/7/72/Strength_door.png

Slightly less durable then adamantine but with far less resale value and requires far more effort to get what little resell-able materials out of it.

Now to put on my Captain Mathematics underoos and start throwing up numbers.

Putting solid block of minerals that is both valuable and not guarded in the middle of a hallway is simply asking for people to drag that block out of there instead of the treasure. Or in addition to the treasure.

The "door of solid gold" is the perfect comparison. thinking that we have a standard 6ft x 3ft x 1.5in door size, made of iron it would be ~500 kilos(1102.31 Lbs, with a density of 7850 per kg/m^3) and market value of ~110gp.

turn that door to gold and it now weighs 1230.9kg(2713Lbs, with a density of 19320 per kg/m^3) and has a market value of 135,650gp. Is the treasure of this gold door worth more or less of it 135k gp in 1lb gold bricks value?

Now adamantine is simply a very useful material. Why should players value the few hundred or even thousand or so gold pieces over the 500 kilos door of adamantine (noting that adamantine weighs as much as iron)?

Noting that items made of adamantine is worth more then those made of mithril. that 6x3x1.5 door, but made of solid mithril instead of iron or gold is worth about 551155gp at market value (noting that mithril is 500gp/lb and weighs half as much as a similar iron item). Only it's made of adamantine in this case, which is more valuable.

This is being a smart adventurer, the kind can potentially retire early because they just made 800k or maybe more AFTER taking their share of the valuable metals.

Finding a way to drag this thing off and sell it is very reasonable for any adventurer because some rich guy decided to guard his treasure by putting treasure in front of it.


As to why use adamantine over steel: a) show of wealth, b) I imagine adamantine is less likely to rust over the ages, and c) it requires special tools to get through. Also, not everyone who builds these dungeons is a wizard, and adamantine doors are the next best thing to a wall of force.

A) Good for that person, but an unguarded show of wealth is kind of dumb. Would you leave a Ferrari unlocked in a sketchy part of town known for thievery? because adventurers are thieves with a good PR agent and you've left a Ferrari in the middle of the hallway hoping it will dissuade people from stealing your other stuff. Best case scenario is these guys leave, happy knowing they just made off with only a Ferrari. The next guys now come in and steal the rest of your stuff. Good job.

B) Probably, but large stone slabs reinforced with the occasional adamantine spike also doesn't rust easily and is going to be a hassle to remove for most people. Our example door made of stone instead of iron or adamantine is going to easily weigh 160+ kilos. 352Lbs of stone with the occasional adamantine spike to hold everything over means they might get enough metal to make one weapon, maybe two out of it and you've still got a good solid obstacle between them and you. going off pathfinder numbers you'd need an unencumbered 15 strength to even think lifting such a doorway once removed and an unencumbered 19 strength to lift it over your head and carry it. it's a hassle and you don't get much from stripping it.

C) If the door is more solid then the walls, then you don't need to break the door, just the walls. That's how they do it in real life if they really need or want to go inside someplace. It's often more easy to target the hinges or lock then the actual door, since those are made of weaker metals or simply easier to break.

"If you want to stop PCs from looting your doors, stop putting loot as doors."

You wouldn't put a "door of briefcases full of money" or "door made entirely of working AK47's and ammunition" in front of a party in a modern day RPG, would you? Then why are you doing that in a fantasy RPG? Tropes aren't bad, but they aren't necessarily good and the "door of precious/rare metal you need to bypass" needs to be either so large that it's unfeaseable to carry out (think 30ft tall, 10 ft wide, 2 ft deep) or of a metal you simply cannot use or sell, then you can expect the PCs to carry it out as they would with coins, gems, tapestries, fancy chests and any other object they can scalp at the nearest pawn shop.

[ZeroGear]

Ok, enough. Yes, sometimes the door is for show, that is, however, less the main reason it was put there. Abd you know what? You, as DMs, are all as responsible for the propegation of the "door mentality" as any player.
There is nowhere in the guidebook that adamantine doors are loot, that is a conclusion that the players came too because they were allowed to sell the thing in town.
Ok, sometimes I get strongarmed into allowing it, but I try to discourage this at my table. The fact that everyone says I am in the wrong is a clear sign that many have given up this fight. This is why I say that processed adamantine cannot be melted down.
Also, "I am a barrier" is not fine print, it is the stuff players deliberately ignore.

[Keltest]

Ok, enough. Yes, sometimes the door is for show, that is, however, less the main reason it was put there. Abd you know what? You, as DMs, are all as responsible for the propegation of the "door mentality" as any player.
There is nowhere in the guidebook that adamantine doors are loot, that is a conclusion that the players came too because they were allowed to sell the thing in town.
Ok, sometimes I get strongarmed into allowing it, but I try to discourage this at my table. The fact that everyone says I am in the wrong is a clear sign that many have given up this fight. This is why I say that processed adamantine cannot be melted down.
Also, "I am a barrier" is not fine print, it is the stuff players deliberately ignore.

No, its just a general tag that comes with the whole "One of the most valuable materials in the game world" thing the door has going on there. Like, seriously. Why are you outright ignoring the fact that it is made of a material more valuable than gold? If it was made of a single gigantic natural flawless diamond you couldn't have made it any more valuable, because at least then nobody would give it a second glance before declaring it a fake and moving on.

Treasure is not an especially viable material to protect other treasure with unless the difficulty of removing it ends up costing the party more than the value of the item in question. In this case, its a giant slab of incredibly valuable material, and the only thing stopping it from being carried out in the treasure cart is a couple of hinges that probably aren't as sturdy as the door itself anyway.

[veti]

As noted above, people have been stealing adamantine doors since the 1970s. It's not so much a trend, as a phase every group goes through, where the players learn to be brutally cavalier with the more tired tropes, and the DM has to learn to stop using them.

I think the best solution was one I saw on a message board somewhere: "they're adamantium-plated steel. But don't tell the players until after they've removed them from the hinges and worked out how to cut them into portable pieces."


Discourage it with in-game decisions. Ok, so how will you "take the door"? It will require some major stone work and tools to remove the hinges from the wall. It will take two hours of hard labor. You have a dwarf? Okay, only one hour. If it's underground, taking down a wall to get at a door might not be a smart thing, either. Maybe your dwarf can advise the party that taking down this wall will cause a cave in.

Two hours? Try two weeks. Not that it will make any difference, because magic.

In so far as there is an underlying mistake here, I think it's the hilariously bad balancing of D&D that makes it possible to remove and carry an adamantine door, at a level where that sort of wealth is still remotely relevant.

[Mr.Moron]

Or casting Fabricate a sufficient number of times and making a killing on manufactured goods out of it.

If you're allowing things as broken as fabricate you're already so far beyond the pale in "PC's break the world" territory I see no reason to get all uppity about a few stolen doors.

[oxybe]

It sounds like you just like the word adamantine: seriously just use "heavy, relatively common metal that is too soft to use as armor and doesn't hold a blade but is rather shiny and not used for currency" call it "boringinum" as it's too boring and useless a metal to use for anything but barriers instead of using an existing one.

Adamantine has properties that you seem to be jumping hoops to make useless just so you can have a door made of adamantine. It's not "loot" but it has known properties that players can make use of and turn into loot.

Just don't make it of adamantine. That's all you need to do. It's all we've been telling you. It's a problem for you because you insist on using a known valuable metal as a door and getting frustrated when your players treat it as a valuable metal instead of a door.

Just don't use adamantine. Use rock. Use boringinum. Use a non-valuable metal. That's the solution. This solution is one that I found out the second I first used the adamantine door. Then I never used the adamantine door.

I used the boringinum one.

Boring, but practical.

As for the time needed to remove the door, taking a month off to make work that will likely set you and your descendents for life is something I'm willing to do.

[ZeroGear]

Let me point out a falicy here:
I use these doors sparringly. And only at exceedingly plot-relevant points.
When such a door appears, I would like players to think " there is something important behind this" or "there may be something very dangerous behind this", rather than then going "sw33t l00tz!!!!!".
That is the mentality I'm fighting, and all I wanted to know was if others shared my problems.
Guess I may be the only one.

[Keltest]

Let me point out a falicy here:
I use these doors sparringly. And only at exceedingly plot-relevant points.
When such a door appears, I would like players to think " there is something important behind this" or "there may be something very dangerous behind this", rather than then going "sw33t l00tz!!!!!".
That is the mentality I'm fighting, and all I wanted to know was if others shared my problems.
Guess I may be the only one.

Then stop using treasure to block the path, and instead use something where the effort to remove and sell the obstacle actually does end up costing more than its worth.

There are a good variety of ways you can go about signifying something interesting behind a door beyond making it so valuable that the party doesn't need to care whats behind it.

[ZeroGear]

Would you steal the carbon fiber steel door of a bank vault? Those can be quite expensive you know.

[Thrawn4]

Let me point out a falicy here:
I use these doors sparringly. And only at exceedingly plot-relevant points.
When such a door appears, I would like players to think " there is something important behind this" or "there may be something very dangerous behind this", rather than then going "sw33t l00tz!!!!!".
That is the mentality I'm fighting, and all I wanted to know was if others shared my problems.
Guess I may be the only one.
It is just a matter of different expectations. Many DMs have to find a way to manage players going off the rails, so you are not alone. But I get the impression that you are annoyed because the players decided to go for the loot first and not for the story. My advise: Talk about it OOC and find some common ground, but also accept that it makes perfectly sense for most characters to loot the door, even if it does not further the story.

Out of curiousity: I am not familiar with the system, but what was hidden behind the door and so valuable that the adamantium door paled in comparison to it?

[sakuuya]

Would you steal the carbon fiber steel door of a bank vault? Those can be quite expensive you know.

In a heist game? Absolutely.

[Keltest]

Would you steal the carbon fiber steel door of a bank vault? Those can be quite expensive you know.

That depends. Do I have the means to remove it before someone shows up to stop me? Can I reliably find a buyer for it? Do I have the means to transport it to said buyer without diminishing its value? If the answer to all 3 is yes, then I would totally steal the bank vault door as well.

[ZeroGear]

Either the Sword of Kass, or an imprisoned advanced Balor.

[Knaight]

Fwiw you can patch this by saying the value of adamantine is the workmanship. The material is common but working it finely is nearly impossible. A big dumb slab is doable enough, so only costs about 50gp or so. The scrap value is below dirt since it's mostly useless outside of doors and other "big dumb slab'" applications and it's everywhere. Weapons and armor are still expensive since in a generation the world sees 1-3 smiths tops that can work it into anything much more refined than a door and doing so decades a piece. Of course this won't stop the "cheated" players from killing the merchant and assaulting his family over the matter.
That would be a viable patch, though an odd one (metals in general tend to be pretty reusable). Another option would be that it's just not the same grade as that needed for weapons/armor, and the sort of sophisticated chemical techniques needed for getting it to that stage don't exist yet, whereas "the high quality stuff from this particular mine" is an old concept.

Basically, the issue here is that there's a game that emphasizes loot (ways to trade money for power, prices everywhere, so on and so forth), with an obstacle in it made of a ludicrously expensive material. It would be like if, in a generally near-modern game where looting is expected there's a doorway that consists of a legitimate force-field generator. It's an obvious target.


Ok, enough. Yes, sometimes the door is for show, that is, however, less the main reason it was put there. Abd you know what? You, as DMs, are all as responsible for the propegation of the "door mentality" as any player.



There is nowhere in the guidebook that adamantine doors are loot, that is a conclusion that the players came too because they were allowed to sell the thing in town.
There's a listed price per weight of adamantine, some approximate door dimensions, and every indication that the density is equal to or greater than that of steel. Sure, technically the doors themselves aren't listed, but it's not exactly hard to figure out. This is system encouraged behavior, and I'm not going to fault players for it.


Ok, sometimes I get strongarmed into allowing it, but I try to discourage this at my table. The fact that everyone says I am in the wrong is a clear sign that many have given up this fight. This is why I say that processed adamantine cannot be melted down.
Alternate hypothesis - we haven't "given up" this fight. We were never on your side. I generally play games where looting everything isn't so genre appropriate, and where doors of that value simply wouldn't exist; I don't put vastly valuable materials in loot focused games and get annoyed when they are focused on.

[Solaris]

See now, this is the mentality I'm fighting. Adamantine doors are supposed to be big and imposibg, saying "I'm here to keep someone out, or in!" They are not meant to be loot, but are intended as barriers between low-level characters and high level areas.

Why are you putting these high-level areas in there to begin with? Why not write them at appropriate-by-level areas, containing something big and nasty (but not carrying much treasure) that the party unleashes (accidentally or otherwise) when they abscond with the door?

Adamantine doors aren't big and imposing. They're metal doors worth an extraordinary amount of money. You can do 'big and imposing' with just about any material and achieve the same or better results without trying too hard... and without handing the players thousands of gold pieces waiting for them to use their finely-honed looting skills in a game almost entirely about looting to collect.

If you must put such tantalizing loot in and insist that they not loot it, why not ask them to not loot things? It's not too hard to inform the players that you're running a game where looting is not the objective, but you'll have to adjust things accordingly. In my Rokugan d20 game, I had it that most magic items simply didn't work for any but their rightful owners on top of it's improper for a member of the samurai caste to loot a corpse.

And if you absolutely must have unlootable adamantine doors because you think they're 'imposing' and good game design, why not rule that refined adamantine is practically worthless because it's all but impossible to work after it's cooled?


Am I alone in this?

Just about, yeah. In all honesty, this notion of impenetrable gates and high-level areas accessible through doors low-level characters can't pass through should stay in computer games where it works well, and not in games like D&D where the characters can and will make off with everything remotely valuable to justify the risk of venturing into the dungeon.


Ok, enough. Yes, sometimes the door is for show, that is, however, less the main reason it was put there. Abd you know what? You, as DMs, are all as responsible for the propegation of the "door mentality" as any player.

Taking no responsibility for your "I must use treasure to guard treasure and keep players from going where I don't want them to" mentality, I see.


There is nowhere in the guidebook that adamantine doors are loot, that is a conclusion that the players came too because they were allowed to sell the thing in town.

You mean, besides in the DMG where they list the by-pound price for adamantine? And how the game is built around looting things?


Ok, sometimes I get strongarmed into allowing it, but I try to discourage this at my table. The fact that everyone says I am in the wrong is a clear sign that many have given up this fight. This is why I say that processed adamantine cannot be melted down.
Also, "I am a barrier" is not fine print, it is the stuff players deliberately ignore.

Whose fault is it that the adamantine door was there in the first place? Whose fault is it that you failed to establish the expectations of your game? Whose fault is it that you're playing a dungeon-crawling game based around looting and expecting players to not loot?

Players aren't ignoring that it's a barrier, they just don't care that it's a barrier because, first, they can get around it and second, they're massively rewarded for doing so.

I didn't 'give up the fight', I never fought it to begin with. If I put anything in a dungeon, I expect the players to potentially make use of it. If I don't want them getting their hands on hundreds of pounds of adamantine, I'm not going to put hundreds of pounds of adamantine into the dungeon.

[Arbane]

Would you steal the carbon fiber steel door of a bank vault? Those can be quite expensive you know.

it depends - how annoyed would Batman be if I did?

[ZeroGear]

One thing I've just realized is how quick people were to point out how I am wrong, but not one person is willing to share player mentalities they wish they could discourage.
As such, why don't we just drop the subject about the door. There is no way for me to argue this without people criticizing me for it, so I'm going to be the bigger man and hold it soley as mu opinion.
So, anyone else brave enough to step up to the plate?

[Knaight]

One thing I've just realized is how quick people were to point out how I am wrong, but not one person is willing to share player mentalities they wish they could discourage.
As such, why don't we just drop the subject about the door. There is no way for me to argue this without people criticizing me for it, so I'm going to be the bigger man and hold it soley as mu opinion.
So, anyone else brave enough to step up to the plate?

There's the occasional player who is weirdly obstinate about switching from the conventions and mentality of one game (usually D&D or WoD) when they're playing something else entirely - they ruin their own fun, the group gets dragged down, and as they agreed to play the game in the first place it would be nice if they would put forth the basic effort it takes to do so.

[Telok]

So, anyone else brave enough to step up to the plate?
"We go turn in the quest to that one guy in that town."
Huh? What quest?
"That one with the demon hearts for that metal thing!"

It turned out that they had, after about three or four months in game, after enabling the opening a portal to Hell, after dropping part of an artifact in front of the demons out of boredom, after having walked into a known demon infested ruin completely unprepared, finally ended up with the hearts of ten demons preserved in oil. They had contacted the leader of one of the factions of a salamander tribe who wanted demon hearts and would trade for a chunk of fire resistant metal several months earlier. This was so they could craft a ring of fire resistance cheaply, which they wanted so the sorcerer could ride a fire elemental/hippogriff. Never mind that the cleric was happily doing so by casting Resist Energy, or the warblade did it by using a shield that granted fire resistance, or that with a single fire lizard skin they could make a saddle that would do the same thing.

After months of demons ranging the countryside the salamanders, who were right in the path of the demon infestation the PCs let loose, didn't need any demon parts any more. They didn't particularly like the PCs now either.

"But WoW quest mobs always have a green mark to show who they are and the quests never time out!"

I could have strangled him.

[Gavran]

And my question still stands:
Am I alone in this?

No. The first time I heard about someone saying they'd do this, I rolled my eyes and abandoned the thread.

I mean, look, Minecraft is a fun game and all but seriously how many of you guys are actually playing "we're adventurers in search of loot!" games? If it's actually a ton of you - well ok, your approach is fine in that context - but in the games I've played, there's usually Something Happening and taking the time to figure out how to retrieve the fillings from the bandit's teeth while the dark cultists finish their ritual to end the world seems just a little inappropriate to me.

The sad thing to me is that you could actually run a pretty fun/cool game on being a salvaging company - throw together a setting full of dangerous crypts, ruins, whatever - and let the PCs be the troubleshooters. The guys that make the area safe for the workers, the guys that deal with anyone claiming ownership and rival companies showing up. But "I get a pickaxe and start trying to mine out the door?" that's background, in the same way the crops being grown for the adventurers to eat at the tavern is.

And then there's what I'll call the "gamist" perspective, which I'd think would appeal to those who see dungeon furniture as loot - in D&D gold is literally power through magic items. I understand that getting more powerful can be fun, but trying to cart off an adamantine door so you can buy magic items equivalent to a character many times your level accomplishes what, exactly? Making the DM rebuild any encounters he's worked out ahead of time? Trivializing every encounter so that you might as well not even roll dice anymore? Doesn't sound like a very fun game to me.

Edit: And the players are 100% as responsible for saying "We want to play a game where we reclaim and sell furniture" as the DM is to say "This is not a game about furniture." The problem is, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of these players don't want to play that game, they just want to "cheat" (it's not entirely fair to call it cheating, given the nature of RPGs) and then use that increased power to trivialize the premise of the actual game.

[ZeroGear]

Thank you, all three of you.
I feel like I owe the participants in this thread an apology for my accusations, I shouldn't have lashed out at people.
On topic, Gavran, you are exactly right about players wanting to "cheat". This was part of the mentality I was aiming at before thing got a little out of hand (let's not open that can of worms again).

Anyway, one of the other mentalities I wish players would not fall into is the "I can do no wrong" mentality.
In short, players expect that they can do anything they want to, and get away with it, but get mad at the DM for bringing about repercussions.
An example:
The players go to the tavern and get drunk. Then, because they are drunk, they figure it is a good idea to start a bar fight. This goes on, the fight eventually breaks up, they all go home and fall asleep. Next day, the Paladin, who started the bar fight, finds that the action has violated his paladin code and he is now an ex-paladin. The paladin's player then gets mad at the DM for making his paladin fall, even though it is the players fault, and agues every-which-way to reverse the decision.

[jaydubs]

Anyway, one of the other mentalities I wish players would not fall into is the "I can do no wrong" mentality.
In short, players expect that they can do anything they want to, and get away with it, but get mad at the DM for bringing about repercussions.

I was with you up to here. While I agree in principle, I'm not a fan of your example.


An example:
The players go to the tavern and get drunk. Then, because they are drunk, they figure it is a good idea to start a bar fight. This goes on, the fight eventually breaks up, they all go home and fall asleep. Next day, the Paladin, who started the bar fight, finds that the action has violated his paladin code and he is now an ex-paladin. The paladin's player then gets mad at the DM for making his paladin fall, even though it is the players fault, and agues every-which-way to reverse the decision.

Unless he started killing downed bar patrons or beating up old men, "you lose all your class abilities because you RPed getting drunk and rowdy" sounds unduly harsh. Especially since (depending on what version I guess) it probably doesn't even actually violate a Paladin's code of conduct unless it went far and beyond the normal limits of a bar fight (aka, fisticuffs where no one gets killed).

Edit: I also actually agree with your irritation at players trying to loot everything. But my solution was just to guarantee everyone wealth by level in magic items, and restrict anything above and beyond that to "narrative wealth." Homes, titles, bribes, businesses, and the like, but no additional combat-boosting items. Most of the "I loot everything" behavior went away when they realized it wouldn't make them more powerful. And they also didn't have to worry constantly about being underpowered either.

[Pex]

The only real bad player trend I don't like is one of "those" players, the ones who are out for themselves and couldn't care less about the rest of the party. They'll steal from party members. They'll take treasure meant for the party for themselves because they found it when no one else in the party was there. They learn important information the rest of the party needs to know because he was the only one there, but he never shares the information. He is superior because he was privileged to learn of the information so is one up on them. The information is not always about a dangerous trap or magical effect in a dungeon room but often is or other information that puts the party in danger physically or fail of the mission because they don't know by his absolute refusal to share the information. They absolutely love passing secret notes with the DM, even if the notes are of nothing just to give the impression they're doing something. They relish in doing something the other players don't know what it is even out of character.

[dps]

That depends. Do I have the means to remove it before someone shows up to stop me? Can I reliably find a buyer for it? Do I have the means to transport it to said buyer without diminishing its value? If the answer to all 3 is yes, then I would totally steal the bank vault door as well.

Looking at real life examples: if you study the history of architecture, you'll find that some experts in the field are amazed that the bronze doors of the Pantheon in Rome were never taken away as loot (especially considering that some on the external marble was looted.

Or even better (or worse, I suppose), a lady I worked with once told me that after her husband died, as part of settling his estate, they went into his mother's house, which had been shut up since her death 7 years before, and found that it had been completely looted. The entire inside of the house had been thoroughly gutted; not only had the copper water pipes been taken (a common event with empty houses in this area), but the thieves had also taken the ceramic sink basins and even the commode. The carpets and linoleum had been stripped off the floors, and the thieves had even stripped the plasterboard off the wall and just left the bare studs. That last one in particular blows my mind--where are you going to sell used chunks of plasterboard?

If people will loot to this extent IRL, the in-game behavior the OP complains about doesn't seem unrealistic at all.

[Red Fel]

I'd like to point out that a perfectly good option was offered earlier, which a few people have mentioned, but it's worth repeating: The impenetrable door doesn't have to be adamantine. You are the DM. You seem quite willing to use that power. It's not unreasonable to come up with things like a door which appears to be steel, yet seems as strong as adamantine, thanks to the inherent magic of the place in which it is installed. Removal of the door would simply reduce it to common steel.

It's also worth noting that, adamantine or not, removing a door is a perfectly reasonable method of bypassing the door. Regardless of your feelings about players seeing the door as loot, it's a perfectly acceptable way to get around the door.

That said...


On topic, Gavran, you are exactly right about players wanting to "cheat". This was part of the mentality I was aiming at before thing got a little out of hand (let's not open that can of worms again).

This is a tricky mentality. There is a difference between what you're describing and "cheating." Cheating means that there are rules, and the players are breaking them. What you are describing is a difference of expectation. You expect that a closed door means "Stop," and should be seen only as a door. The players you describe expect that a door made of a valuable substance - or indeed, anything made of a valuable substance - is valuable and can be taken. When the PCs steal the door, they are violating your expectation of the game, but they are not violating the rules. It's disruptive and upsetting, but not cheating.

Referring to it as cheating suggests an antagonistic mindset, and that word in particular carries a negative charge sufficient to render reasonable dialogue difficult. I'd advise you to avoid using words like that unless you really mean them.


Anyway, one of the other mentalities I wish players would not fall into is the "I can do no wrong" mentality.
In short, players expect that they can do anything they want to, and get away with it, but get mad at the DM for bringing about repercussions.
An example:
The players go to the tavern and get drunk. Then, because they are drunk, they figure it is a good idea to start a bar fight. This goes on, the fight eventually breaks up, they all go home and fall asleep. Next day, the Paladin, who started the bar fight, finds that the action has violated his paladin code and he is now an ex-paladin. The paladin's player then gets mad at the DM for making his paladin fall, even though it is the players fault, and agues every-which-way to reverse the decision.

As Jaydubs mentioned, it's questionable whether getting into a drunken brawl is fall-worthy. There have been entire threads on that subject, so I don't feel it's necessary to debate it. I do think, however, that since it's a somewhat ambiguous example, you'd do better to produce a less ambiguous one. For instance:

The party wants to enter the city, but is rejected at the gates. They proceed to attack and kill the guards. Needing a place to hide from the now-on-alert patrols, they find a house, sneak in, and murder the inhabitants in their sleep. Now hidden and secure, they stuff the corpses in the cellar and claim bedrooms. In the morning, the Paladin has fallen, and complains.

In this illustration, the Paladin clearly committed some fairly heinous Evil (assuming he was conscious for any of it), and a fall was completely justified. The player's anger, by contrast, is not justified. In that sense, yes, the "I can do no wrong" attitude, and a refusal to accept consequences of their actions, is a rather serious player problem.

That said, once again, it's a matter of expectation. The kind of player who would do such a thing and then complain about the result is the kind who expects a consequence-free environment. A player who was comfortable with the idea of consequences should be absolutely unsurprised by the fact that his Paladin falls after murdering innocents in their beds. Once again, this highlights the importance of having your expectations match up with those of your players.

[Flashy]

"But WoW quest mobs always have a green mark to show who they are and the quests never time out!"

I could should have strangled him.

Fixed that for you.

[Mr.Moron]

It's also worth noting that, adamantine or not, removing a door is a perfectly reasonable method of bypassing the door

I should say only for exceedingly poorly designed doors. People keep talking about "Hinges" (I believe one poster used the phrase "Barely Bolted to the wall"), like any door created for the level of security that would demand it be made of unbreakium would have exposed hinges at all. These aren't household doors, they're not held on with a couple of Phillips head screws and a decorative plates.

At the bare minimum it's going to be designed such that it swings on an internal pivot mechanism. Beyond that the locking mechanism is going to be sending at least a handful of solid bars a good 8"+ into the surrounding "Frame" material, such that even if you managed to disable/remove the pivot you've still got a solid piece of metal locked into the surrounding material by solid bars embedded in the middle of the wall.

I'd also imagine whatever traps (if any), the door would have would be keyed to the destruction/tampering with the weaker of the elements of the door rather simply approaching it or attempting to open it. Presumably you don't want to blast yourself every time you jiggle the key incorrectly, really want to only trigger it on clear tampering.


A door that can just "Be removed" has an even bigger problem than the door that's stronger than the surrounding material: It wouldn't stop anyone regardless of strong it or the surrounding materials are. It may as well be made of tissue paper, and the walls balsa wood for all it's going to stop anything. For a door to even be worth putting a lock on it has to be fairly resistant to that kind of tampering.

(this is really neither here nor there in the context of the larger discussion, it's just been bothering me)

[oxybe]

Honestly speaking I have very few problems that can't be solved via a discussion of expectations between the GM and the Players. This will either end with a compromise, one side agreeing to change it's expectations or the players involved willingly leaving as it's an important point for them, with no bad blood.

If the problem can't be solved via discussion, it's likely because the player is being a disruptive [OH MY] and needs to be excised from the group. I have also done this. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but like removing an abscessed tooth, it's worth it in the long run, so you don't need to have your group on permanent antibiotics.

So yeah, my "trend" is people being disruptive for the sake of being disruptive, which is an issue as old as social gatherings and solved by removing the disruption.


Looking at real life examples: if you study the history of architecture, you'll find that some experts in the field are amazed that the bronze doors of the Pantheon in Rome were never taken away as loot (especially considering that some on the external marble was looted.

Or even better (or worse, I suppose), a lady I worked with once told me that after her husband died, as part of settling his estate, they went into his mother's house, which had been shut up since her death 7 years before, and found that it had been completely looted. The entire inside of the house had been thoroughly gutted; not only had the copper water pipes been taken (a common event with empty houses in this area), but the thieves had also taken the ceramic sink basins and even the commode. The carpets and linoleum had been stripped off the floors, and the thieves had even stripped the plasterboard off the wall and just left the bare studs. That last one in particular blows my mind--where are you going to sell used chunks of plasterboard?

If people will loot to this extent IRL, the in-game behavior the OP complains about doesn't seem unrealistic at all.

Copper theft is a real and serious thing. When I worked as a night auditor at a motel, I also had to do security walkabouts. This was partially because there was no one else on staff at night and because we were building a second building and I had to be on the lookout for people looking for scrap. I remember a build site downtown where I live where there were signs warning copper thieves that there is security.

Here is an article from the CBC last year. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/copper-theft-more-about-damage-than-loss-1.2657834) This has been going on for a long time here on the Island.

People would steal copper wiring, piping, ANYTHING from build sites or homes where the owners are currently away for it's resale value if they could break in. At the hotel we've had people break into the maintenance shed (which is on the other side of the property) and steal tools and getaway on the ride-on-mower last summer.

When my dad was fishing, he's had his boat broken into on several occasions and had to replace various tools more then a few times.

Thinking people wouldn't rip a door off it's hinges for a dime is ignoring that this kind of theft is alive and well to this day.

[ZeroGear]

Forgive me if I was unclear with my example earlier. When I was referring to the paladin earlier, I intended it to mean that he actually started the fight. I know paladin codes can be very different, and I am basing this on the expectation that the player knew what the code was and that it stated that paladins were to allowed to attack unarmed individuals. I apologize if that was an unclear example.

If I may refine my definition of "cheating" (the parentheses are intentional), I am using it in the context of "getting an unfair advantage". Often I come back to the concept of adamantine doors (sorry for belaboring this) because of inherent impressions they give:
1) They are imposing
2) They are among the hardest known substances in the game world
3) They create the image of security (for whatever is behind them)

I know that the material is exceedingly valuable, and often find myself looking at it form the builders point of view: they want the sturdiest material they can afford, and there is nothing harder in the world.

That being said, I often find a few fallacies with the logic of stealing such an item:
1) It's big, heavy, and bulky. I find it hard to imagine someone lugging it back to town.
2) Secure doors, like those I refer to, don't have any hinges. thieves would have to chip through the stone to even attempt to open the door, and that tends to be magically reinforced.
3) I checked the books, and there is no price given for one pound of adamantine. Probably because the creators never foresaw a scenario like this. Even then, it is perfectly viable for no buyers to exist for such items.
4) The process of removing the door is time consuming. I would rather the characters move along and finish other parts of the adventure instead of wasting time trying to vandalize the infrastructure. Also, such work would attract attention, and random encounters could be very deadly in the long run.

As a DM, I use doors like this as temporary cut-offs to areas, often leaving the "key" in the hands of an enemy the group eventually runs into (many times a boss or mini-boss). It may be a personal opinion, but I feel doors like this are good for peaking the players interest, often giving them a reason to come back and explore later down the line.


Anyway, another mindset that tends to disagree with me is the "sacrifice the NPC" mindset. This often involves using hirelings, villagers, pets (like dogs), or similar entities as trap testers. It really starts getting to you, as a DM, when you see your players send oblivious individuals to their demise while catching flack for dropping the alignment of the characters for a clearly evil act. The concept of "evil" may be arbitrary, but I'm pretty sure these acts qualify.

[Maglubiyet]

I should say only for exceedingly poorly designed doors. People keep talking about "Hinges" (I believe one poster used the phrase "Barely Bolted to the wall"), like any door created for the level of security that would demand it be made of unbreakium would have exposed hinges at all. These aren't household doors, they're not held on with a couple of Phillips head screws and a decorative plates.

At the bare minimum it's going to be designed such that it swings on an internal pivot mechanism.....

(this is really neither here nor there in the context of the larger discussion, it's just been bothering me)

Me too. Are people picturing swinging saloon doors or something?

Anyone who takes the time to build a door out of a nearly-indestructible metal is not going to leave exposed hinges. Take a look at your average security door -- aside from an acetylene torch, what tool could you possibly use to take one down to steal it?

[BayardSPSR]

Often I come back to the concept of adamantine doors (sorry for belaboring this) because of inherent impressions they give:
1) They are imposing
2) They are among the hardest known substances in the game world
3) They create the image of security (for whatever is behind them)

...

As a DM, I use doors like this as temporary cut-offs to areas, often leaving the "key" in the hands of an enemy the group eventually runs into (many times a boss or mini-boss). It may be a personal opinion, but I feel doors like this are good for peaking the players interest, often giving them a reason to come back and explore later down the line.


It sounds like the message you were trying to send wasn't the message your players received (in this particular case).

At this point, I don't think it would work to keep using doors made out of valuable materials with this group. Even if you specifically require that they not remove adamantine doors, the next time they see one they'll still think "that would be such great loot - if only the DM would let us take it!"

With future groups, I would recommend that you not describe adamantine doors as "adamantine" - describe them as large, imposing, whatever color, intricately carved with scenes of office work, humming with a strange energy or what have you. Every time you say "adamantine" you invite them to open a rulebook to the page that says "valuable."


As for the use of NPCs to test traps, there's a simple solution: have the NPCs refuse to go to certain death.

[NichG]

The door thing comes from two conflicting needs. The DM needs to be able to put elaborations into the world in order to make things more inspiring, interesting, distinct, etc. Generally, these elaborations have to be done within a fairly reasonable amount of prep time or even on the spot - that is, the DM can't spend 6 hours designing an intrincate lock mechanism for what amounts to an ornamental detail of the game.

The other need, however, is for the world to make sense - both the players and DM need to be able to actually work with the elements that have already been introduced into play and have some idea of what things do when they interact with each-other or are used in certain ways.

The reason this tends to show up as a player issue rather than a DM one is that both the DM and the players have the second need, but only the DM has the first need. So from the players point of view, they're not going to be thinking things like "If the dragon has a tiny anthill of coins when you work out the volume, even if that's still 10 times our party's net WBL it's going to look pretty lame" or "If the supposedly super-rich dwarves don't have expensive decorations lying around, they're not going to seem all that rich." Instead they'll be focusing on the second need: "Hey, there's all this expensive stuff around and someone forgot to post a guard!".

It doesn't help that the underlying system doesn't really lend itself towards making things self-consistent, so in any game there's a lot of this kind of fridge logic waiting to happen. It means that it can be hard to know when you're supposed to suspend disbelief and just go with it, versus when you're supposed to carefully engage in the details and think things through. This is a skill that better players learn - how to read the DM's habits and recognize when, even if you could do something, it might not make the game as a whole better.

Players who haven't learned that skill are just a fact of life, and the good news is that after a few awkward experiences of how things can go wrong, they generally improve and become a bit more savvy. But there are also players who resolutely refuse to learn that skill, or even who get offended at the idea that somehow the game running well and being fun is in some part their responsibility too.

So if I were to select a particular 'bad player trend', its the tendency of some players to latch onto this idea that its the DM's responsibility and the DM's responsibility alone to make them have fun - that if they find a way to break the game and use it, it's not at all their fault that the game gets broken but solely the DM's fault for making the game breakable in the first place.

[Ralanr]

Why not set fire to building?

Or the dreaded my character goes right while everyone argues about which direction to go. I almost let one of my players die by mimic chest this way.

I'll admit I'm guilty of these (well one in practice. I have had thoughts about setting things on fire in the session or similar destructive things). Honestly it's more of a lack of patience with the rest of the group. They could spend maybe 10 minutes at something that doesn't at all seem important. Recently, while my group was deciding to climb from the roof of a small building inside, using a rope to reach inside, my character just opted to grab a big rock and make the door bigger (it was small sized). When they pointed out the repercussions this could have if this kidnapping thing turned out to be a silly misunderstanding, I just had my character respond as follows:

"Then I have the up most confidence that you'll handle it." which to be fair, I was talking to the diplomatic people of the group.

Sometimes I just feel people take waaaaaay too long on some tasks. That, and playing a character who is likely going to respond to problems simply and quickly, gets pretty fun.

Case in point: See a crowd of people and my character needs to know who to ask for the slave trade. In response, my character yells, "DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE SLAVE TRADE!"

Not good for some situations, but good for others.

[Coidzor]

Let me point out a falicy here:
I use these doors sparringly. And only at exceedingly plot-relevant points.
When such a door appears, I would like players to think " there is something important behind this" or "there may be something very dangerous behind this", rather than then going "sw33t l00tz!!!!!".
That is the mentality I'm fighting, and all I wanted to know was if others shared my problems.
Guess I may be the only one.

Then you need to learn how to communicate danger, etc. with things beyond door material alone. I recommend looking into accessorizing.


Would you steal the carbon fiber steel door of a bank vault? Those can be quite expensive you know.

If I was playing a super villain and there was a market for stolen bank vault doors or for it as valuable raw material, sure.

At the very least it'd be amusing to use it to smack the super hero that came to stop me. :smallcool:


it depends - how annoyed would Batman be if I did?

:smallamused:


http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111129072541/runescape/images/7/72/Strength_door.png

Slightly less durable then adamantine but with far less resale value and requires far more effort to get what little resell-able materials out of it.

I'm not getting the reference, sorry.

[Eldan]

Honestly, this entire thing seems so out of character to me. No, not looting the door. Having a door that the players arne't supposed to look behind since it's too high levels.

You're adventurers. If you find a locked, imposing looking, valuable door, of course you look behind it! That's your entire job! Looting it because it's valuable is just secondary.

[JAL_1138]

Honestly, this entire thing seems so out of character to me. No, not looting the door. Having a door that the players arne't supposed to look behind since it's too high levels.

You're adventurers. If you find a locked, imposing looking, valuable door, of course you look behind it! That's your entire job! Looting it because it's valuable is just secondary.

Or primary job if the door is worth more than anything else you've seen in the dungeon so far.

[Gavran]

Or primary job if the door is worth more than anything else you've seen in the dungeon so far.

So, yes, you are exclusively playing Minecraft the RPG?

I mean - I honestly want to know, do you really most often play characters/games where your #1 goal is "get loot"?

[veti]

Would you steal the carbon fiber steel door of a bank vault? Those can be quite expensive you know.

Two words: Resale value. They may cost half a million dollars to fit, for all I know, but I doubt anyone would give you a fiftieth of that for them once removed.

And that's part of the answer to the "loot everything" mentality. Those accessories may be worth 100,000 GP, but only if you can find someone who (a) has the money and (b) wants the item. That's gonna be a pretty small group. Then they'll offer you - if they're honest - about 20% of the item's book value. (Hey, it takes a lot of work to convert slabs of metal into masterwork gear. It ain't cheap.)

If they're less honest, or if they know for a fact that there's no-one else within a week's journey who could afford it, you'll be lucky to get more than 5% value out of them.

[Keltest]

So, yes, you are exclusively playing Minecraft the RPG?

I mean - I honestly want to know, do you really most often play characters/games where your #1 goal is "get loot"?

As mentioned, its a giant imposing slab made of a substance more valuable than gold. Even when the goal is "Save the world" or something like that, its VERY hard to ignore the idea of settling all your monetary concerns forever, especially if the same item that lets you do that can also be converted into useful tools that directly aid you on your "save the world" quest.

[Feddlefew]

I don't understand why people make all these comparisons to Minecraft. We're arguing discussing old-school, take-everything-that-isn't-nailed-down-and-solve-the-nail-removal-puzzle adventuring, not just-dig-through-the-wall Minecraft mentality.




As mentioned, its a giant imposing slab made of a substance more valuable than gold. Even when the goal is "Save the world" or something like that, its VERY hard to ignore the idea of settling all your monetary concerns forever, especially if the same item that lets you do that can also be converted into useful tools that directly aid you on your "save the world" quest.

Or move that door to a location where it'll be of more use, such as sealing off the gates of hell.

Also, if I had a door that strong, you can bet it's going to slide into the walls and/or ceilings when opened, instead of being on hinges. The actually "door" part is just a piece of a mechanism that takes up most of the wall, making it nigh impossible to circumvent.

I would also cover it with lead, just to A) hide the value of the door without closer inspection and B) scare the fishsticks out of the metagamers in the group.

[Eldan]

Two words: Resale value. They may cost half a million dollars to fit, for all I know, but I doubt anyone would give you a fiftieth of that for them once removed.

And that's part of the answer to the "loot everything" mentality. Those accessories may be worth 100,000 GP, but only if you can find someone who (a) has the money and (b) wants the item. That's gonna be a pretty small group. Then they'll offer you - if they're honest - about 20% of the item's book value. (Hey, it takes a lot of work to convert slabs of metal into masterwork gear. It ain't cheap.)

If they're less honest, or if they know for a fact that there's no-one else within a week's journey who could afford it, you'll be lucky to get more than 5% value out of them.

In that case, you melt the door down and make adamantine weapons for the entire party at a fraction of the cost. Why sell it? Adamantine is rare and useful!

Or you glue a handle to it and use it as an adamantine tower shield. That's pretty damn useful, since it's large enough to, you know, block a doorway!


No, as a classical adventurer (not that my games feature those often), your number one job isn't "find loot". Your number one job is "get into situations that are horrendously dangerous" and "find creative solutions to get out of situations that are horrendously dangerous".

[daemonaetea]

I know the thread has slightly moved past the door thing, but I just wanted to throw in another interpretation of the player's intent, and some ways of handling it.

For me as a player, if I try to go around that door or even to loot it, I'm not trying to break the game. I'm not even specifically looking to grab a huge pot of loot, although that's certainly part of it. For me, I'm reveling in the greatest strength of the tabletop RPG - that I'm only limited by my imagination. If this was a computer game, I'd have to find the key, but it's not! The only limit to what my character is able to do is what I'm able to imagine. In most games I've played in, the DM loved this, and once I finally DM'ed I understood why - my favorite moments in any game tend to be where players do something I completely didn't expect. Honestly, at this point if I was to put in a door of some valuable material my players would just assume it's a mini game of sorts to try to think of clever ways to extract it.

Now, I know the door one is a famous enough example that it barely even counts as clever anymore, but I'd say that even counts as heritage. I have a number of players who've heard stories of the sacking of the Tomb of Horrors, and again if I put in an adamantine door they'd be excited to loot it, not just for the value, but because it'd make them excited to get to do something they've heard of from classic D&D stories.

I guess what I'm saying is, though your players might just see dollar signs, there might be other things involved too, so try not to think poorly of them.

Also, I've been on the other side of this before too, and I honestly wasn't upset. I was more impressed, because what I was doing honestly hadn't occurred to me. I once had a puzzle, a standard sort of "use mirrors to bound a beam of light into the target" thing. As part of the puzzle I had big solid blocks of blended quartz, a material from 3.5 with some interesting properties. After the players had completed the dungeon, on the way out they decided to take the time to carry the blocks off. In retrospect this was completely obvious, but it hadn't even occurred to me. Some quick numbers crunching suggested the material, at market value, was worth a few hundred thousand gold pieces. For a fourth level party. So I didn't want to give it to them, but at the same time I hate to not reward cleverness and thought. The compromise was that this material wasn't a good grade, and would need to be refined further. So although they didn't get 90,000 gold a piece, they did get 10,000, which was still a significant chunk of change, but only put them a level or so ahead of where they should be. They got to feel smart and get some valuable loot, while I was able to prevent the game from being completely unbalanced. A win-win.

[oxybe]

I'm not getting the reference, sorry.

It's not a reference to anything in particular, just an iron banded wooden door with a thick plank barricading it. that should be plenty tough to break through for most purposes and a cheap casting of Arcane Lock can make it damn near unbreakable for all intents and purposes by adding an extra +10 to the break DC. If you're at the point where you need to worry about using adamantine to protect your things from fighter types kicking down your door, you should probably start looking in investing in magical defenses instead because there is a very good chance the whole thing will be passwall'd, fabricate'd, warp wood'd, stone shape'd or the like for easy dungeon bypass or door removal.

[Tengu_temp]

Oh wow. Maybe 3 posts of bad player trends, 3 freakin' pages of people arguing about doors. Never underestimate nerds' ability to be nitpicky about tiny details and miss the big picture in the process.

[oxybe]

So, yes, you are exclusively playing Minecraft the RPG?

I mean - I honestly want to know, do you really most often play characters/games where your #1 goal is "get loot"?

Well, my current modpack of choice, Resonant Rise 3, has a wide range of customizable weapons (down to choosing the material the stock, bow, string and binding of your custom-made crossbow and how each affects arrow speed, string pull time, bolt penetration and weapon durability) and armors from mundane leather tunics to fantastic ones like the green vyroxeres to modular power armors and bound magic armors, fueled by sacrificing monsters atop an altar or churning them into a bloody pulp via horrific rituals of summoning and killing.

You have a wide array of non-stabby tools to choose from, from picks to axes to mattocks to sledges to drills, chainsaws, atomic disassemblers, chemical laboratories, nuclear reactors and more. Each with their own uses and unintended uses for you to test and discover.

You can choose to focus on intricate farming where you crossbreed trees to get new ones, large farms that can create hundreds of different foods, or grow more exotic and magical crops that can produce raw materials like iron or tin.

Or you can throw yourself full tilt into studying the various magic systems of the game world, from thaumcraft and it's golems in funny hats that run around helping you in your various tasks to botania's flower powered magic to the aforementioned magical crops that can grow most materials you could want or the sketchy blood magic that can be fueled by self-sacrifice to power rituals, useful runic slabs or the powerful bound armor. Or normal sacrifices if you're into that kind of thing.

If you want to process metals there are multitudes of methods of fetching that metal, from large quarries that systematically destroy sections of the world and pump it out for you, to digital miners that seek and mine specific ores for you. And you have many ways of processing it, from simply burning away what you can in a forge to smelting it into molds to more intricate processes that refine away all impurities and get three or four times the output of a less complex method.

And don't get me started on the variety of aesthetic options: from decocraft to chisel mod to carpenter's blocks to simply having a wide array of matrials at hand you can build anything from my square cobblestone block houses to roman styled marble structures.

Or you could just grab a pick and a sword and go exploring. all these are valid.

So I honestly wouldn't mind playing Minecraft the RPG. Seems pretty awesome. :smallwink:

[Yora]

Oh wow. Maybe 3 posts of bad player trends, 3 freakin' pages of people arguing about doors. Never underestimate nerds' ability to be nitpicky about tiny details and miss the big picture in the process.

I never really got what the big picture here really is. Confrontational players? Dungeon design? Rules question?

[dps]

For me as a player, if I try to go around that door or even to loot it, I'm not trying to break the game. I'm not even specifically looking to grab a huge pot of loot, although that's certainly part of it. For me, I'm reveling in the greatest strength of the tabletop RPG - that I'm only limited by my imagination. If this was a computer game, I'd have to find the key, but it's not! The only limit to what my character is able to do is what I'm able to imagine. .

Thank you for pointing this out. It's actually a more important point than anything to do with the market value of the material doors are made out of. On reflection, this is clearly a case of a DM wanting a party to solve a problem in a particular way, and getting upset that they have used a different method. More a bad DM trend than a bad player trend when you look at it like that.

[JAL_1138]

As mentioned, its a giant imposing slab made of a substance more valuable than gold. Even when the goal is "Save the world" or something like that, its VERY hard to ignore the idea of settling all your monetary concerns forever, especially if the same item that lets you do that can also be converted into useful tools that directly aid you on your "save the world" quest.

I was going to post a reply but this took the words right out of my mouth. +1.

Edit: Several other posters likewise, but this phone is terrible at multi-quoting. Sorry.

But yes--it arcs back all the way to pre-Advanced D&D, it's worth enough money and contains enough material to kit the party out much better than currently (probably) in order to better save the world, and it's part of the fact that it's a TTRPG that lets me go at an obstacle sideways rather than "find the one exact answer" in the first place.

Also edit: Furthermore, back in AD&D, gold was XP and monsters only gave a pittance. We'd all level like mad.

[Red Fel]

Oh wow. Maybe 3 posts of bad player trends, 3 freakin' pages of people arguing about doors. Never underestimate nerds' ability to be nitpicky about tiny details and miss the big picture in the process.

The thing is, the latter is emblematic of the former.

It's hard to point to one thing and say "this is a bad player trend," as opposed to "this is the result of expectations that don't line up between players and GM." The door illustration is an excellent example.

There are a few illustrations of player behavior that are clearly "bad." Actual and deliberate cheating, abusive or hostile behavior, these might qualify as "bad player trends," but there's really no merit to discussing them. Other issues occupy more of a gray, ambiguous space. Again, the door example is an illustration.

Don't think of it as the posters nitpicking about one example. Think of it as the posters using the example to highlight the difficulty in addressing the question. The door example shows players looking at the game one way, and the GM looking at it another way; in doing so, it highlights the fact that the question made assumptions which may not be justified.

Also, I'm sensing a bit of hostility in your post. Is that really necessary?

[Maglubiyet]

PvP players is the trend that bugs me.

Several members of the group I DM'ed as an undergrad would take any and every opportunity to attack each other, to the point where it made no sense. They'd be fighting the city guard, for example, and one would backstab another in the middle of combat. It was strange because they were relatively serious players otherwise.

Another campaign I was a player in, another player tried to have his character permanently ability drain my character. Why it was important that *I* was the target and not some random NPC, I have no idea.

Maybe RPG's are a place where latent grudges and anti-social behaviors manifest themselves.

[Gavran]

Well, my current modpack of choice, Resonant Rise 3, has a wide range of customizable weapons [...]
So I honestly wouldn't mind playing Minecraft the RPG. Seems pretty awesome. :smallwink:

As someone who played quite a bit of Minecraft, I went back and forth a few times reading this whether you were talking about an RPG system I hadn't heard of (playing "Minecraft" the RPG) or a modpack I hadn't heard of (playing Minecraft the "RPG"). :P

Let it be known that I don't at all think Minecraft isn't a pretty neat game.

[jaydubs]

PvP players is the trend that bugs me.

Several members of the group I DM'ed as an undergrad would take any and every opportunity to attack each other, to the point where it made no sense. They'd be fighting the city guard, for example, and one would backstab another in the middle of combat. It was strange because they were relatively serious players otherwise.

Another campaign I was a player in, another player tried to have his character permanently ability drain my character. Why it was important that *I* was the target and not some random NPC, I have no idea.

Maybe RPG's are a place where latent grudges and anti-social behaviors manifest themselves.

It's not just RPGs. You'll see PvP tendencies in any game (i.e., videogames) that allows players to attack or sabotage one another. The best one can hope to do is to segregate players interested in it from those who aren't. Or at least, draw bright red lines so people know which games allow it, and which don't.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like PvP in some games. There are entire genres that absolutely thrive on how exciting PvP can be. I just don't like it in all games. And I don't like in tabletop RPGs.

[ZeroGear]

Maybe I misnamed the thread and dind't phrase the original question properly. I'll admit I had problems thinking of a proper title.
The original question I was posing was about mindsets and mentalities players slipped into that DMs would have liked to discourage.
In this case, the door example was of the "let's loot everything" mindset, and the "let's waste time doing something unrelated to the main adventure" mentality, plus a bit of the "anything we find can be sold" assumption. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about this.

That being said, why do people keep saying adamantine is more valuable than gold? No, this is something I don't understand because I can't find any direct comparison. I have checked my reference books, and there is no "X gold/pound of adamantine" line in anything. The closest I can compare is in terms of weapon cost:
Adamantine weapons cost 3000 gp on top of the cost of the weapon. According to what I remember, alchemically pure gold weapons actually cost 4000 gp on top of the main weapon price, 1000 gp more than adamantine. Plus, one has to consider that adamant weighs 2x as much as iron, while gold weighs about 5x as much. So it would stand to reason that a gold door of the same dimensions would be much more expensive.

Please correct me if I am wrong with these numbers, as I genuinely don't know the exact pricing of these things.

[Nightcanon]

Church rooves in the UK are regularly targeted by thieves making off with the lead, as are high-voltage cables on railway lines for copper. Laws have needed changing to stop scrap metal dealers paying cash, so the cops can track down the provenance of such things. Thus, in certain types of game I can see why adamantium doors are attractive to adventurers.
Alternative ideas for imposing doors: low level: fire-blackened oak, heavily studded and banded with iron. With the remains of dead rogues/ paladins nailed to them. Higher level: animated blocks of stone such that whatever trigger item/event you want has to be ticked off to open the door, or the blocks just sit there in the way. Attempts to move result in a 'rocks fall, everyone dies' scenario.
Ways to stop excessive looting: how are we going to a) get these doors back up via those 3 narrow spiral staircases, or b) transport and construct a blast furnace hot enough to work the metal into smaller pieces down here? Doable, perhaps, and on a par with mining a discovered rich seam of valuable ore in difficulty. Unfortunately, whatever was behind the door is either long gone or spend the time summoning reinforcements, or the BBEG uses the hiatus to take over the world.
If your PCs are wandering aimlessly looking for wealth and xp in the form of random monsters and dungeon furnishings, and that is not the game you want to play, you need to stop putting those rewards in front of them and make it clear that better rewards are more easily available by following the main plot. Whether the reward is monetary/ xp/ continues existence of world is up to you.

[JAL_1138]

Maybe I misnamed the thread and dind't phrase the original question properly. I'll admit I had problems thinking of a proper title.
The original question I was posing was about mindsets and mentalities players slipped into that DMs would have liked to discourage.
In this case, the door example was of the "let's loot everything" mindset, and the "let's waste time doing something unrelated to the main adventure" mentality, plus a bit of the "anything we find can be sold" assumption. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about this.

That being said, why do people keep saying adamantine is more valuable than gold? No, this is something I don't understand because I can't find any direct comparison. I have checked my reference books, and there is no "X gold/pound of adamantine" line in anything. The closest I can compare is in terms of weapon cost:
Adamantine weapons cost 3000 gp on top of the cost of the weapon. According to what I remember, alchemically pure gold weapons actually cost 4000 gp on top of the main weapon price, 1000 gp more than adamantine. Plus, one has to consider that adamant weighs 2x as much as iron, while gold weighs about 5x as much. So it would stand to reason that a gold door of the same dimensions would be much more expensive.

Please correct me if I am wrong with these numbers, as I genuinely don't know the exact pricing of these things.

Depends on system. Using PF stats, since they're freely available online and it's currently the top rpg on the market (and despite my preferences for AD&D 2e or 5e over 3.PF, all my books are in storage while I'm relocating so I can't go dig them out and look easily), you would literally save a minimum of 59GP per shot by using actual 1-gold pieces as sling bullets instead of using adamantine sling bullets (or other missile weapons). Since gold is an extremely soft metal, presumably it takes a lot more gold and/or workmanship compared to adamantine to make useable weapons or armor that don't deform, bend, dent, and/or break if you look at it funny, accounting for gold armor's higher value.

[Solaris]

One thing I've just realized is how quick people were to point out how I am wrong, but not one person is willing to share player mentalities they wish they could discourage.
As such, why don't we just drop the subject about the door. There is no way for me to argue this without people criticizing me for it, so I'm going to be the bigger man and hold it soley as mu opinion.
So, anyone else brave enough to step up to the plate?


My bugbear, even more so that Star Wars and Monty Python quotes? "I attack the darkness!"

:smallsigh:

Fine, very funny, whatever; you waste your action this round, next player...?

#3 reply to the post. The second half of my first post in the thread was an agreement with him and a statement of how I'm not keen on Monty Python (though Star Wars can be quoted at all times). If you want discussion on something other than a single subject, especially when you're starting the thread, you really gotta come up with it instead of blaming us for discussing what you apparently want to discuss.

That, and we're nerds. We're going to beat a subject to death because everyone thinks his restatement of one of a handful of points is brilliant and innovative.


Me too. Are people picturing swinging saloon doors or something?

Anyone who takes the time to build a door out of a nearly-indestructible metal is not going to leave exposed hinges. Take a look at your average security door -- aside from an acetylene torch, what tool could you possibly use to take one down to steal it?

Well, if the walls are made out of just about anything softer than adamantine...

We're talking about the sort of people who go into dungeons and kill dragons for loot. If they're willing to pick a fight with hyperintelligent magic-wielding superpredators for shiny things, what chance do you think walls stand when all you need is some mundane tools to excavate it and a team of mules to haul it away?
It is, of course, the sort of thing you do after you've killed everything else in the dungeon. Otherwise, someone is going to walk up and inquire as to why you've taken such an interest in the decor.


PvP players is the trend that bugs me.

I really dislike PvP in a game that isn't explicitly about PvP. "It's what my character would do" is trotted out as an excuse for it, too, which just fuels the irritation.

I'm also deeply, deeply un-fond of "It's what my character would do" being used as an excuse for antisocial behavior, too.


That being said, why do people keep saying adamantine is more valuable than gold? No, this is something I don't understand because I can't find any direct comparison. I have checked my reference books, and there is no "X gold/pound of adamantine" line in anything. The closest I can compare is in terms of weapon cost:
Adamantine weapons cost 3000 gp on top of the cost of the weapon. According to what I remember, alchemically pure gold weapons actually cost 4000 gp on top of the main weapon price, 1000 gp more than adamantine. Plus, one has to consider that adamant weighs 2x as much as iron, while gold weighs about 5x as much. So it would stand to reason that a gold door of the same dimensions would be much more expensive.

Please correct me if I am wrong with these numbers, as I genuinely don't know the exact pricing of these things.

In the 3.5E PHB on page 112, on the table entitled Trade Goods, it lists the price of gold as 50 gp per pound.

In the 3.5E DMG on page 283, it lists the price for ammunition, armor, shields, and weapons made from adamantine (including the '60 gp for a sling bullet' thing). There's no mention about adamantine being heavier than steel, but you're right about core 3.5E D&D lacking a price-per-pound comparison. That may not be as glaring an oversight as we think, though. A glance at the material in the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook also suggests adamantine is priced less by weight of the material and more by the workmanship required, as a freestanding wall 6" x 10' x 10' costs only 3,000 gp. Judging by that, I'd say that at best the players could remake the adamantine door into weapons and armor and then sell those off for piles of gold... in a big city.

[jaydubs]

The original question I was posing was about mindsets and mentalities players slipped into that DMs would have liked to discourage.

My campaign has a capital P Plot. But I try to run it as flexible as possible. That is, while there are big happenings going on in the background, the PCs are free to interfere with it as they see fit, and to vastly change the flow of that river. There's no "planned official ending" of any sort. There are no immutable organizations that can't be opposed or subverted. There are no plot-required, unkillable NPCs. Or DM fiat protected DMPCs.

But I get the impression they've played too often under DMs that protect their storylines like precious, untarnished gems. They just seem to have this hesitation whenever presented with such opportunities, like they're afraid their hands will be slapped if they touch important world events.

For instance, every time they meet a king, champion, general, quest-giver, wizened old wizard, etc., they usually assume it's some uber-leveled NPC with plot protection. And even when I tell them they're just nearly as strong as the most powerful people in the nation, it's like they can't conceive of it. I tell them that if they wanted, they could in fact beat (as a party) just about any individual they're likely to meet, and it just doesn't seem to click.

And that makes me sad. Because it's like railroady DMs have somehow reached into my campaign, and erected "keep off the grass signs" signs in my games as well. My favorite part of DMing is when the players do something clever and unexpected - it's like getting to watch a movie where I don't know what the protagonists are going to do, or if/how they're going to succeed. So it pains me to think they're stifling themselves because they're afraid they'll break the story, or get punished for doing something they're "not supposed to."

[Demidos]

Just saying, the easiest fix is the Earthfast spell, which doubles the HP of any earth/stone its cast on, stacking infinitely. Instantaneous, so it cant be dispelled.

...Theyre not getting through without high level magic.

[themaque]

Maybe I misnamed the thread and dind't phrase the original question properly. I'll admit I had problems thinking of a proper title.
The original question I was posing was about mindsets and mentalities players slipped into that DMs would have liked to discourage.
In this case, the door example was of the "let's loot everything" mindset, and the "let's waste time doing something unrelated to the main adventure" mentality, plus a bit of the "anything we find can be sold" assumption. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about this.

That being said, why do people keep saying adamantine is more valuable than gold? No, this is something I don't understand because I can't find any direct comparison. I have checked my reference books, and there is no "X gold/pound of adamantine" line in anything. The closest I can compare is in terms of weapon cost:
Adamantine weapons cost 3000 gp on top of the cost of the weapon. According to what I remember, alchemically pure gold weapons actually cost 4000 gp on top of the main weapon price, 1000 gp more than adamantine. Plus, one has to consider that adamant weighs 2x as much as iron, while gold weighs about 5x as much. So it would stand to reason that a gold door of the same dimensions would be much more expensive.

Please correct me if I am wrong with these numbers, as I genuinely don't know the exact pricing of these things.

It's also not just pure numbers.

Adamantine is generally rarer than gold and it's more directly useful for adventurers. a first level adventurer expects to find GOLD, but not enough adamantine to make a couple swords or a piece of armor. It's not just intrinsically but instrumentally valuable.

But beyond that it's the question, Why are the players bored with the adventure? Why do you feel the need to corral them down a certain path? If they want to try and strip a dungeon bare, then why not?

All that glitters isn't gold, and it's your job to remind them. Yes, those goblin swords have the same stats as a short sword, but no one is going to spend MONEY on them. Then they have to clean them up, or melt them down, or any other ideas that starts to make an adventure all of it's own!

If your players aren't interested in being pulled in by a cry for help from a scared princess (Help my Obiwan Kenobi, you're my only hope!) What does interest them? If it's solely money, maybe the rewards aren't high enough? (Why bother taking all this copper when we can rescue the princess for all the platinum we can carry?)

ANSWER TO SECONDARY QUESTION:

Power Gaming in games when I'm trying to run a story driven game. It was explained at the outset, it was agreed at the outset, yet Mark still brought an optimized power house on game one. Oh, he has a very deep background, but he still undermined the spirit of the agreed purpose of the game.

[Telok]

For instance, every time they meet a king, champion, general, quest-giver, wizened old wizard, etc., they usually assume it's some uber-leveled NPC with plot protection. And even when I tell them they're just nearly as strong as the most powerful people in the nation, it's like they can't conceive of it. I tell them that if they wanted, they could in fact beat (as a party) just about any individual they're likely to meet, and it just doesn't seem to click.

I sort of had a different problem. My players figured that anyone who wasn't powerful enough to push them around wasn't useful or important.

Since they could kill any one group of city guards they acted as though the guards had no authority or power. Essentially they decided that every town/city was a lawless clump of buildings where they could get away with anything. They dissed the local king (good, effective, nice, useful king who had 100,000 gp rewards to offer them for stuff) in front of the chamberlain and nobles. Talked publicly about killing a mayor because he didn't respect homeless wanderers in dirty travel clothes. Planned to murder a magistrate in front of her husband and children because they were told that she took bribes. Attacked and killed the police who wanted to ask them to leave town peacefully. Went to astonishingly extreme lengths to avoid a 5gp toll bridge (one of them almost drowned and had to be rescued).

The dragon-demigod that kept an impaled major demon as a doorbell? They respected him.

They were also pretty mad that nobody knew that they were "big dang heroes". But that was just because they never told anyone about what they did. Wipe out a castle of hostile giants? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when someone else claims the fame. Wreck an evil cult? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when nobody notices. Clean out a basilisk lair? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when someone else claims the reward. Kill a marauding dragon? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when someone else gets knighted for bringing back it's head. Kill an infamous outlaw? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when they learn weeks later about the bounty and can't claim it without proof.

[ZeroGear]

In the 3.5E PHB on page 112, on the table entitled Trade Goods, it lists the price of gold as 50 gp per pound.

In the 3.5E DMG on page 283, it lists the price for ammunition, armor, shields, and weapons made from adamantine (including the '60 gp for a sling bullet' thing).
There's no mention about adamantine being heavier than steel, but you're right about core 3.5E D&D lacking a price-per-pound comparison. That may not be as glaring an oversight as we think, though. A glance at the material in the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook also suggests adamantine is priced less by weight of the material and more by the workmanship required, as a freestanding wall 6" x 10' x 10' costs only 3,000 gp. Judging by that, I'd say that at best the players could remake the adamantine door into weapons and armor and then sell those off for piles of gold... in a big city.

Point ceded with the big city. That leads to the question of "how much would a sling bullet made of gold actually cost?". And it still begs the question of "how much is a pound of adamantine worth?".

Also, I now have the urge to create a halfling sling-speciallist who focusses on using gold coins as a weapon.
-----------------------------------------------------------

Another mentality that may needs to be discouraged is the "DM does all the work for us" mentality. It involves players expecting to have every request for help come to them rather than going about and looking for quests to complete. Sure, you have the standard "the king has summoned us to fight the evil cultists" scenario, but not all game (not even the majority of games) follow that formula. Other than being clueless as to where to look for work, it is hard to imagine why players don't look for quests in taverns (by following rumors or wanted posters), traveling around, etc.
I'll admit to having done this myself, yet state that I just didn't know the setting well enough to make a decent choice on where to start looking.

[JAL_1138]

Went and looked up the AD&D 2e costs. Cost multiplier for gold armor: x3. Just 3. Provide the weight of metal for the armor. In the case of gold, 50gp/pound, so, for full cost of full plate (70lbs) with a base cost of 4,000-10,000, that's 3,500gp of metal plus somewhere from 12,000 to 30,000 gp. Highest cost for gold fullplate, 33,500gp.

Cost multiplier for Adamantite armor? x500. Not required to provide the metal to get it made, but for Adamantite fullplate, still somewhere from two million gp (minimum) to five million gp.

So it's worth a little more than gold, yeah.

EDIT: Found an old Dragon Magazine article which gave Mithral coins as being worth 50gp (back when platinum was 5gp) and then said that Adamantite coins would be so much more valuable than mithral that the article gave no exchange rate.

[Elderand]

I'd like to address something. The idea of looting everything is not new, nor is it an old idea that somehow got started long ago that was contrary to how the game was meant to be played.

No

Loot everything was, in fact, the very first way the game was meant to be played. It was the whole basis of DnD when it still came in boxes. Killing monsters gave you very little XP, good roleplay XP ? That came later. The prime way to gain experience was treasure. 1 GP looted was 1 xp gained.

[JAL_1138]

I'd like to address something. The idea of looting everything is not new, nor is it an old idea that somehow got started long ago that was contrary to how the game was meant to be played.

No

Loot everything was, in fact, the very first way the game was meant to be played. It was the whole basis of DnD when it still came in boxes. Killing monsters gave you very little XP, good roleplay XP ? That came later. The prime way to gain experience was treasure. 1 GP looted was 1 xp gained.

+1. True for White Box, B/X, BECMI, RC, 1e, and was at least an official option in 2e if it wasn't the default (I remember reading it in the book, but can't recall which).

[Coidzor]

Also, if I had a door that strong, you can bet it's going to slide into the walls and/or ceilings when opened, instead of being on hinges. The actually "door" part is just a piece of a mechanism that takes up most of the wall, making it nigh impossible to circumvent.

The point still remains that if I can break through the surrounding wall to remove the doorframe and sell the door, I can take more time to destroy more of the wall surrounding the door and remove it, no matter how long of a length of adamantine rebar you choose to use to set it into the wall, floor, or ceiling.

You just give me more adamantine in the form of that rebar.

[oxybe]

I usually respond to "It's what my character would do!" with "Then why did you bring a disruptive character to the table?" and that usually shuts most people up or gets them to rethink their actions. Those that don't rescind their disruptive behaviour are asked to not show up again and their PC is quietly shuffled out of the campaign.

Which is why I generally don't harshly punish characters beyond the natural repercussions for doing the action itself or for a player's out of character actions. It's not the character's fault Ethan decided to bring Vorpal Von Hackenslash to the table instead of a PC who wouldn't try to slaughter and pillage the peaceful town of Citiesburgh.

Most disruptive behaviour can be solved by addressing the player out of game and telling him he's doing something that ain't cool. If Ethan is a cool dude, he'll stop. If Ethan is a jerkface meaniepants, he's no longer invited.

I think the "worst" behaviour I've seen is the player that doesn't interact with much, or at least doesn't take any initiative. He's not being disruptive like Ethan, but say what you will, at least Ethan is a catalyst for stuff to happen. Steve is just there and not taking initiative to move the game along. This is fine if there's only Steve, happy to follow Ethan, Paul and Kyle in their escapades as he's here more to hang out with his friends then actually move the story along (not that he's a bad roleplayer or anything when it comes up, just doesn't take initiative), but a table of Steves who just sit around waiting for some sort of cue or call to action to drop on their lap is a bit frustrating.

I can deal with telling Ethan to shape up or ship out, but forcing Steve to go out of his comfort zone feels dirty when he's not actually doing anything wrong.

[veti]

In that case, you melt the door down and make adamantine weapons for the entire party at a fraction of the cost. Why sell it? Adamantine is rare and useful!

Or you glue a handle to it and use it as an adamantine tower shield. That's pretty damn useful, since it's large enough to, you know, block a doorway!
".

Sure, if one of your party happens to be a master blacksmith. With his own master level forge and tools. Then he can absolutely take the metal and spend the next three months making gear for the rest of the party. And then, it's likely that settling down to spend the next five years working the rest of the door into marketable shapes would also be very profitable.

And if that's what the smith player wants to do, that's fine with me.

[Coidzor]

I really dislike PvP in a game that isn't explicitly about PvP. "It's what my character would do" is trotted out as an excuse for it, too, which just fuels the irritation.

I'm also deeply, deeply un-fond of "It's what my character would do" being used as an excuse for antisocial behavior, too.

Indeed, those are the pits. Also non-answer deflections because Mr. or Ms. or Mrs. Player is still the one who chose to have their character be a **** who derails the game and kills the group's fun.

[JAL_1138]

Indeed, those are the pits. Also non-answer deflections because Mr. or Ms. or Mrs. Player is still the one who chose to have their character be a **** who derails the game and kills the group's fun.

I don't (usually) mind harmless, non-lethal PVP that makes sense in the circumstances, like the newly-hired Thief pickpocketing the Wizard's component pouch to prove her skills when they've been called into question, or a duel to first blood (e.g., roll init and to-hit, deal 1hp or purely nonlethal damage) after one too many short jokes from the elf about the dwarven fighter. Anything much more than that and it tends to get really unpleasant really fast.

[Ralanr]

I sort of had a different problem. My players figured that anyone who wasn't powerful enough to push them around wasn't useful or important.

Since they could kill any one group of city guards they acted as though the guards had no authority or power. Essentially they decided that every town/city was a lawless clump of buildings where they could get away with anything. They dissed the local king (good, effective, nice, useful king who had 100,000 gp rewards to offer them for stuff) in front of the chamberlain and nobles. Talked publicly about killing a mayor because he didn't respect homeless wanderers in dirty travel clothes. Planned to murder a magistrate in front of her husband and children because they were told that she took bribes. Attacked and killed the police who wanted to ask them to leave town peacefully. Went to astonishingly extreme lengths to avoid a 5gp toll bridge (one of them almost drowned and had to be rescued).

The dragon-demigod that kept an impaled major demon as a doorbell? They respected him.

They were also pretty mad that nobody knew that they were "big dang heroes". But that was just because they never told anyone about what they did. Wipe out a castle of hostile giants? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when someone else claims the fame. Wreck an evil cult? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when nobody notices. Clean out a basilisk lair? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when someone else claims the reward. Kill a marauding dragon? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when someone else gets knighted for bringing back it's head. Kill an infamous outlaw? Don't tell anyone and get pissed when they learn weeks later about the bounty and can't claim it without proof.


Sometimes massive showing of force doesn't get players to respect others. One of my characters certainly didn't respect one of my friends cities that he was running a session for. This was mainly because my character felt he was being looked down upon and as such looked down on others in response. If they wished to treat him as such, then he will treat them as such. Fair is fair.

I wouldn't encourage this ever and I've been a bad player at times (To be fair, my friend is a very railroady DM who ends up finishing campaigns with cut scene battles that our characters don't participate in. He's ok to play with, but I really don't like him DMing...yet I still join in every time :smallfrown: ). But I think it's about knowing your players.

Though sometimes you just play with *******s or people playing *******s.

[Solaris]

Point ceded with the big city. That leads to the question of "how much would a sling bullet made of gold actually cost?". And it still begs the question of "how much is a pound of adamantine worth?".

A single sling bullet weighs 1/2 a pound (they're sold in lots of 10, with a listed weight of 5 lb for the lot). Going strictly by weight, that'd put a single sling bullet at 25 gp.


Also, I now have the urge to create a halfling sling-speciallist who focusses on using gold coins as a weapon.

... That's a new take on 'throwing away money'.


Another mentality that may needs to be discouraged is the "DM does all the work for us" mentality. It involves players expecting to have every request for help come to them rather than going about and looking for quests to complete. Sure, you have the standard "the king has summoned us to fight the evil cultists" scenario, but not all game (not even the majority of games) follow that formula. Other than being clueless as to where to look for work, it is hard to imagine why players don't look for quests in taverns (by following rumors or wanted posters), traveling around, etc.
I'll admit to having done this myself, yet state that I just didn't know the setting well enough to make a decent choice on where to start looking.

I've encountered this in a PbP game where I'd advertised it as a sandbox.
... I don't run PbP games anymore.


I don't (usually) mind harmless, non-lethal PVP that makes sense in the circumstances, like the newly-hired Thief pickpocketing the Wizard's component pouch to prove her skills when they've been called into question, or a duel to first blood (e.g., roll init and to-hit, deal 1hp or purely nonlethal damage) after one too many short jokes from the elf about the dwarven fighter. Anything much more than that and it tends to get really unpleasant really fast.

When it's harmless and consensual, I don't mind it nearly so much. It can even be cool (like with the thief in your example) or funny (like with your dwarf-vs-elf example, particularly if they keep up with the quips in between attacks), provided it's handled well and in good fun.

When that thief decides he wants to start backstabbing his fellow PCs, on the other hand, or the dwarf decides the elf would look a lot better with an axe in between those knife ears because the player thought there somehow wouldn't be short jokes when he was playing a dwarf... Oh yeah. As DM, I'm going to step in out-of-game and ask that player if they're sure they want to do that. If the answer is in the affirmative, the result is generally expulsion from the game.

I have better things to do than waste my time catering to someone's antisocial urges at the expense of people I like. Video games have been in existence for decades now. They're great for venting that desire to maim, kill, and loot other people. The only one allowed to kill PCs in my games is me.

[Keltest]

As far as annoying trends go, the group im DMing for has an especially annoying habit where they press for ideas that they know are bad simply as a joke, and as often as not end up going through with them because enough people decide it would be funny to push for it that the more sane people are overruled. As a DM this is seriously annoying because it makes it very difficult for me to plan appropriate encounters and other obstacles. I cant put a sign that says "Certain Death This Way" without half the group wanting to go down that way. Im not opposed to courageous and innovative players, but half the time these actions are near-suicidal.

[Coidzor]

... That's a new take on 'throwing away money'.

Zeninage!

I've only encountered it in its various incarnations in the Final Fantasy franchise and in the Legend of Mystical Ninja series as the primary ranged attack of the protagonist Goemon.

[JAL_1138]

A single sling bullet weighs 1/2 a pound (they're sold in lots of 10, with a listed weight of 5 lb for the lot). Going strictly by weight, that'd put a single sling bullet at 25 gp.



Didn't look at that, was picturing "using a gold coin." Still puts it adamant/ine/ite at 2.4x the value of gold by weight (60 vs 25) in PF. Of note that it's worth far less in PF than in 1e/2e, like in the armor costs I mentioned (gold fullplate = 33,500 gp maximum; adamantite fullplate 2,000,000 gp minimum) and in that TSR-era Dragon article with 1 mithral = 50gp and 1 adamantite so far above mithral as not to have a specific value other than "far more than that."



When [PVP is] harmless and consensual, I don't mind it nearly so much. It can even be cool (like with the thief in your example) or funny (like with your dwarf-vs-elf example, particularly if they keep up with the quips in between attacks), provided it's handled well and in good fun.

When that thief decides he wants to start backstabbing his fellow PCs, on the other hand, or the dwarf decides the elf would look a lot better with an axe in between those knife ears because the player thought there somehow wouldn't be short jokes when he was playing a dwarf... Oh yeah. As DM, I'm going to step in out-of-game and ask that player if they're sure they want to do that. If the answer is in the affirmative, the result is generally expulsion from the game.

I have better things to do than waste my time catering to someone's antisocial urges at the expense of people I like. Video games have been in existence for decades now. They're great for venting that desire to maim, kill, and loot other people. The only one allowed to kill PCs in my games is me.

Alas that there is but one Internets to give.

[ZeroGear]

Food for thought on the gold ammunition:
how much does lead weigh compared to gold? How does that influence the cost of solid gold bullets?

[JAL_1138]

Food for thought on the gold ammunition:
how much does lead weigh compared to gold? How does that influence the cost of solid gold bullets?

Lead is slightly heavier for a given volume, but sling bullets are measured by weight, so (barring silliness like gigantic aluminum bullets), the weight (actually mass; weight varies depending on local gravity) of the bullet remains constant and the size increases slightly for a gold bullet compared to a lead one. They're still half-a-pound.

A ton of feathers weighs the same as a ton of bricks.

Edit: This conclusion is based on the notion that since no volume is given, but a weight is given, that there's no standardized caliber for a sling bullet, only a rough ballpark based on weight (mass). Stone sling bullets, the most common non-lead type, presumably weigh the same as lead bullets but are larger.

[Joe the Rat]

Gold is heavier - lead clocks in at 11.34 g/cc, gold at 19.3 g/cc. Which means a heavier or smaller bullet. and it's softer, so you're looking at more of the impact energy lost to deformation. Personally, I'd just go with "enh, close enough" for everything besides price.

Rather pricey way to play Lone Ranger.

Which gets into the wonderful fiddly details of coinage: your gold coins will be about half the size, or twice the weight, of copper and silver coins (depending on whether volume or mass is the critical detail in your ignored treasure encumbrance.

Some napkin math: an iron door in the 3' x 6-and-change' will be somewhere in the neighborhood of half a ton to a full ton, depending on how thick it is. Adamantine doors are going to be crazy heavy.

[Pex]

As far as annoying trends go, the group im DMing for has an especially annoying habit where they press for ideas that they know are bad simply as a joke, and as often as not end up going through with them because enough people decide it would be funny to push for it that the more sane people are overruled. As a DM this is seriously annoying because it makes it very difficult for me to plan appropriate encounters and other obstacles. I cant put a sign that says "Certain Death This Way" without half the group wanting to go down that way. Im not opposed to courageous and innovative players, but half the time these actions are near-suicidal.

I'll take your word your group is doing this on purpose, but there is a counterpoint for parties who would do this in all seriousness. When villagers tell the party not to go somewhere because it's very dangerous and others who have gone there have been killed by (insert monster or foreboding doom), the players will take that as a clue they're supposed to go there and take care of the problem. They're the heroes. That's what they're supposed to do. You as DM can be Honest True in saying some location is too dangerous for the party that's for world flavor text and/or meant to be handled at a later level, but that's not how the players interpret it. Villagers always say something is too dangerous because they're not adventurers like the party. Going into danger and defeating it is the whole point of playing the game.

[JAL_1138]

Gold is heavier - lead clocks in at 11.34 g/cc, gold at 19.3 g/cc.

Derp. You're right. Lead's atomic weight is greater (207 and change for lead vs just shy of 197 for gold) but gold is denser. Good catch.

Either way, we have a listed weight (1/2lb) for sling bullets rather than a volume, so I'm guessing it's somewhat like a lead-core 150-grain rifle bullet being shorter for the same caliber than a gilding-metal (not actually gold) monolithic 150-grain rifle bullet--size changes (only length in the case of same-caliber rifle bullets), weight does not.

[Maglubiyet]

I'd like to address something. The idea of looting everything is not new, nor is it an old idea that somehow got started long ago that was contrary to how the game was meant to be played.

No

Loot everything was, in fact, the very first way the game was meant to be played. It was the whole basis of DnD when it still came in boxes. Killing monsters gave you very little XP, good roleplay XP ? That came later. The prime way to gain experience was treasure. 1 GP looted was 1 xp gained.

OMG, I had forgotten that! Yeah, you'd kill stuff and their treasure made you go up in levels! I remember my players would even drag the monsters back to town to sell. What a wacky world.

[goto124]

I shall do the reverse!

'DM, we got past the door and searched the room thoroughly and there's no treasure?!'
'Well, the door's made of adamantite...'

[Telok]

I'll take your word your group is doing this on purpose, but there is a counterpoint for parties who would do this in all seriousness. When villagers tell the party not to go somewhere because it's very dangerous and others who have gone there have been killed by (insert monster or foreboding doom), the players will take that as a clue they're supposed to go there and take care of the problem. They're the heroes. That's what they're supposed to do. You as DM can be Honest True in saying some location is too dangerous for the party that's for world flavor text and/or meant to be handled at a later level, but that's not how the players interpret it. Villagers always say something is too dangerous because they're not adventurers like the party. Going into danger and defeating it is the whole point of playing the game.
Of course when the ten hit die salamander noble tells them that there is a ruined fortress infested with many dangerous demons on the other side of a lava lake you don't expect five eighth level adventurers to blindly waltz in without any preparations beyond an Endure Elements spell to keep the heat off. Even better, after the two invisible lion demons at the front door they lit torches to cross the pitch dark courtyard towards the keep and were surprised when they got ambushed.

There's a difference between being a hero and being a stupid fool. One is a combination of tough, lucky, and dead. The other usually asks what and where the danger is and has a plan, even if it's a bad one.

The line between hero and twit can be as thin as asking if the dragon is blue or black.

[Bad Wolf]

Well, if you want to make it seem like something not to mess around with...make it out of flesh. Or animated zombie babies.

[veti]

I'll take your word your group is doing this on purpose, but there is a counterpoint for parties who would do this in all seriousness. When villagers tell the party not to go somewhere because it's very dangerous and others who have gone there have been killed by (insert monster or foreboding doom), the players will take that as a clue they're supposed to go there and take care of the problem. They're the heroes. That's what they're supposed to do. You as DM can be Honest True in saying some location is too dangerous for the party that's for world flavor text and/or meant to be handled at a later level, but that's not how the players interpret it. Villagers always say something is too dangerous because they're not adventurers like the party. Going into danger and defeating it is the whole point of playing the game.

That's why you should never be vague about danger. Don't say "no-one ever comes back from the East road". Say "the East road leads to the Cave of Aargh, home to a family of huge black dragons and this loony human sorcerer who tells them what to do, because he's more powerful than all of them put together."

Let the players decide when they think they're hard enough to take on that challenge.

[goto124]

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I would go for both.

Only OOC talk can convince me otherwise.

And then again, I grew on a diet of railroady video games.

If the players are in the mindset of 'plot is in the most dangerous path so let's go there', they're going to underestimate a lot of the upcoming danger. They'll see the journey as tough, but ultimately meant to be defeated.

Also, there's the option of not giving the option...?

[Keltest]

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I would go for both.

Only OOC talk can convince me otherwise.

And then again, I grew on a diet of railroady video games.

If the players are in the mindset of 'plot is in the most dangerous path so let's go there', they're going to underestimate a lot of the upcoming danger. They'll see the journey as tough, but ultimately meant to be defeated.

Also, there's the option of not giving the option...?

I generally don't give that option, but if, for example, there is an acidic lake blocking their path, they'll opt to swim it rather than, say, use the acid-proof boat.

[Earthwalker]

Has anyone else encountered opposite Bob ?

Session 0 creating characters.
GM: Ok so how far have we got.
Sally: I have a lawful elf good fighter
Joe: I have made an elf too, natural good but a cleric of nature.
Eric: Half Elf for me but grew up in elf society, he is a chaotic good bard.
Opposite Bob : I have made a lawful evil dwarf barbarian, he hates elfs ever since they attacked his home lands.
GM: Are you sure your character is going to fit in with the rest of the group Opposite Bob, it seems like there might be a lot of tension.
Opposite Bob: You are always railroading me, this is so unfair I want to play this character. Why are you picking on me. You didn’t say anything to anyone else !!!!
Sally, Joe and Eric together “Its ok GM, we do have these other characters. If Opposite Bob really wants to play his evil dwarf. We can switch to 2 evil dwarfs and a evil human that has a background dealing with Dwarfs.
Opposite Bob: If they are all playing Evil Dwarfs I want to be a Elven Paladin !!!!
GM Why opposite Bob Why ?

[Coidzor]

Yeah, if I don't want players to go and investigate something that will clearly interest them, I, uh, I wouldn't tell them, or have it, really. Or I'd have it be far enough away that the various distractions and tribulations they ran into on their way there prepared them for it. :smallconfused:

Outside of a situation like Expedition to Castle Ravenloft where the idea is for the players to do their homework and lay the groundwork before storming the castle, but that'd be presented differently anyway.

[Yora]

Because you don't establish in advance what kind of campaign and party you are going to play. Doesn't help when the player wants to annoy everyone - in which case there is nothing but kicking him out - but it avoids getting incompatible parties by accident.

[Coidzor]

Has anyone else encountered opposite Bob ?

Session 0 creating characters.
GM: Ok so how far have we got.
Sally: I have a lawful elf good fighter
Joe: I have made an elf too, natural good but a cleric of nature.
Eric: Half Elf for me but grew up in elf society, he is a chaotic good bard.
Opposite Bob : I have made a lawful evil dwarf barbarian, he hates elfs ever since they attacked his home lands.
GM: Are you sure your character is going to fit in with the rest of the group Opposite Bob, it seems like there might be a lot of tension.
Opposite Bob: You are always railroading me, this is so unfair I want to play this character. Why are you picking on me. You didn’t say anything to anyone else !!!!
Sally, Joe and Eric together “Its ok GM, we do have these other characters. If Opposite Bob really wants to play his evil dwarf. We can switch to 2 evil dwarfs and a evil human that has a background dealing with Dwarfs.
Opposite Bob: If they are all playing Evil Dwarfs I want to be a Elven Paladin !!!!
GM Why opposite Bob Why ?

Opposite Bob seems a bit like a self-correcting problem, all-in-all. Quite courteous about revealing himself to be a prat before play even starts, so he can be addressed directly, have reason attempted, and then escorted from the premises.

[Hyena]

Dungeons and Dragons is a party-based game, but the Lone Wanderer seems to have missed the memo. He is a lone wolf - usually with a non-magical class like a fighter, a rogue or a ranger, rarely a monk, for some reason almost never a barbarian. Lone Wanderer always acts like he's the biggest thing since ever, dismisses all the party's efforts - and sometimes threatens them with violence too. He steals from the party, he often goes on lone missions (because he doesn't need anyone else, naturally) and never, ever thanks the cleric/bard/whatever for buffs and healing.

I really, really hate the Lone Wanderer. Too bad he has so many names and faces.

[JAL_1138]

Has anyone else encountered opposite Bob ?

Session 0 creating characters.
GM: Ok so how far have we got.
Sally: I have a lawful elf good fighter
Joe: I have made an elf too, natural good but a cleric of nature.
Eric: Half Elf for me but grew up in elf society, he is a chaotic good bard.
Opposite Bob : I have made a lawful evil dwarf barbarian, he hates elfs ever since they attacked his home lands.
GM: Are you sure your character is going to fit in with the rest of the group Opposite Bob, it seems like there might be a lot of tension.
Opposite Bob: You are always railroading me, this is so unfair I want to play this character. Why are you picking on me. You didn’t say anything to anyone else !!!!
Sally, Joe and Eric together “Its ok GM, we do have these other characters. If Opposite Bob really wants to play his evil dwarf. We can switch to 2 evil dwarfs and a evil human that has a background dealing with Dwarfs.
Opposite Bob: If they are all playing Evil Dwarfs I want to be a Elven Paladin !!!!
GM Why opposite Bob Why ?

Opposite Bob brings up another point--the perception that any DM intervention at all is railroading. I ran into a whole group of those once. I don't allow evil-aligned characters in a heroic campaign? "That's railroading." I have any houserules at all? "That's railroading."

I declined to DM for them.

[Amphetryon]

How about the "It's a plot! RUN!" Player mentality as a 'Bad Player Trend'? These are the Players who perceive any descriptive text (including areas already mapped, or NPCs with already-generated gear/descriptions/locales) as indicative that the Characters are intended to go toward a particular goal, and fight tooth and nail against the perceived 'railroading' of the GM who dared prepare something ahead of time. These Players are particularly 'fun' if they then turn around and complain that GM isn't properly prepared with something for them to do when they've actively refused to follow through on any available plot-hook, including those they generated themselves through in-Character actions.

[GungHo]

With the cost of adamantine doors these days, a resident is better off just taking the door out completely, putting in more wall, and buying a few scrolls to enter and exit his own abode.

They should really serialize the adamantine doors so that the scrap metal shop can inform the owner of the door that someone stole his door and is attempting to illegally scrap it.


If your doors are sturdier than your walls, you have a problem.

There's a cybersecurity joke in here somewhere.

[Earthwalker]

How about the "It's a plot! RUN!" Player mentality as a 'Bad Player Trend'? These are the Players who perceive any descriptive text (including areas already mapped, or NPCs with already-generated gear/descriptions/locales) as indicative that the Characters are intended to go toward a particular goal, and fight tooth and nail against the perceived 'railroading' of the GM who dared prepare something ahead of time. These Players are particularly 'fun' if they then turn around and complain that GM isn't properly prepared with something for them to do when they've actively refused to follow through on any available plot-hook, including those they generated themselves through in-Character actions.

Ahhh I have met these people. They are alot of fun and you are right the complainng that there is nothing prepared makes it all the sweeter.

As a bonus if they run from plot and then find say a begger on the street and begin asking you a million questions about his life, feeling insulted if you had not prepped a detailed background for a random NPC they went out looking for. (Replace begger with street vendor, barmaid, barman etc...)

[Joe the Rat]

...but the instant you give the hint that the beggar has a mission/quest/thing for them, they'll run.

This is why you have inns. After ignoring all of the plot hooks, someone will get bored and start a bar fight. Could be the barbarian's player, could be the wizard's player, could be the GM...

[oxybe]

There's a cybersecurity joke in here somewhere.

A nerd is bragging about how impenetrable his company's new server is after he finished upgrading the code. His friend who works at a PC repair shop assures him that he can take down the service in an afternoon.

Sure that his friend is less of a hacker then the script kiddies who tried before, agrees and they bet on a meal at a fancy restaurant.

From his home, our hero monitors server activity on the given day while our antagonist puts on a white shirt puts on his lanyard with his name+company around his neck and walks in through the nerd's company's front door, says he's here to bring a faulty server in for maintenance, is lead to the server room where he unplugs the server, puts it in his car and proceeds to go to our hero's home to claim his free meal.

You're welcome.

[Maglubiyet]

Of course when the ten hit die salamander noble tells them that there is a ruined fortress infested with many dangerous demons on the other side of a lava lake you don't expect five eighth level adventurers to blindly waltz in without any preparations beyond an Endure Elements spell to keep the heat off. Even better, after the two invisible lion demons at the front door they lit torches to cross the pitch dark courtyard towards the keep and were surprised when they got ambushed.

There's a difference between being a hero and being a stupid fool. One is a combination of tough, lucky, and dead. The other usually asks what and where the danger is and has a plan, even if it's a bad

I try not to dangle plot hooks the party isn't ready for for this reason. Some players hear "dangerous" as an open invitation. They assume anything you're presenting them with is the adventure.

There are no overt barriers like in video games, like level requirements or glowing numbers over monsters' heads.

Sometimes it's possible for a lower level party to defeat apparently powerful foes because they're the first to actually try. Like maybe those dragons are just illusions created by a 5th-level mage -- all the townsfolk are fooled but the adventures figure it out and unmask him.

[Yora]

You're welcome.

The easiest way to get through any security is to get someone to let you through.

[Amphetryon]

Ahhh I have met these people. They are alot of fun and you are right the complainng that there is nothing prepared makes it all the sweeter.

As a bonus if they run from plot and then find say a begger on the street and begin asking you a million questions about his life, feeling insulted if you had not prepped a detailed background for a random NPC they went out looking for. (Replace begger with street vendor, barmaid, barman etc...)

Of course, if you do have that detailed background prepped, the beggar is clearly Plot and needs to be avoided immediately because of the railroad obviously involved.

Pair the above with a mentality that says that any fight where a PC drops near unconsciousness/death is the sign of a 'merciless, killer DM,' but any fight that is dispatched without any PC at this level of danger is 'the DM just being nice.'

Yeah, that's a fun group to run a game for.

[Feddlefew]

The easiest way to get through any security is to get someone to let you through.

The version of that story I heard involved a class prodject and a version of etherkiller (http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/).

[Synovia]

Honestly, this entire thing seems so out of character to me. No, not looting the door. Having a door that the players arne't supposed to look behind since it's too high levels.

You're adventurers. If you find a locked, imposing looking, valuable door, of course you look behind it! That's your entire job! Looting it because it's valuable is just secondary.

It's very video-gamey.

If you don't want the players trying to go into an area - don't have a door.

[Ralanr]

It's very video-gamey.

If you don't want the players trying to go into an area - don't have a door.

If you must have a door, why not make it a hidden door? Aren't those a classic thing?

[goto124]

The solution, of course, is to not have any treasure behind the door. The door IS the treasure!

:P


Also, I try to have the courtsey to follow whatever the DM has planned for the game. It's just easier.

[Mr.Moron]

The solution, of course, is to not have any treasure behind the door. The door IS the treasure!

:P


Also, I try to have the courtsey to follow whatever the DM has planned for the game. It's just easier.

The latter is just what most people do. I had a big fancy door gating the way to nexus of power in the ancient temple just a few sessions ago. I'd set things up so they already had 1/4 keys they'd need before they got there. The whole party just immediately resolved to go find the rest of the keys, with the implicit understanding that the keys were going to be in the same place as the interesting encounters, neat bits of setting lore and other useful items.

It really is a minority of players that wants to bypass telegraphed solutions in favor of doing their things, their way because freedom.

[Cristo Meyers]

The version of that story I heard involved a class prodject and a version of etherkiller (http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/).

The tale itself is likely just one of those legends: somewhere it probably happened, but everyone tells it differently (the way I heard it has the friend monitoring traffic in the office, so the hacker literally walked right by him). Check out the Real Life section of the TvTropes page Bavarian Fire Drill, there's a lot of these kinds of stories, most of them true.

---

Don't know if it qualifies as a trend or not, but one of the major reasons a game of mine fell apart was one player's insistence that everything 'make sense.' Unfortunately they left off the vital additional phrase 'to me.' It didn't matter if the world itself was consistent or if they were the only one that thought X made sense, if it wasn't that way then it didn't make sense at was thus badwrong.

What should have been a short discussion about fleshing things out turned into a my way or the highway, multi-day debate over fundamental differences with how the GM thought the world should work vs what the player thought 'made sense.'

[oxybe]

Depends on how much of a hassle the task at hand might thought to be and the timetable involve, as well as potential risk involved in removing part of the dungeon and karting it home is.

If you end up in front of a locked door and you've already cleared out most of the inhabitants getting to it, but you're missing keys one reasonable thing to ask is "is the hassle of removing the door more or less of a hassle going and backtracking a few times to look through those rooms for something you missed? is the estimated time required to find those keys more or less then the estimated time required to break through the doorway before the horrible thing on the other side occurs?" because most adventuring groups, as a whole, likely have the tools required to remove the door.

Most PCs, i would assume, would likely use a key to open a door should they have it on hand, but most GMs I play with tend to put us on rather strict timelines so we don't just setup camp outside the door, prepare a new set of spells, remove the door, camp out again, and then rush the boss encounter at full HP and a specialized spell list, so sometimes kicking in the door instead of backtracking for a missed key is the thing to do.

[Mr.Moron]

Depends on how much of a hassle the task at hand might thought to be and the timetable involve, as well as potential risk involved in removing part of the dungeon and karting it home is.

If you end up in front of a locked door and you've already cleared out most of the inhabitants getting to it, but you're missing keys one reasonable thing to ask is "is the hassle of removing the door more or less of a hassle going and backtracking a few times to look through those rooms for something you missed? is the estimated time required to find those keys more or less then the estimated time required to break through the doorway before the horrible thing on the other side occurs?" because most adventuring groups, as a whole, likely have the tools required to remove the door.

Most PCs, i would assume, would likely use a key to open a door should they have it on hand, but most GMs I play with tend to put us on rather strict timelines so we don't just setup camp outside the door, prepare a new set of spells, remove the door, camp out again, and then rush the boss encounter at full HP and a specialized spell list, so sometimes kicking in the door instead of backtracking for a missed key is the thing to do.

I keep on hearing these doors being framed in terms of being relatively trivial to remove and I'm wondering if the disconnect has to do with what people are thinking of as "Doors". When I think of a nigh-unbreakable door in an ancient temple, or the fortress of a powerful sorcerer bent on world domination I think of something maybe a bit like this:

http://guide4gamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Hexys-force_Cecilia_phase-4_lab-door.jpg

or this:

http://crygaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/33-gate.jpg



or at minimum if you're talking a simple "It's a couple slabs that what swing open/close to keep things out", something like this:

http://www.mischievous-tengu.com/images/The_Gate_of_Truth_FMA_by_draven686.jpg

Those are the sorts of things I picture being made out of super-durable material, sealing great power, or access to an amazing treasure. Something where the construction is held together magic, or complex internal machinery. Not simple hinges or poles.

However the way people are talking about them I can't help but think they're picturing something much more mundane:

http://img.diytrade.com/cdimg/331930/1365821/0/1144220922/Insulated_wrought_iron_door.jpg

Something like that certainly wouldn't never be built to the kind of specs that exclude simply kicking-it/picking it the quickest means of getting past it. So like why would removing it even wind up on the table?

[Jay R]

I would never build an adamantium door in this world, for the same reason I don't see any gold or platinum doors in our world. The value of the door is just not worth the cost.

[I suppose that a truly demented wizard might make an door-shaped adamantium demon cell, which released the demon by taking the door pins off.]

[oxybe]

The only disconnect I can see is where you seem to think when we're talking about removing the valuable material from the door, you imagine people huddled around a bunch of hammers, pickaxes and crowbars where while those are likely used, if you're at the level where such impressive doors are required to stop people from punching through them and onto the other side you're likely also dealing with magic users who are capable of altering the physiology of the dungeon itself.

I don't know where these mythical all non-caster parties are, but i've never seen them in any practical play, and magic is one tool among many and often the best one.

Stone shape, warp wood, fabricate, stone to mud, etc... are all ways to extract the wanted material in some fashion, if not targeting the material itself, the material around it.

[JNAProductions]

We here at Magnus and Riker Inc. are proud to present the new and improved ADVENTURER SHMUCK BAIT! Door-shaped, to lure in those pesky "heroes", and containing your choice of Balor, Pit Fiend, or Ultroloth! As soon as the hinges come off, the fiend comes right on out! Get yours today! Only 9E99 Platinum Pieces

[NichG]

The only disconnect I can see is where you seem to think when we're talking about removing the valuable material from the door, you imagine people huddled around a bunch of hammers, pickaxes and crowbars where while those are likely used, if you're at the level where such impressive doors are required to stop people from punching through them and onto the other side you're likely also dealing with magic users who are capable of altering the physiology of the dungeon itself.

I don't know where these mythical all non-caster parties are, but i've never seen them in any practical play, and magic is one tool among many and often the best one.

Stone shape, warp wood, fabricate, stone to mud, etc... are all ways to extract the wanted material in some fashion, if not targeting the material itself, the material around it.

One of the examples from earlier in this thread was of a 4th level party, so I don't think this necessarily follows.

Personally, by the time Lv7 comes around, I tend to use dimensional distortions with significantly different planar properties on the other side if I really want to send the 'this is high level mojo' vibe.

[oxybe]

unless the party has traveled significantly far between level 4 and 7, I would imagine most adventurers would make note of where a large cache of adamantine can be found locally if they stumble across it, hoping to eventually get the resources to claim it. If they did travel far between 4 and 7, easy access to teleport is only 2 levels away where that quantity of adamantine is still very significant.

[Mr.Moron]

The only disconnect I can see is where you seem to think when we're talking about removing the valuable material from the door, you imagine people huddled around a bunch of hammers, pickaxes and crowbars where while those are likely used, if you're at the level where such impressive doors are required to stop people from punching through them and onto the other side you're likely also dealing with magic users who are capable of altering the physiology of the dungeon itself.

I don't know where these mythical all non-caster parties are, but i've never seen them in any practical play, and magic is one tool among many and often the best one.

Stone shape, warp wood, fabricate, stone to mud, etc... are all ways to extract the wanted material in some fashion, if not targeting the material itself, the material around it.

Presumably you don't put your Big Door of Doom in a location that can easily be penetrated by out-of-hand uses of low to mid level spells. Having a giant indestructium door that can be bypassed by a shape stone 10 feet to the left shouldn't happen because it's pointless on several levels:


Narratively: It's pointless because the door isn't actually serving as any kind of real impediment forward, it's decoration viewed for the 6-seconds it takes to cast the spell. Not worth the time it takes to even describe.

Mechanically: It's pointless because it doesn't represent much of a meaningful resource expenditure or skill failure chance. It's all the impact of adding one more monster somewhere in the adventure at most.

In-Character: Presumably as the builder you're aware of these things in the universe and would take steps to mitigate this. You don't construct fortification you aren't confident will be an impediment to your likely enemies. You don't build door you aren't confident will keep people out. If a defense would be casually penetrated by any bozo who picks up a scroll at the local Magic-WalMart you don't build it at all.


A door only has a reason to exist, or at least exist as prompt to the players and not a part of the narration of them moving down the hallway is if it presents some challenge that isn't readily auto-solved by a well established ability. If it is: It doesn't' serve the narrative, it doesn't present a meaningful mechanical interaction and doesn't make any sense for the builder to have made in the first place.


(Though, this does highlighted that out of the box the D&D magic tends to limit the relevant challenges to "Big scary monster: Resistant to magic" and "Another magic user", with all other possible factors having a very small place to live. Part of why I've switched to strict white-listing of spells when I run D&D, precisely to keep the challenge space from becoming so narrow)

[YossarianLives]

Does anyone else have problems with the PCs being really invested and interested in the plot but still forgetting major NPCs completely?

[Maglubiyet]

The only disconnect I can see is where you seem to think when we're talking about removing the valuable material from the door, you imagine people huddled around a bunch of hammers, pickaxes and crowbars where while those are likely used, if you're at the level where such impressive doors are required to stop people from punching through them and onto the other side you're likely also dealing with magic users who are capable of altering the physiology of the dungeon itself.

I don't know where these mythical all non-caster parties are, but i've never seen them in any practical play, and magic is one tool among many and often the best one.

Stone shape, warp wood, fabricate, stone to mud, etc... are all ways to extract the wanted material in some fashion, if not targeting the material itself, the material around it.

Presumably the builders of said door were aware of the abilities of those they wanted to keep out. If this was simply the front door of some single-family residence, then maybe it was just installed to keep the neighbors honest and offer a sense of privacy.

But a door made out of some exceedingly exotic, difficult-to-work-with material is likely there to protect against REALLY nasty things. The PC's aren't (usually) the first people in the universe to be able to bend reality.

[Feddlefew]

Presumably the builders of said door were aware of the abilities of those they wanted to keep out. If this was simply the front door of some single-family residence, then maybe it was just installed to keep the neighbors honest and offer a sense of privacy.

But a door made out of some exceedingly exotic, difficult-to-work-with material is likely there to protect against REALLY nasty things. The PC's aren't (usually) the first people in the universe to be able to bend reality.

You know, this gives me an idea for an AMAZING dungeon boss. :smallamused:

[sakuuya]

Dungeons and Dragons is a party-based game, but the Lone Wanderer seems to have missed the memo. He is a lone wolf - usually with a non-magical class like a fighter, a rogue or a ranger, rarely a monk, for some reason almost never a barbarian. Lone Wanderer always acts like he's the biggest thing since ever, dismisses all the party's efforts - and sometimes threatens them with violence too. He steals from the party, he often goes on lone missions (because he doesn't need anyone else, naturally) and never, ever thanks the cleric/bard/whatever for buffs and healing.

I really, really hate the Lone Wanderer. Too bad he has so many names and faces.


How about the "It's a plot! RUN!" Player mentality as a 'Bad Player Trend'? These are the Players who perceive any descriptive text (including areas already mapped, or NPCs with already-generated gear/descriptions/locales) as indicative that the Characters are intended to go toward a particular goal, and fight tooth and nail against the perceived 'railroading' of the GM who dared prepare something ahead of time. These Players are particularly 'fun' if they then turn around and complain that GM isn't properly prepared with something for them to do when they've actively refused to follow through on any available plot-hook, including those they generated themselves through in-Character actions.

I once had a super-fun mix of these two. The player decided his character (a dwarven fighter) should leave the town where an investigation/diplomacy game was taking place and run around in the spooky surrounding woods instead. I had been planning for the bulk of the adventure's combat to occur in these woods, so he sees a monster, currently minding its own business. He attacks it, and only DM fiat got him back to town alive. I would've just let him die, but this game was during a school trip, so we were pretty much stuck with each other.

[oxybe]

Truth be told the best high-level door is a wall. You don't put doors because those indicate "there is a thing on the otherside" You have blank, featureless, continuous walls that are a few feet thick each that you teleport through to specific locations in some fashion (an item, a spell you can cast, whatever) or in the case of adamatine door we keep going back to, you end up with a large object the players might want to rip out the wall and use as treasure/gear, meaning you lost out not just on your security (as it was stolen) but also your shiny thing you hid behind it. This way (no doors, only thick walls) you can't just detect magic through them (locate object would probably work if you have a notion of what might be hidden in the area), punching through them will take some time and unless you know the floorplan you are literally just punching stone to get to dirt futilely.

You want to keep a thing locked up where no one can get it? put it in a seamless box and bury it, then teleport into it as needed. Write some warnings on the outside if needed.

The big point though, which I agree with, is that D&D magic does limit the challenges you can put forwards. This is largely because D&D tends to treat almost anything that isn't mundane as magic and only has a few classes to cover all those blanket "magic" effects with many overlaps.

The late-end 3rd ed casters, like the dread necro, beguiler, warmage, etc... were on the right track for how to treat traditional D&D magic and it's casters, so it's a shame they reverted back to the old catch-all "i'm a necromancer on tuesday, an evoker on wednesday, a conjurer on thursday..." one-style-fits-all casters.

So in traditional D&D, you should never use doors. A series of identical 10x10 featureless, doorless cubes is THE builder's choice.

[Telok]

I try not to dangle plot hooks the party isn't ready for for this reason. Some players hear "dangerous" as an open invitation. They assume anything you're presenting them with is the adventure.

There are no overt barriers like in video games, like level requirements or glowing numbers over monsters' heads.

Sometimes it's possible for a lower level party to defeat apparently powerful foes because they're the first to actually try. Like maybe those dragons are just illusions created by a 5th-level mage -- all the townsfolk are fooled but the adventures figure it out and unmask him.
Or they could just be complete idiots who are completely unprepared for level appropriate challenges and never back down from anything because of that mentality. Seriously thinking that everything in the world that the DM mentions is meant to be an easily defeatable encounter is one thing I dislike. If your game has two countries at war and you mention that there's an enemy army in the next valley are sixth level D&D characters expected to win a frontal assault on it? If there's a haunted castle with a lich in the basement should the first thought of the characters be to walk in the front gate, head straight to the cellars and expect to win a level appropriate fight just because it's marked on a map?

Something related to that mindset that I also dislike is players ignoring everything except for thier current self-appointed 'quest'. They decided to attack a fortress full of demons? Fine, I can deal with that. Then they ignore the magic library that has maps and a history of the fortress, they ignore the npc who makes demon bane arrows, they ignore the scroll and potion shop that stocks bless weapon and protection from evil spells. A haunted castle? Ignore the npcs who say there's a curse that never lets anyone leave, ignore the warnings about ghosts and wraiths, ignore the merchant selling blessed weapons and holy water. Just assume that because it exists and you call yourself a hero that a non-magic sword, some burning oil, and a couple of healing potions are all you need to kill everything you meet. Ignore the whole setting, every npc that doesn't say 'I have a quest', and all the warning the DM tries to give. Just walk blindly to the next spot on the map and expect to kill everything there.

After all, if it's on the map then you're obviously expected to go there and kill everything. Otherwise the DM wouldn't have put it there. What does it take before "heroic adventuring" becomes "blind stupidity"?

And the worst bit that these guys are actually pretty intelligent and decent people most of the time. They just switch to idiot syndrome randomly and stay there for weeks before suddenly switching back.

[Keltest]

Or they could just be complete idiots who are completely unprepared for level appropriate challenges and never back down from anything because of that mentality. Seriously thinking that everything in the world that the DM mentions is meant to be an easily defeatable encounter is one thing I dislike. If your game has two countries at war and you mention that there's an enemy army in the next valley are sixth level D&D characters expected to win a frontal assault on it? If there's a haunted castle with a lich in the basement should the first thought of the characters be to walk in the front gate, head straight to the cellars and expect to win a level appropriate fight just because it's marked on a map?

Something related to that mindset that I also dislike is players ignoring everything except for thier current self-appointed 'quest'. They decided to attack a fortress full of demons? Fine, I can deal with that. Then they ignore the magic library that has maps and a history of the fortress, they ignore the npc who makes demon bane arrows, they ignore the scroll and potion shop that stocks bless weapon and protection from evil spells. A haunted castle? Ignore the npcs who say there's a curse that never lets anyone leave, ignore the warnings about ghosts and wraiths, ignore the merchant selling blessed weapons and holy water. Just assume that because it exists and you call yourself a hero that a non-magic sword, some burning oil, and a couple of healing potions are all you need to kill everything you meet. Ignore the whole setting, every npc that doesn't say 'I have a quest', and all the warning the DM tries to give. Just walk blindly to the next spot on the map and expect to kill everything there.

After all, if it's on the map then you're obviously expected to go there and kill everything. Otherwise the DM wouldn't have put it there. What does it take before "heroic adventuring" becomes "blind stupidity"?

And the worst bit that these guys are actually pretty intelligent and decent people most of the time. They just switch to idiot syndrome randomly and stay there for weeks before suddenly switching back.

My solution to that conundrum is to introduce the idea of player mortality very early on. The very first session that I DMed for my party, the wizard decided he would stop and politely wait for the orc's chasing him to catch up so he could case burning hands at them. This did not kill them all, and one of them decided that a wizard makes a good resting place for an axe. As the wizard was level one, if he tripped and landed on soft dirt he would die, so naturally the axe killed him a lot.

Killing him specifically wasn't intentional, but the fact that they had to run away from some encounters was.

[oxybe]

Or they could just be complete idiots who are completely unprepared for level appropriate challenges and never back down from anything because of that mentality. Seriously thinking that everything in the world that the DM mentions is meant to be an easily defeatable encounter is one thing I dislike. If your game has two countries at war and you mention that there's an enemy army in the next valley are sixth level D&D characters expected to win a frontal assault on it? If there's a haunted castle with a lich in the basement should the first thought of the characters be to walk in the front gate, head straight to the cellars and expect to win a level appropriate fight just because it's marked on a map?

Something related to that mindset that I also dislike is players ignoring everything except for thier current self-appointed 'quest'. They decided to attack a fortress full of demons? Fine, I can deal with that. Then they ignore the magic library that has maps and a history of the fortress, they ignore the npc who makes demon bane arrows, they ignore the scroll and potion shop that stocks bless weapon and protection from evil spells. A haunted castle? Ignore the npcs who say there's a curse that never lets anyone leave, ignore the warnings about ghosts and wraiths, ignore the merchant selling blessed weapons and holy water. Just assume that because it exists and you call yourself a hero that a non-magic sword, some burning oil, and a couple of healing potions are all you need to kill everything you meet. Ignore the whole setting, every npc that doesn't say 'I have a quest', and all the warning the DM tries to give. Just walk blindly to the next spot on the map and expect to kill everything there.

After all, if it's on the map then you're obviously expected to go there and kill everything. Otherwise the DM wouldn't have put it there. What does it take before "heroic adventuring" becomes "blind stupidity"?

And the worst bit that these guys are actually pretty intelligent and decent people most of the time. They just switch to idiot syndrome randomly and stay there for weeks before suddenly switching back.

This actually brings to mind our current off-campaign, the one we play when our normal GM can't make it which is a weird case study of "what happens when the group's face/investigator is missing and the stooges are left to run the asylum and keep successfully bumbling through to the correct answers"
For several sessions the party's main face and investigative force was missing (which made matters worse as he was the main contact to our primary employer) so we push forward with our investigations, missing several important hints that would lead us to the right path but always stumbling in the "somewhat correct" direction due to weird happenstance and guesswork, leaving me to realize our current crop of characters are basically the Scooby gang. Only Fred, our brawler, is currently missing this session as he worked at 2am, leaving the Shaggy and Scooby (FLGS store owner and me, respectively: A vanara druid/monk and a kitsune sorc/ninja who are close, fire-forged friends), the barbarian (our Daphne, as she ends up grappled, or "kidnapped"/focused on by monsters often), the bard (our Velma and primary investigative force was missing for several sessions before this one, which is likely why we ended up in this mess and he entered the adventure in media rez and had to be caught up) and the wizard (our OtherFred, who reads like a bargain bin version of 4chan's muscle wizard).

The main quest we were on was looking for the missing half of the artifact we had in our possession (partially to cure an NPC, partially because it's dangerous if left in the wrong hands and incomplete) and we ended up snooping around and trailing a group of cultists, where after punching them out and the barbarian not understanding the yells of "keep the leader alive!" forced us to shuffle through his various things until we could find another lead, which happened to be the carrier ravens the cultists used's route, which our druid turned into and followed to a partially destroyed tower. After 2 particularly rough fights where we lost Daphne (partially due to bad rolls, partially due to bad tactics, partially due to missing party members, like her flanking buddy Fred) and I was afflicted with what could only be described as "psychic brain snakes" we push onwards once it wears off as the GM had made it clear this might be the last session earlier, so why not go all-out?

This was where our downfall was assured. We knew there was an invisible threat on the top but weren't sure what exactly as the druid in raven form just saw something "shimmer" invisibly on the top floor and told us it was big. We went in going for broke, to end the campaign with a big finale.

Well, we encounter and engage what we then find out is a Naga with class levels and a CR well above ours and in possession of an entirely different artifact then the one we're looking for.

After losing OtherFred to a pretty nasty crit a few rounds of combat in it's pretty clear we're outmatched by the critter, who is trying to leave the city as quickly as possible since we made quite a bit of noise getting to it (i used what could best be considered "magical C4" to blow the hinges off an unlocked trapdoor we couldn't open. turns out it had a 30x30x60 ft bronze bell lying on top of it, which my 8 str couldn't push open for some "odd" reason, read: I'm weak as a kitten. Note that this was all happening in an empty and old clock tower, so when the trapdoor and floor burst open, the rest of the floor near it couldn't handle the weight of the bell which fell 100ft, making enough racket to notify everyone several blocks over that something was going on).

It tells us it will let us live as long as we let it leave town and kill one person, who, we later learned, if we would have followed the actual leads instead of our weird roundabout ones, would have used the other half of the artifact we were looking for to threaten an important NPC and use both as leverage to get us to try to kill the naga we just encountered.

The wheels in our heads start turning and we come to a realization:

All this time, we were chasing down and interfering with a cult who were in direct confrontation with the actual artifact owner who was planning to threaten us with his half of the artifact (he knew we had the other half). The monster/cult's real leader, just wants to leave town at this point due to our constant interference and drawing the officials closer and closer to her, kill the guy who's been harassing her for a long time and will leave us be (We could have stalled her if we really tried. We could not kill her, but we could stall long enough for authorities to arrive as people were already gathered outside) if we stop making so much racket and drawing attention towards it long enough for it to pack up, kill him and leave. After having lost 2 allies (and two more are currently MIA) and getting seriously wounded and outmatched we were scared and tired and realized if we just stop interfering with this monster for an evening we can possibly save the lives of 2-3 NPCs we care for and claim the artifact we were looking for over it's owner's dead corpse.

Needless to say after that harrowing ordeal and getting our macguffin at long last and completing our quest, considering the time and effort spent "investigating" entirely wrong leads and getting the [OH MY] kicked out of me on several occasions (Key episodes of our Scooby-Doo Mysteries being "That Goblin-Faced Hell Hound Thing that Caused My Insides Suddenly Appearing on My Outsides as I Burned Face-First in Hot Coals Half-Conscious", "The Forest of Horrible Horrible Spiders", the magic crit fail causing "A Surprise Return to The Forest of Horrible Horrible Spiders", the "Case of the Psychic Brain Snakes" and finally "The Evil Naga Who Just Wanted to Leave and Murdered the Party Wizard on Her Way Out the Door"), my character and the druid just kinda broke down and started seriously rethinking their life choices and began drinking their PTSD away in a bar after burying Daphne and OtherFred.

So yeah, sometimes you need to think things through a bit better.

On the other hand, it was cathartic to play a more carefree and happy-go-lucky PC for once.

Though it did give me a story tell of how if you don't use your noggin and stop relying on dumb luck, it'll eventually catch up to you when the dumb luck runs out.

[Maglubiyet]

Or they could just be complete idiots who are completely unprepared for level appropriate challenges and never back down from anything because of that mentality. Seriously thinking that everything in the world that the DM mentions is meant to be an easily defeatable encounter is one thing I dislike.

I hear ya. Been down that road many times, which is why I try not to throw out too many enticements before it's time. My theory is that this is partly due to a difference in how the descriptions are interpreted by different people. The GM may have one thing in mind while the players something else.

For example:

"You see an enormous spider ahead of you behind a pile of humanoid skulls. The tunnel beyond the spider is blocked by a giant web."

http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/w478/Kanklefest/giant_spider_tunnel1__zpsuf4t0cix.jpg

http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/w478/Kanklefest/giant_spider_tunnel2_zpsplthq4dq.jpg

The differences are subtle, but if you're picturing the first image, then you'll be more confused when a player says: "I'm going to throw my dagger at the spider to distract it while I jump over the skulls. Then I'm going to slide under the web and continue down the tunnel".

[Mr.Moron]

I hear ya. Been down that road many times, which is why I try not to throw out too many enticements before it's time. My theory is that this is partly due to a difference in how the descriptions are interpreted by different people. The GM may have one thing in mind while the players something else.

For example:

"You see an enormous spider ahead of you behind a pile of humanoid skulls. The tunnel beyond the spider is blocked by a giant web."

http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/w478/Kanklefest/giant_spider_tunnel1__zpsuf4t0cix.jpg

http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/w478/Kanklefest/giant_spider_tunnel2_zpsplthq4dq.jpg

The differences are subtle, but if you're picturing the first image, then you'll be more confused when a player says: "I'm going to throw my dagger at the spider to distract it while I jump over the skulls. Then I'm going to slide under the web and continue down the tunnel".

I dunno. I once had like level 4 players charge what I described as "A Massive undead horror, at least 15ft tall with spiked fists the size of cows". Keep in mind I also made a point of describing (and showing on the map) that it was too large to fit through the door they charged it through.

[Solaris]

I keep on hearing these doors being framed in terms of being relatively trivial to remove and I'm wondering if the disconnect has to do with what people are thinking of as "Doors". When I think of a nigh-unbreakable door in an ancient temple, or the fortress of a powerful sorcerer bent on world domination I think of something maybe a bit like this:

http://guide4gamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Hexys-force_Cecilia_phase-4_lab-door.jpg

or this:

http://crygaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/33-gate.jpg



or at minimum if you're talking a simple "It's a couple slabs that what swing open/close to keep things out", something like this:

http://www.mischievous-tengu.com/images/The_Gate_of_Truth_FMA_by_draven686.jpg

Those are the sorts of things I picture being made out of super-durable material, sealing great power, or access to an amazing treasure. Something where the construction is held together magic, or complex internal machinery. Not simple hinges or poles.

However the way people are talking about them I can't help but think they're picturing something much more mundane:

http://img.diytrade.com/cdimg/331930/1365821/0/1144220922/Insulated_wrought_iron_door.jpg

Something like that certainly wouldn't never be built to the kind of specs that exclude simply kicking-it/picking it the quickest means of getting past it. So like why would removing it even wind up on the table?

Not at all.

You see those walls all around those doors? If they're softer than adamantine, they're pretty easy for a character to get through with time and patience. Once magic gets involved, it becomes trivially easy. If I can get through the wall, I can also pull out the door attached to it. The only question is what the inhabitants are doing in the meantime, if I haven't killed them all off yet.

[BayardSPSR]

Now that I think of it, if you really want the players to know that there's a place they can't go to but eventually will, give them a prophecy: "The Door of X will only open when Y," where Y is a once-in-a-lifetime event like the coronation of a king or a nearby volcanic eruption - something like a centennial Durin's Day.

Of course, that doesn't mean they'll be happy with a door they can't go through - and I'm not actually a fan of impassable barriers - but if you really want to accomplish that objective, it might work.

[Mr.Moron]

Not at all.

You see those walls all around those doors? If they're softer than adamantine, they're pretty easy for a character to get through with time and patience. Once magic gets involved, it becomes trivially easy. If I can get through the wall, I can also pull out the door attached to it. The only question is what the inhabitants are doing in the meantime, if I haven't killed them all off yet.

Oh yes.

It's the giant rune-encrusted gateway to the secrets of the multi-verse.
The great portal where the god stored the last bits of the fabric the he used to weave the world.
It's the entryway to the throne room the Dragon Emperor's inner sanctum.
It's sanctuary of a forgotten sea god, the center of which holds nexus that sustains all life in the oceans.
It's the great Dwarven empire's ultimate mountain stronghold.
It's the mysterious gateway to the underworld, carved into bottom the deepest darkest cavern in the world.

All locations beings or organizations of immense power have a vested interest in keeping safe. Places where by magic, wealth or will rare materials and immense power have come together to seal something away.

..and you've just bypassed in a "trivially easy" fashion, using a low-level scroll worth barely more than a particularly nice sword. Surely the only question in that situation is "What were the guards doing?", because things being set up in such a clearly absurd way invites no other questions about the integrity of the setting or competence of the game designers. A situation so clearly farcical to the point of bordering on self-parody should be assumed the default case, and not at all a sign something might be terribly wrong.

I mean it's not like there's an implicit assumption that if you've got a nigh-impervious door, something about the location also makes the walls impervious. I mean otherwise they'd just make the walls out of doors right?

[Keltest]

Oh yes.

It's the giant rune-encrusted gateway to the secrets of the multi-verse.
The great portal where the god stored the last bits of the fabric the he used to weave the world.
It's the entryway to the throne room the Dragon Emperor's inner sanctum.
It's sanctuary of a forgotten sea god, the center of which holds nexus that sustains all life in the oceans.
It's the great Dwarven empire's ultimate mountain stronghold.
It's the mysterious gateway to the underworld, carved into bottom the deepest darkest cavern in the world.

All locations beings or organizations of immense power have a vested interest in keeping safe. Places where by magic, wealth or will rare materials and immense power have come together to seal something away.

..and you've just bypassed in a "trivially easy" fashion, using a low-level scroll worth barely more than a particularly nice sword. Surely the only question in that situation is "What were the guards doing?", because things being set up in such a clearly absurd way invites no other questions about the integrity of the setting or competence of the game designers. A situation so clearly farcical to the point of bordering on self-parody should be assumed the default case, and not at all a sign something might be terribly wrong.

I mean it's not like there's an implicit assumption that if you've got a nigh-impervious door, something about the location also makes the walls impervious. I mean otherwise they'd just make the walls out of doors right?

Of course not, that would be silly. People would just steal the walls then.

[Grim Portent]

It's the giant rune-encrusted gateway to the secrets of the multi-verse.

I'd still look for a way to strip it down and use it for something more useful, especially if that collapses the gateway afterwards so only I get the chance to know those secrets.


The great portal where the god stored the last bits of the fabric the he used to weave the world.

So I can steal the fabric as well then?


It's the entryway to the throne room the Dragon Emperor's inner sanctum.

Unless I'm there as their guest I've probably fought and killed the Dragon Emperor, in which case I'm either going to use his abode as my own or strip it down for resale value.


It's sanctuary of a forgotten sea god, the center of which holds nexus that sustains all life in the oceans.

Most of my characters would destroy or try to control that nexus and then loot the sanctuary of all it's valuables including the door.


It's the great Dwarven empire's ultimate mountain stronghold.

See the Dragon Emperor response.


It's the mysterious gateway to the underworld, carved into bottom the deepest darkest cavern in the world.

If I'm there I've probably killed my way there specifically to open said gateway and prevent it from ever being sealed again, so melting down the door and turning it into wheelbarrows or something is likely to be part of my plan. If I'm there to stop it from opening then I'll probably just ignore it for the most part other than keeping it shut.


I mean it's not like there's an implicit assumption that if you've got a nigh-impervious door, something about the location also makes the walls impervious. I mean otherwise they'd just make the walls out of doors right?

If the material or location renders the walls nigh impervious then it's just begging to be re-purposed as much as the door is. If the walls are magical granite that can only be shaped and damaged with great difficulty then I'd be looking to re-use it to make a fortress of my own design. Or I'd try to strip the magic out and use it for something else. if it's the area that's magic then I'd look into building my own little fortress of despair on it and using it as a secure base from which to pursue my goals.



As for bad trends among players I've GM'd for and played with I'd have to say my biggest irritation has been with players who lack any initiative or drive. The ones that just sit there unless you beat them with a plot stick. As as sandbox style GM that's incredibly frustrating. Especially when half your player's have drive and ideas for things to do in the sandbox and the other's wind up complaining that we only do what the ones who do stuff want to do. :smallmad:

Another bad trend I've seen is players with no initiative trying to be the party face. It's just painful to watch someone with no idea what he wants to achieve try to speak with NPCs.

Final thing I find annoying is when the party doesn't pursue some quite simple things that would be both sensible and in character in a given situation. Like not trying to leverage the politics of a world when you've been sent to remove the planetary governor from power. The last 40k campaign I was in wound up with the rest of the party just barreling straight to a kidnapping/assassination plot while I was still trying to explain to them that we could turn the whole thing into a war and come out of it rich as kings with just a little political manipulation. :smallsigh:

[Mr.Moron]

Of course not, that would be silly. People would just steal the walls then.

No wonder we couldn't find the loot. The real loot was the dungeon all long. Wait!

Dungeons are treasures.
A dungeon is home to monsters.
Man is the greatest monster of all.
Treasure must be men's homes.
Home is where the heart is.
That means the dungeon must be where the heart is.
Our hearts are inside of us, the dungeon is inside of us, the treasure is in us.
Love is the greatest treasure that lives in every man, the dungeon must be love.
Love is dungeon.
Dungeons are places where you keep prisoners.
Love is a place where you keep people prisoners.
Keeping people prisoner hurts them, and hurting people is evil.
Love a is tool of evil.
Tools are inventions.
Necessity is the mother of all invention.
Necessity is the mother of love.
However children are 1/2 their parents.
Necessity is 1/2 love, and love is evil... Necessity is 1/2 evil.
Money is the root of all evil, so Necessity = (Money*Money)/2
Time is money
Necessity = (Time*Time)/2
Necessity is composed entirely of time! Time is money.
Necessity is composed entirely of money.
Money is treasure.
My god! Dungeons are treasure. (please return to start)

[JNAProductions]

Mr. Moron, you have won the internet. Please, do not post again-nothing will top that, and it's better to go out in a blaze of glory than fade to obscurity!

On a more serious note, (assuming the blamed thing will fit), can I sig this?

[Pex]

Dungeons and Dragons is a party-based game, but the Lone Wanderer seems to have missed the memo. He is a lone wolf - usually with a non-magical class like a fighter, a rogue or a ranger, rarely a monk, for some reason almost never a barbarian. Lone Wanderer always acts like he's the biggest thing since ever, dismisses all the party's efforts - and sometimes threatens them with violence too. He steals from the party, he often goes on lone missions (because he doesn't need anyone else, naturally) and never, ever thanks the cleric/bard/whatever for buffs and healing.

I really, really hate the Lone Wanderer. Too bad he has so many names and faces.

Goes hand in hand with my guy who passes secret notes to the DM and never tells the party important information he learned they really need to know.

Interesting enough, if there happens to be two of these players in the group they will always team up and share smug looks with other.

[Coidzor]

I keep on hearing these doors being framed in terms of being relatively trivial to remove and I'm wondering if the disconnect has to do with what people are thinking of as "Doors". When I think of a nigh-unbreakable door in an ancient temple, or the fortress of a powerful sorcerer bent on world domination I think of something maybe a bit like this:

http://guide4gamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Hexys-force_Cecilia_phase-4_lab-door.jpg

or this:

http://crygaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/33-gate.jpg



or at minimum if you're talking a simple "It's a couple slabs that what swing open/close to keep things out", something like this:

http://www.mischievous-tengu.com/images/The_Gate_of_Truth_FMA_by_draven686.jpg

Why would you describe those doors as being made out of treasure, though? :smallconfused: The material they're made out of is clearly the least important aspect of them, and at that point, making them out of adamantine is unnecessary.

They're also no longer really doors, either. More scenery.


Dungeons and Dragons is a party-based game, but the Lone Wanderer seems to have missed the memo. He is a lone wolf - usually with a non-magical class like a fighter, a rogue or a ranger, rarely a monk, for some reason almost never a barbarian. Lone Wanderer always acts like he's the biggest thing since ever, dismisses all the party's efforts - and sometimes threatens them with violence too. He steals from the party, he often goes on lone missions (because he doesn't need anyone else, naturally) and never, ever thanks the cleric/bard/whatever for buffs and healing.

I really, really hate the Lone Wanderer. Too bad he has so many names and faces.

NENAD (http://www.rpg.net/columns/building/building16.phtml)s are another expression of that sort of thing, I think.

Either way, rather tiresome and boorish behavior.


Does anyone else have problems with the PCs being really invested and interested in the plot but still forgetting major NPCs completely?

That's why you smack the player with the best handwriting or the best mix of typing skills and ability to not give into watching cat videos during a session until they agree to take session notes for the party.

After a few sessions of digging through player notes to find out notable NPCs' names, they'll start to keep a sheet with blurbs for major NPCs and possibly even a flowchart.

Or you'll have to designate a new player as the party note-taker, because this one is broken.

[Mr.Moron]

Why would you describe those doors as being made out of treasure, though? :smallconfused: The material they're made out of is clearly the least important aspect of them, and at that point, making them out of adamantine is unnecessary

I wouldn't describe any door as being made out of treasure at least where the narrative or mechanical function of the door is "Security Measure", I've not exactly been on the side "Loot the doors!" side of argument here.

That aside, in the post you quoted the examples were not so much to say "This exact door is the door" but rather kind of a visual aid on relative styles. Many posters were saying that in the case of a door made of Adamtine or whatever indestructible material you choose to use, removing it would be a clear triviality barring immediately being drawn into combat. This stance seemed rather silly to me. If you've got a door worth making out of impossibly strong materials to guard something important it's going to be highly tamper resistant at the very least.

I wasn't objecting to anything about the Admantine door specifically in that post. I was objecting to the idea of "Just take it off the hinges!". Why one would be taking it off the hinges or what it's made of isn't really material to the point I was trying to reach for. It's more that it if you have a nigh-indestructible door be it due to Adamantine construction or otherwise, it will (or at least should) be presented in a context where take it off the hinges is somewhere between grossly inefficient and plainly absurd and certainly foolish in either case.

[draken50]

Goes hand in hand with my guy who passes secret notes to the DM and never tells the party important information he learned they really need to know.

Interesting enough, if there happens to be two of these players in the group they will always team up and share smug looks with other.

I left a game 1 session in because of that nonsense. Sure as hell isn't happening in any game I run.

[Maglubiyet]

Are the properties of adamantine so distinctly different from steel than it would be immediately obvious that that's what the door was constructed of? Couldn't you just say a "large heavy metal door".

[ZeroGear]

I wasn't objecting anything about the Admantine door specifically in that post. I was objecting to the idea of "Just take it off the hinges!". Why one would be taking it off the hinges or what it's made of isn't really material to the point I was trying to reach for. It's more that it if you have a nigh-indestructible door be it due to Adamantine construction or otherwise, it will (or at least should) be presented in a context where take it off the hinges is somewhere between grossly inefficient and plainly absurd and certainly foolish in either case.

A point that a lot of players tend to miss.
They also tend to miss the important point of "the door is there for a reason".
I swear to god, the next time I decide to put a door like that into a game, it's going to have a dire terasque or some equivalently dangerous monster behind it just to drive this point home.

If it's ok, I would like to point out why I would use a door rather than just a wall:
a) not everyone who builds these forts is a caster. Sometimes they're just rich enough to afford some of the best construction/materials/magical fortification services.
b) they had to magically ward it against teleportation before the door was finished, and still had to get whatever was supposed to be sealed into the room.
c) the area is still in use, and like in 'b', the area is warded against teleportation
d) it was created for use by the non-magical public, but has long since fallen to abandonment for whatever reason (probably inhabitants dying to a plague or something)
e) magic isn't as common as most people think, and the builders needed something to keep mundane raiders out.

If it helps, my walls tend to be magically hardened stone that has a hardness of 35 (which is equal to the magically forged adamantine door that cannot be re-forged into armor or weapons). I never said the walls were any weaker than the door. I also never said the materials could be melted down (I usually allow appraise/spellcraft/metalworking checks to figure this out, not that players ever decide to take the opportunity). Mostly, the door exists because (as far as I know) walls don't open and impressions are important, and we needed something to stick the keys into.

[Gritmonger]

I find a wall of misinformation and obfuscation to be much more powerful than adamantine, and much less prone to looting. If they aren't meant to pass through the door yet, why did they even find the door?

If anything, make it apparent after the first few doors that bypassing the doors without care triggers traps that can either hurt the players, or self-destruct whatever it is they are there to find.

I would not have such a door concealing a treasure - I'd have a door like that protecting an evil, indestructible artifact, such that if the door was opened improperly the dias the item was sitting on was dumped into a mile-deep well of boiling acid, filled with boiling-acid-breathing sharks cross-bred with Rust Monsters - for everyone's safety. Heck, to heck with the dias and the trap. Just start out with it in the well, and improperly opening the door simply improperly opens the door.

[Darth Ultron]

Am I the only one irritated by this? And are there any other player trends that you all feel should be discouraged?

I'd say the worst is when the players ''game the game'' and spend every second trying to be all adversarial metagame second guess the DM and not even come close to role playing.


The description thing is always a problem. I find it best to take the extra couple of seconds to fully describe things and even more so take the extra couple of seconds to overly describe counters to obvious player pattern actions.

So I don't bother saying ''the hallway ahead is blocked floor to ceiling with thick webs''. Now the DM thinks that sounds like ''it is hard to go this direction'', but often players are thinking ''Ok, so my character sneezes and obliterates all the webs easy''. So it's worth the couple of extra seconds to say how ''strong, thick, powerful, unnatural and strange'' the webs are, and some players will take the hint. Though to be sure, a DM really needs to tap into the ''omniscient narrator'' and say ''the magical webs cover the hallway floor to ceiling ten feet thick. It will take at least a couple rounds for you to hack through'' and careful look at each player.

[BayardSPSR]

impressions are important

Yes. Exactly. You use your admantine doors to send a message, except your players don't seem to consistently receive that message. This is why you should try sending that message a different way.

If no one picks up the phone, don't hang up and call again. Leave a message or send an email.

[ZeroGear]

Yes. Exactly. You use your admantine doors to send a message, except your players don't seem to consistently receive that message.

This also comes to the contention of a good number of players not looking at this form the view of a character. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a lot of issues arise mainly form the fact that players have a tendency to look at things from a gamer perspective rather than that of someone actually inside the story. As a player, I can understand wanting wealth, but characters themselves usually don't know how much 'item x' is usually worth unless the've had experience with it. Many people tend to forget that things like 'xp', 'level', 'character class', and 'attack bonuses' are all arbitrary things that have no true equivalent in the real world. As such, this lapses into the the bigger issue of "metagame view", where players will look at the abstracts rather than the narrative sense when making a decision.
Because honestly, how many people in the real world actually know the cost of a pound of iron without looking it up? And it stands to reason that if you are in an ancient dungeon that is the known stomping ground of monsters, it often looks exceedingly impractical to cause a lot of noise, potentially attracting more monsters and causing a significant drain on your resources.
Even in the real world, looters (I would think) rarely waste more than a few hours at a time in any given house, and often go for stuff that can be removed without much effort, for the main reason that they are literally trying to get a "quick buck" (emphasis on the word 'quick'). Otherwise you'd see a lot more people trying to steal a car's motor instead of just the tires are electronics (in the case of car-jackers that only take parts), or stealing the solid gold sarcophagus (in the case of tomb robbers).

[Keltest]

I wouldn't describe any door as being made out of treasure at least where the narrative or mechanical function of the door is "Security Measure", I've not exactly been on the side "Loot the doors!" side of argument here.

That aside, in the post you quoted the examples were not so much to say "This exact door is the door" but rather kind of a visual aid on relative styles. Many posters were saying that in the case of a door made of Adamtine or whatever indestructible material you choose to use, removing it would be a clear triviality barring immediately being drawn into combat. This stance seemed rather silly to me. If you've got a door worth making out of impossibly strong materials to guard something important it's going to be highly tamper resistant at the very least.

I wasn't objecting to anything about the Admantine door specifically in that post. I was objecting to the idea of "Just take it off the hinges!". Why one would be taking it off the hinges or what it's made of isn't really material to the point I was trying to reach for. It's more that it if you have a nigh-indestructible door be it due to Adamantine construction or otherwise, it will (or at least should) be presented in a context where take it off the hinges is somewhere between grossly inefficient and plainly absurd and certainly foolish in either case.

Youre forgetting that adventurers are people who regularly go out and fight things several times their size and strength for a living, which quite probably includes at least one person in the party who can bend reality itself. Compared to that, dismantling a (presumably) stone wall around a door of any material is going to be comparatively easy, or at least the more appealing option.

If the DM doesn't want people doing that, its up to him to make the effort of dismantling the thing not worth the time and energy.

[Jay R]

I'd say the worst is when the players ''game the game'' and spend every second trying to be all adversarial metagame second guess the DM and not even come close to role playing.

Yes, I try to prevent the worst abuses by telling them that modern physics doesn't work. In a recent game, the introductory material included the following:

"A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements, lightning is not caused by an imbalance of electrical potential, and stars are not gigantic gaseous bodies undergoing nuclear fusion. Cute stunts involving clever use of the laws of thermodynamics simply won’t work. Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche. But in a world with teleportation, levitation, and fireball spells, Newton’s three laws of motion do not apply, and energy and momentum are not conserved. Accordingly, modern scientific meta-knowledge will do you more harm than good. On the other hand, knowledge of Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval alchemy, or medieval and classical legends might be useful occasionally."


The description thing is always a problem. I find it best to take the extra couple of seconds to fully describe things and even more so take the extra couple of seconds to overly describe counters to obvious player pattern actions.

Exactly. If the payers are trying to dismantle a black gate, when the DM intended it to be the Black Gate, then the problem is insufficient description, and it's the DM's fault, not the players'.

[Mr.Moron]

re doors:
http://i.imgur.com/BIVLH.gif


Yes, I try to prevent the worst abuses by telling them that modern physics doesn't work. In a recent game, the introductory material included the following:

"A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements..."


I did something similar with my game albeit not really to stop meta gaming, I just though it would be interesting to have game where the fantastic elements extended to the back end.

The world isn't a "Planet" orbiting a star. It's hemisphere hanging statically at the center of existence. There is an actually edge of the world, and a quite literal underworld as well.

The Sun isn't a star at distance, it's something that rises and sets by emerging/returning to the center of the world at the start of every day.

Richness alone doesn't make soil fertile, the integrity of the earth-energy in the area also matters.

Most ships don't move by sail or wind, but ride super fast magic currents in the worlds oceans that can make some of even the more distant crossing take only a few days.

[Jay R]

I did something similar with my game albeit not really to stop meta gaming, I just though it would be interesting to have game where the fantastic elements extended to the back end.

The world isn't a "Planet" orbiting a star. It's hemisphere hanging statically at the center of existence. There is an actually edge of the world, and a quite literal underworld as well.

The Sun isn't a star at distance, it's something that rises and sets by emerging/returning to the center of the world at the start of every day.

Richness alone doesn't make soil fertile, the integrity of the earth-energy in the area also matters.

Most ships don't move by sail or wind, but ride super fast magic currents in the worlds oceans that can make some of even the more distant crossing take only a few days.

Yup. In the game that quote came from, the earth was the center of the universe, the stars were fixed points on the celestial sphere, and the seven planets (moon, Mercury, Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) were stars that moved. The first major plot involved seven staffs that had been held by seven wandering heroes. The staffs were called the Staves of the Wanderers, but that didn't mean they were held by wandering heroes. Each staff had powers from one of the planets (wandering stars).

The seven heroes died in the second episode, and the PCs were first-level PCs with artifacts they couldn't quite control.

[Solaris]

... All locations beings or organizations of immense power have a vested interest in keeping safe. Places where by magic, wealth or will rare materials and immense power have come together to seal something away.

..and you've just bypassed in a "trivially easy" fashion, using a low-level scroll worth barely more than a particularly nice sword. Surely the only question in that situation is "What were the guards doing?", because things being set up in such a clearly absurd way invites no other questions about the integrity of the setting or competence of the game designers. A situation so clearly farcical to the point of bordering on self-parody should be assumed the default case, and not at all a sign something might be terribly wrong.

I mean it's not like there's an implicit assumption that if you've got a nigh-impervious door, something about the location also makes the walls impervious. I mean otherwise they'd just make the walls out of doors right?

Then I'm hoping the DM is putting more effort into it than "I can't think of a way to get through stone (and never mind that mining is a thing, much less someone worked the stone to begin with)" to protect that door. If these beings or organizations of immense power can think of nothing better than a slab of extraordinarily pricey metal to protect something, they deserve what happens next.

"Implicit assumptions" don't count for anything if you're wanting me to ignore the basic assumption of the game. Explicate them, or don't be surprised when it doesn't take me a lot of work to get at the treasure I want. Heck, I'd be disappointed if it were so trivially easy - but that disappointment is the sort of thing why I don't play very often, and instead am usually the DM. When I put in an important door, it's not merely a slab of metal protected by my own arrogant assumptions that mine is the extent of human creativity and ingenuity. Guardian monsters, warding magic, traps, and clever architectural tricks are all in the DM's purview. To simply rely on "implicit assumptions" is just being lazy.

When I put an important door in there, it's not generally made of adamantine unless I expect the players to loot the door. Not since the Tomb of Horrors could a DM reasonably expect his players to not make off with a slab of precious metal. Most of the time, it's some manner of stone - less likely to corrode, much harder to repurpose (and thus practically unsellable) and has a much purer conceptual identity as an ancient, hard-to-bypass, impenetrable barrier.


This also comes to the contention of a good number of players not looking at this form the view of a character. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a lot of issues arise mainly form the fact that players have a tendency to look at things from a gamer perspective rather than that of someone actually inside the story. As a player, I can understand wanting wealth, but characters themselves usually don't know how much 'item x' is usually worth unless the've had experience with it. Many people tend to forget that things like 'xp', 'level', 'character class', and 'attack bonuses' are all arbitrary things that have no true equivalent in the real world. As such, this lapses into the the bigger issue of "metagame view", where players will look at the abstracts rather than the narrative sense when making a decision.

... Not from the point of view of a character who spends his life delving into dangerous situations and looting stuff from dead guys who don't need it anymore? Why wouldn't they know that adamantine is nigh-impervious and expensive, gold is a precious metal, and dragons are hyper-intelligent magic-wielding super-predators with breath weapons capable of slaughtering villages?

I don't need to have experience with things and know everything about them to know something about them. Some things are just common knowledge and are entirely reasonable for characters to know (or think they know).


Because honestly, how many people in the real world actually know the cost of a pound of iron without looking it up? And it stands to reason that if you are in an ancient dungeon that is the known stomping ground of monsters, it often looks exceedingly impractical to cause a lot of noise, potentially attracting more monsters and causing a significant drain on your resources.
Even in the real world, looters (I would think) rarely waste more than a few hours at a time in any given house, and often go for stuff that can be removed without much effort, for the main reason that they are literally trying to get a "quick buck" (emphasis on the word 'quick'). Otherwise you'd see a lot more people trying to steal a car's motor instead of just the tires are electronics (in the case of car-jackers that only take parts), or stealing the solid gold sarcophagus (in the case of tomb robbers).

I don't need to know the cost of an ounce of gold to know that it's worth a lot of money. The same with silver, platinum, titanium, and copper. Heck, I know that scrap iron are generally worth salvaging in the real world, and if I were a commoner in the D&D setting I'd do the same (that longsword selling for 7 gold, 5 silver sure beats the handful of silver pieces I'd make working that week, and a pound of scrap iron selling for a silver piece is pretty comparable).

Archaeologists spend weeks and months 'looting' sites. If they've killed everything in the dungeon, what's the difference between a PC and an archaeologist? Thieves and tomb robbers in the real world are a bad comparison because they run the risk of being caught. PCs don't run the risk of being caught - they run the risk of being interrupted by something they can probably defeat and not get in trouble for killing. Likewise, there aren't any social repercussions for someone who plunders a dungeon like there are for tomb robbers - who, in ancient Egypt, were typically put to death if caught.

[NichG]

Then I'm hoping the DM is putting more effort into it than "I can't think of a way to get through stone (and never mind that mining is a thing, much less someone worked the stone to begin with)" to protect that door. If these beings or organizations of immense power can think of nothing better than a slab of extraordinarily pricey metal to protect something, they deserve what happens next.

"Implicit assumptions" don't count for anything if you're wanting me to ignore the basic assumption of the game. Explicate them, or don't be surprised when it doesn't take me a lot of work to get at the treasure I want. Heck, I'd be disappointed if it were so trivially easy - but that disappointment is the sort of thing why I don't play very often, and instead am usually the DM. When I put in an important door, it's not merely a slab of metal protected by my own arrogant assumptions that mine is the extent of human creativity and ingenuity. Guardian monsters, warding magic, traps, and clever architectural tricks are all in the DM's purview. To simply rely on "implicit assumptions" is just being lazy.


Laziness is what allows game to happen in a reasonable timespan. There exists only so much time and thought to dedicate to things, and the DM has a lot more things to keep track of running 'the world' than you do running 'your character'. Optimizing the use of that time is to the benefit of everyone at the table, because it means that the things which are actually interesting to play out get more focus. The DM can spend those thoughts on making the door really obnoxious to turn into loot, or you could spend those thoughts on statting up the enemies for the next encounter, or on figuring out some way to work in Player C's background story to help engage them in the game. If the DM decides they have to spend their thoughts on 'explicating' the door, then thats a little less detail that everything else in the world gets.

If you truly believe that the process of trying to remove the door or the stuff you can do with that wealth is the most interesting gaming you could have had that evening, then that's fine - I might not share those tastes, but its self-consistent. However, if you're just exploiting the situation because you saw a gotcha and you want to punish the DM for a mistake, then the end result of that behavior is that everyone at the table spends an hour bored because you were feeling spiteful. That's the problem here, when 'it makes sense' is used as an excuse for making the game tedious in order to punish the DM.

[Braininthejar2]

It really does seem like a glaring design flaw doesn't it? I remember running into the same thing in RCR Star Wars D20, the blast doors were nearly impenetrable, the walls they were attached to? Not so much.

I have a druid player whose solution to any logistics problem is "stone shape" :)

[hookbill]

Two words: Resale value. They may cost half a million dollars to fit, for all I know, but I doubt anyone would give you a fiftieth of that for them once removed.

And that's part of the answer to the "loot everything" mentality. Those accessories may be worth 100,000 GP, but only if you can find someone who (a) has the money and (b) wants the item. That's gonna be a pretty small group. Then they'll offer you - if they're honest - about 20% of the item's book value. (Hey, it takes a lot of work to convert slabs of metal into masterwork gear. It ain't cheap.)

If they're less honest, or if they know for a fact that there's no-one else within a week's journey who could afford it, you'll be lucky to get more than 5% value out of them.

I would so do this as well... sure you can spend XX amount of gold, resources, and tons of time (make them roleplay it out) hire people, tools, etc, to get the door, cart it all the way back, then " I know a guy who specializes in this kind of thing" (go all pawn stars on them) "yeah but I'm going to have to break it apart, resmelt it, yadda, yadda, I'll give you two plat for it..

they will only do this once...

[Amphetryon]

Laziness is what allows game to happen in a reasonable timespan. There exists only so much time and thought to dedicate to things, and the DM has a lot more things to keep track of running 'the world' than you do running 'your character'. Optimizing the use of that time is to the benefit of everyone at the table, because it means that the things which are actually interesting to play out get more focus. The DM can spend those thoughts on making the door really obnoxious to turn into loot, or you could spend those thoughts on statting up the enemies for the next encounter, or on figuring out some way to work in Player C's background story to help engage them in the game. If the DM decides they have to spend their thoughts on 'explicating' the door, then thats a little less detail that everything else in the world gets.

If you truly believe that the process of trying to remove the door or the stuff you can do with that wealth is the most interesting gaming you could have had that evening, then that's fine - I might not share those tastes, but its self-consistent. However, if you're just exploiting the situation because you saw a gotcha and you want to punish the DM for a mistake, then the end result of that behavior is that everyone at the table spends an hour bored because you were feeling spiteful. That's the problem here, when 'it makes sense' is used as an excuse for making the game tedious in order to punish the DM.

'It makes sense' should ideally be the primary motivating force behind any Character's actions. The perception that it's 'punishing the DM' or 'being spiteful' because the behavior doesn't mesh with that DM's initial expectations is not necessarily justified, accurate, or even conducive to a good Player/DM relationship. The Player whose Character attempts to remove the door may see the removal as the fastest, or most efficient, method of getting to whatever lies beyond, while simultaneously perceiving that the door was placed as a deliberate indicator that the most interesting stuff the DM had planned for the evening is likely to be on the other side of the fancy door. If you truly believe that spending an hour in-game trying to locate the key the DM has hidden somewhere, or rolling Disable Device checks (or another system's equivalent) until someone succeeds on hitting the target number is more interesting and better roleplaying than removing the obstacle through other means already available to the Characters, you're entitled to that belief, but I hope I'm equally entitled to disagree. And, as far as I'm concerned, the fact that the door is also likely to be as valuable, monetarily, as any single item they may find in the dungeon means they'd be behaving irrationally if, once they removed it, they simply dumped it by the wayside, just as they'd be behaving irrationally to voluntarily leave behind a 50k GP diamond, barring other factors.

Incidentally, I'll also disagree - strongly - with the notion that 'laziness is what allows the game to happen in a reasonable timespan,' unless you're using 'laziness' as a synonym for preparation, ability to improvise, and knowledge of your Players' general tendencies and preferences.

[Coidzor]

Incidentally, I'll also disagree - strongly - with the notion that 'laziness is what allows the game to happen in a reasonable timespan,' unless you're using 'laziness' as a synonym for preparation, ability to improvise, and knowledge of your Players' general tendencies and preferences.

Depends on where you count timeskips for travel and the like, I suppose.

[Keltest]

Depends on where you count timeskips for travel and the like, I suppose.

I don't consider that laziness. Theres little benefit to making the players actually elaborate on what they do for 8 hours until nightfall.

[Flickerdart]

Even if you want to use adamantine doors, it's beyond easy to make it unstealable. Maybe there are sinister looking black veins pulsing through it - it's clearly cursed, and tampering with it now carries an obvious risk, better find the key and open it properly. Maybe the door has no visible lock (to break) or hinges (to remove), either because it opens outwards or because it shapeshifts open rather than mechanically swinging. Maybe the door is guarded by suspiciously realistic statues with inscriptions to the effect of "don't mess around with the door."

If you want players to behave a certain way, then the onus is on you to make the behaviour likely or encourage it in some way besides wishful thinking and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

[icefractal]

I've always liked portals for my "door that must actually be unlocked" needs. Want to smash the portal? Go ahead, now you have a broken pile of rubble and you're still not on the other side.

They can still be looted, but only if you have an Artificer, otherwise nobody's going to want to buy a portal that only goes to one destination and can't be moved (50% discount for the item being immobile, who wouldn't choose to construct it that way?) Plus it makes weird entry conditions more logical.

[Lord Torath]

Please correct me if I am wrong with these numbers, as I genuinely don't know the exact pricing of these things.The AD&D modules D1-D3 listed an underworld price for Mithral of 250 gp per pound (at 10 coins per pound, or 25 times its weight in gold) and 400 gp/pound for Adamantium/Adamantite. It was also implied that this was lower than the above-ground values for the metals. But that's 1E AD&D.

If you want doors that scream opulence and wealth, have them elaborately carved and possibly gilded (gold plated in strategic places), with sturdy iron or steel bars, locks and hinges. The intricate carvings can also contain warnings of what it's hiding and/or magical protections sealing whatever it is inside. Much more interesting than just a slab of adamantium. And much more valuable as a door in their current location than removed from the dungeon and sold for scrap/turned into magic arms and armor.


Derp. You're right. Lead's atomic weight is greater (207 and change for lead vs just shy of 197 for gold) but gold is denser. Good catch.

Either way, we have a listed weight (1/2lb) for sling bullets rather than a volume, so I'm guessing it's somewhat like a lead-core 150-grain rifle bullet being shorter for the same caliber than a gilding-metal (not actually gold) monolithic 150-grain rifle bullet--size changes (only length in the case of same-caliber rifle bullets), weight does not.How big do you assume your average sling stone is? No, really, form a mental image of one in your mind (This goes for everyone, not just JAL_1138). Got it? How big is it? I'm guessing something roughly golf-ball sized? Official golf balls are 1.68 inches in diameter in the US (42.8 mm), but we can round that to 1.5 inches (38.1 mm). Assuming an average rock density of 2.67 g/cm (granite is 2.65 - 2.75), that sphere weighs about 0.17 pounds (masses 80 grams), or just over 1/6th of a pound. A half-pound rock has a diameter of 2.14 inches (54.3 mm), which is about the size of a medium apple, which is substantially bigger than I usually imagine sling stones to be. 2E Players Option: Combat and Tactics dropped their weight to 0.1 lbs (or a mass of roughly 45 g), which gives you a sphere with a diameter of 1.25 inches (31.8 mm), just a bit smaller than a golf ball. Ever since I did the math, I decided to go with the 10 to a pound weight for sling stones and sling bullets. Makes more sense, and lets those wimpy mages carry a few more. :smallwink:

[BayardSPSR]

Many people tend to forget that things like 'xp', 'level', 'character class', and 'attack bonuses' are all arbitrary things that have no true equivalent in the real world. As such, this lapses into the the bigger issue of "metagame view", where players will look at the abstracts rather than the narrative sense when making a decision.

Fair enough. It's always frustrating when people kill the immersion - at least, in the kind of games I like to play. It does sound like there are in-character reasons to do "metagamey" things, based on this thread and a couple others I've been following. This (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?407920-Is-enemy-optimization-poor-DMing) one approaches the issue of optimizing enemies against the players. This (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?405884-On-Metagame-and-in-character-quot-Suddendly-I-realize-!-quot) one is mostly a discussion of the question "may players attack trolls with fire if the GM doesn't think they should know that."


Because honestly, how many people in the real world actually know the cost of a pound of iron without looking it up? And it stands to reason that if you are in an ancient dungeon that is the known stomping ground of monsters, it often looks exceedingly impractical to cause a lot of noise, potentially attracting more monsters and causing a significant drain on your resources.

I think the root of this problem is that D&D has fixed prices for everything instead of supply and demand. Of course, shopping would be much more effort-intensive for everyone if prices and currency values could fluctuate, so I'm not sure how best to get around this.


There's little benefit to making the players actually elaborate on what they do for 8 hours until nightfall.

Personally, I like offering players the opportunity to fill in details - character development is always fun. The players who aren't interested usually clean their weapons or go hunting, but occasionally you get some light philosophical discussion (so exciting!). It may not move things along, but it makes people care more, and there's definitely value in that.

Plus, it doesn't take any effort on the GM-side when the players are sitting around a campfire talking to each other. All you have to do is figure out when they're ready to move on - and all that takes is asking.

[JAL_1138]

The AD&D modules D1-D3 listed an underworld price for Mithral of 250 gp per pound (at 10 coins per pound, or 25 times its weight in gold) and 400 gp/pound for Adamantium/Adamantite. It was also implied that this was lower than the above-ground values for the metals. But that's 1E AD&D.

If you want doors that scream opulence and wealth, have them elaborately carved and possibly gilded (gold plated in strategic places), with sturdy iron or steel bars, locks and hinges. The intricate carvings can also contain warnings of what it's hiding and/or magical protections sealing whatever it is inside. Much more interesting than just a slab of adamantium. And much more valuable as a door in their current location than removed from the dungeon and sold for scrap/turned into magic arms and armor.

How big do you assume your average sling stone is? No, really, form a mental image of one in your mind (This goes for everyone, not just JAL_1138). Got it? How big is it? I'm guessing something roughly golf-ball sized? Official golf balls are 1.68 inches in diameter in the US (42.8 mm), but we can round that to 1.5 inches (38.1 mm). Assuming an average rock density of 2.67 g/cm (granite is 2.65 - 2.75), that sphere weighs about 0.17 pounds (masses 80 grams), or just over 1/6th of a pound. A half-pound rock has a diameter of 2.14 inches (54.3 mm), which is about the size of a medium apple, which is substantially bigger than I usually imagine sling stones to be. 2E Players Option: Combat and Tactics dropped their weight to 0.1 lbs (or a mass of roughly 45 g), which gives you a sphere with a diameter of 1.25 inches (31.8 mm), just a bit smaller than a golf ball. Ever since I did the math, I decided to go with the 10 to a pound weight for sling stones and sling bullets. Makes more sense, and lets those wimpy mages carry a few more. :smallwink:

A diameter of 2.4 inches is almost exactly the size of a billiard ball (2 & 7/16ths = 2.44). Most stone sling bullets IRL are rocks in the 4-oz (1/4 lb) to 10-oz (just over 1/2 lb, which is 8oz for the metric folk) range, and are about that size. Some were over a pound! Typical lead sling-bullets were often far smaller (around an ounce or two) if used for hunting game, larger if used against armor.

David pretty much brought a gun to a swordfight against Goliath. It wasn't the little guy against the giant, it was the Indiana Jones School of Fencing.

[Telok]

On descriptive text:

DM: "The sage tells you where to find the dungeon of the lich who holds the final third of the artifact. He tells you that the lich, in life, was a famous wizard named [name] and that he ran the Imperial Necromancers Guild two hundred years ago despite not being a necromancer. He also made custom undead and had a succubus wife. You'll need to be careful."

PCs: "We travel past the town with the big library, past the town with the magic college, past the big trading town with the sages in it, through the capitol where the royal library is, through the front lines of a war, past a hostile city, and off into the uninhabited swamp where the dungeon is."

Note that at this point it's a party of six 10th and 11th level characters. No special anti-undead skills or powers beyond a standard mid-op cleric (they sold the ghost touch weapon that they'd been given), no divinations, no prep, no plan. In the very first area they disturb some crypts with specters in them, one specter per crypt. The first one is dangerous but not very harmful, bad rolls on my part, one person lost two levels. They prepare and ready actions when they open the second crypt... This specter rolls over 10 on the d20 a couple times. It drains and spawns one guy and then the two specters get about 8 levels off of two more people before then end.

After a couple of days they go past the first area, not opening any more crypts.

DM: "You find a huge dark pit. It is pitch black and extends beyond sight and light both up and down, stale cold water drips slowly from somewhere high above. It's about 80 feet across with a narrow three foot wide stone bridge across the middle, slick with water."

PCs: "We walk across."

Now I'd thought this was a pretty obvious trap. One of those crypts had a vampire and a weakened brick wall that led to a passage past this. But a water damaged brick wall with cold air coming through wasn't enough of a hint, they didn't even manage to kill the bog standard vampire who escaped through there as mist. But they waltzed across without even breaking stride to make a spot or listen check. By this time I'd downgraded the guardian from a Living Spell Scintillating Pattern to a Living Spell Rainbow Pattern with a couple extra HD (but still 2/3 of the original guardian). It dropped from above when the first person stepped onto the bridge.

They tanked it there, despite the corridor being too small for the Living Spell to follow them. Another person died and the guy carrying the party loot bag dropped his favorite weapon.

PC: "I jump down after it."
Everyone else: "Oh hell no!"

He never came back up. Now all the loot was down there. They went back to town for replacement adventurers. Still no prep, no research, not asking anyone any questions, not telling anyone anything. They knew there was a historian/sage/retired adventurer in town, they'd asked him questions and bought maps from him before. Nope. Just stock up on warm bodies and go back in.

Eventually they get to the bottom. Fight some ghasts, a couple demons, two more vampires, a golem. Nothing will go near the black lake.

DM: "It's icy cold down here, somewhere between ten and twenty degrees fahrenheit. The rim of ice on the shore indicates that the black lake is even colder. Slow, sourceless, ripples undulate across the surface. With your bright lights you see a huge eighty foot wide hole in the ceiling about two hundred feet out from shore. Water slowly drips into the lake and evaporates into ice fog when it hits the surface. The ghast that you captured whimpers in terror."

PCs: "Our loot is over there!"
That guy: "I jump in and swim out so I can start diving for it!"

He was a sorcerer with no ranks in swimming. I don't think he even had anything stronger than Endure Elements and Bracers of Armor protecting him. I think they went in that lake a total of four times, recovered about half the loot, and lost three more people. They never did kill what was in there either.


It doesn't matter with some players. You say "sealed door" and they think there's treasure on the other side. You say "danger" and they think it's xp on the hoof. You say "damsel in distress" and they ignore it because there's no reward posted. An enemy wants to parley and they kill him because they "never get xp for roleplay" (hint: you have to roleplay first). There are just people who play D&D like it's pen and paper WoW/EQ. The only things that matter are killing stuff, leveling up, and "quests".

And it's a bloody nuisance when you have one in the group. You can only hope that some day, they might learn.

[Maglubiyet]

You can only hope that some day, they might learn.

This is hilarious and sad. Were they baffled by their lack of progress or did they accept their fate stoically?

[NichG]

'It makes sense' should ideally be the primary motivating force behind any Character's actions.

"It makes sense" has to coexist with "the game is a functional and enjoyable experience". Thats why even if the party paladin would try to arrest and imprison the party rogue for tomb robbing, his player should think twice and consider the out-of-character consequences before doing so.

The less often the two needs come into conflict, the better, but sometimes 'crap happens'. The DM will make a mistake. The other player will do something without thinking and piss off your character. Yeah, you could get 10x your normal WBL by exploiting the door, but is that really going to make for a fun game when you either curbstomp everything or end up in an arms race? Maybe instead you should say 'psst, hey DM, you do realize how much this is worth, right? Want to change the material?'. Sometimes its best to pretend that you didn't notice the flaw and move on, or do your part to help correct it, because you can reason out what the consequences of the other path will be like.


The perception that it's 'punishing the DM' or 'being spiteful' because the behavior doesn't mesh with that DM's initial expectations is not necessarily justified, accurate, or even conducive to a good Player/DM relationship. The Player whose Character attempts to remove the door may see the removal as the fastest, or most efficient, method of getting to whatever lies beyond, while simultaneously perceiving that the door was placed as a deliberate indicator that the most interesting stuff the DM had planned for the evening is likely to be on the other side of the fancy door. If you truly believe that spending an hour in-game trying to locate the key the DM has hidden somewhere, or rolling Disable Device checks (or another system's equivalent) until someone succeeds on hitting the target number is more interesting and better roleplaying than removing the obstacle through other means already available to the Characters, you're entitled to that belief, but I hope I'm equally entitled to disagree. And, as far as I'm concerned, the fact that the door is also likely to be as valuable, monetarily, as any single item they may find in the dungeon means they'd be behaving irrationally if, once they removed it, they simply dumped it by the wayside, just as they'd be behaving irrationally to voluntarily leave behind a 50k GP diamond, barring other factors.

This scenario may be the case. But I was responding to the previous poster's comment in particular, in which the focus of the argument was on how 'the DM deserves what he gets' and things like that.

Doing something because you think it will make for more interesting gameplay than what the DM had planned is legit. I can certainly believe that the first time a player encounters an adamantine door and thinks 'hey, this is going to be totally awesome, I get to do the door thing!', it'll be a fun exercise to play out. But if you've done it before, is it really still a cool and interesting thing to do? Or is it that the player thinks that having 10x WBL would be a fun thing to try? Or is it just that the player is being spiteful or is enjoying ideas of 'beating' the DM?

The last type of situation definitely takes place, and I very frequently see posts in that direction on the forums - 'the DM messed up, so he deserves to have the game broken!'. That mentality in particular is a very bad player trend. It's the player-side equivalent of an antagonistic DM. Instead of working together to make the game good for everyone, such a player puts their energies into trying to make the game bad so they can say 'see, I knew you were a bad DM after all'.


Incidentally, I'll also disagree - strongly - with the notion that 'laziness is what allows the game to happen in a reasonable timespan,' unless you're using 'laziness' as a synonym for preparation, ability to improvise, and knowledge of your Players' general tendencies and preferences.

I'm using 'laziness' as a synonym for good time management skills.

[Darth Ultron]

The Outside the Game Player This player, oddly, does not really want to play the game by the game rules. They just want to make up stuff and free from it. For example, some foes are in a log fort. In stead of using any game rules, the player will want to ''burn down the fort''. Not that it's a bad idea, but the 3rd level group just does not have the means to do so. And it would take three times as long to try and fail, as it would to simply attack the fort. And, at it's worst, the player will think one flask of oil should cause the whole fort to explode like a cheesy action movie.

And the player is just crushed when the DM describes the guards see the small bit of the side of the one wall burning...and grab some waterfulls of buckets and put out the fire. A round later the wall is just a little black and scorched.

After all, the player was oddly expecting the oil from the one flask you dumped on the wooden wall explodes! With in a round the whole fort is on fire from top to bottom and then the whole fort explodes! You get 50,000 xp for all the people in the fort when it exploded.

[BayardSPSR]

Hang on, about how many buckets in a waterfull?

[Darth Ultron]

Hang on, about how many buckets in a waterfull?

Just one bucket.

[Jay R]

The player who insists on a "realistic" interpretation when it will give him an advantage, but wants to go exactly by RAW at other times.

The player who will not let go of a ruling that went against him, and grinds the game to a halt. (This is what I think wandering monsters are for.)

[Amphetryon]

Depends on where you count timeskips for travel and the like, I suppose.

Unless it takes your group eight days of playing in order to describe eight days' worth of travel from city to city, I'm inclined to believe that every group uses 'timeskips. . . and the like' without considering them a particularly 'lazy' choice.

[Spojaz]

The Outside the Game Player This player, oddly, does not really want to play the game by the game rules. They just want to make up stuff and free from it. For example, some foes are in a log fort. In stead of using any game rules, the player will want to ''burn down the fort''. Not that it's a bad idea, but the 3rd level group just does not have the means to do so. And it would take three times as long to try and fail, as it would to simply attack the fort. And, at it's worst, the player will think one flask of oil should cause the whole fort to explode like a cheesy action movie.

And the player is just crushed when the DM describes the guards see the small bit of the side of the one wall burning...and grab some waterfulls of buckets and put out the fire. A round later the wall is just a little black and scorched.


Wow. You are one terrible railroad engineer. Even a moderately good idea should be rewarded with something not just "you waste your time and oil and probably a spell for no change in the combat. No burning area of the wall for foes to avoid, no divided attention of guards, nothing. Your oil fire is put out instantly by the water the guards have right here already. srsly, learn to play the game exactly how I want you to play it!"

D&D is made for lateral thinking! Don't punish your players for their "odd" desire to play D&D like it was made to be played!

[Lord Torath]

Wow. You are one terrible railroad engineer. Even a moderately good idea should be rewarded with something not just "you waste your time and oil and probably a spell for no change in the combat. No burning area of the wall for foes to avoid, no divided attention of guards, nothing. Your oil fire is put out instantly by the water the guards have right here already. srsly, learn to play the game exactly how I want you to play it!"

D&D is made for lateral thinking! Don't punish your players for their "odd" desire to play D&D like it was made to be played!I think the point here is that using a single flask of oil to try to burn down an entire fort does not qualify as even a "moderately good" idea, but rather a poorly thought-out idea will little real chance of success. Not that burning down the fort is not a valid strategy, but it's going to require a bit more planning and supplies.

Of course, you should probably point that out to the player before his character wastes his flask.

[Keltest]

I think the point here is that using a single flask of oil to try to burn down an entire fort does not qualify as even a "moderately good" idea, but rather a poorly thought-out idea will little real chance of success. Not that burning down the fort is not a valid strategy, but it's going to require a bit more planning and supplies.

Of course, you should probably point that out to the player before his character wastes his flask.

Indeed. Even if the Player has no idea of the physics involved, a veteran (or even novice) adventurer is at least going to have a grasp of what would actually happen.

[Amphetryon]

"It makes sense" has to coexist with "the game is a functional and enjoyable experience". Thats why even if the party paladin would try to arrest and imprison the party rogue for tomb robbing, his player should think twice and consider the out-of-character consequences before doing so.

The less often the two needs come into conflict, the better, but sometimes 'crap happens'. The DM will make a mistake. The other player will do something without thinking and piss off your character. Yeah, you could get 10x your normal WBL by exploiting the door, but is that really going to make for a fun game when you either curbstomp everything or end up in an arms race? Maybe instead you should say 'psst, hey DM, you do realize how much this is worth, right? Want to change the material?'. Sometimes its best to pretend that you didn't notice the flaw and move on, or do your part to help correct it, because you can reason out what the consequences of the other path will be like.



This scenario may be the case. But I was responding to the previous poster's comment in particular, in which the focus of the argument was on how 'the DM deserves what he gets' and things like that.

Doing something because you think it will make for more interesting gameplay than what the DM had planned is legit. I can certainly believe that the first time a player encounters an adamantine door and thinks 'hey, this is going to be totally awesome, I get to do the door thing!', it'll be a fun exercise to play out. But if you've done it before, is it really still a cool and interesting thing to do? Or is it that the player thinks that having 10x WBL would be a fun thing to try? Or is it just that the player is being spiteful or is enjoying ideas of 'beating' the DM?

The last type of situation definitely takes place, and I very frequently see posts in that direction on the forums - 'the DM messed up, so he deserves to have the game broken!'. That mentality in particular is a very bad player trend. It's the player-side equivalent of an antagonistic DM. Instead of working together to make the game good for everyone, such a player puts their energies into trying to make the game bad so they can say 'see, I knew you were a bad DM after all'.



I'm using 'laziness' as a synonym for good time management skills.That's a curious synonym for 'good time management skills,' given that laziness is generally a negative descriptor, while 'good time management skills' is generally a positive descriptor.

Would you call the Player/Character who goes about getting into the vault in the room directly, rather than spending time looking through the rest of the room/building for any possible key or combination lying about in a drawer or under a rug, one who is metagaming, or being spiteful or trying to break the game? Because a giant adamantine door is a form of vault, as far as I can figure. If the Player/Character does go hunting for a key or combination through the rest of the building, is there a rational, in-world explanation as to why that search should be successful besides 'the owner's clearly not very bright or savvy about security protocols'?

[JAL_1138]

Indeed. Even if the Player has no idea of the physics involved, a veteran (or even novice) adventurer is at least going to have a grasp of what would actually happen.

That said, setting something on fire with one flask of oil is usually a great way to distract the guards and sneak in, or to cause a panic in a crowd and have some confusion going on to cover an eacape, while being reasonably sure no greater harm will befall.

(As an aside, though, putting water on an oil fire is sometimes a very bad idea. Oil floats on top of water, often stays lit while it does that, and so water can simply spread it rather than putting it out. That's why we always kept a bucket of absorbent material (soaks up the spill and smothers fire) and a fire-blanket around at the equipment dealership I used to work at. Spilled diesel, gas, kerosene, and/or hydraulic oil sometimes got set on fire by stray sparks from the welders, or by the cutting torches. Gas is the worst, followed by kerosene; diesel and hydro oil are actually pretty hard to get burning. You can drop a lit cigarette in a bucket of diesel and it'll just go out. Source on that last claim: I still have eyebrows.)

[Keltest]

That said, setting something on fire with one flask of oil is usually a great way to distract the guards and sneak in, or to cause a panic in a crowd and have some confusion going on to cover an eacape, while being reasonably sure no greater harm will befall.

(As an aside, though, putting water on an oil fire is sometimes a very bad idea. Oil floats on top of water, often stays lit while it does that, and so water can simply spread it rather than putting it out. That's why we always kept a bucket of absorbent material (soaks up the spill and smothers fire) and a fire-blanket around at the equipment dealership I used to work at. Spilled diesel, gas, kerosene, and/or hydraulic oil sometimes got set on fire by stray sparks from the welders, or by the cutting torches. Gas is the worst, followed by kerosene; diesel and hydro oil are actually pretty hard to get burning. You can drop a lit cigarette in a bucket of diesel and it'll just go out. Source on that last claim: I still have eyebrows.)

From my own experience, one of two things would happen with that fire. Either it would go out on its own without alerting the people inside of much, or it would quickly grow out of control. Either way, they aren't going to be doing much with a few buckets of water.

[Telok]

I had a player once say "I burn down the house!" With what? "I cast burning hands!" Where? "On the outside corner, that blank spot." Ok, roll damage.

In 3.5 D&D fire damage is halved before subtracting hardness, wood has hardness 5 and 8 hp per inch if my memory is correct. The house was made of four inch thick logs with adobe filling the cracks. The damage roll was 12 or 13, halved and subtracting five resulted in one point of damage.

When I said that one point of damage from an instant spell wasn't enough to set the exterior wall of a house on fire I was accused of railroading.

The guy sitting next to him slapped him for me.

There are times when something might be a good idea, and the execution is just so bad that it makes you wonder if the player is actually trying to fail.

[JAL_1138]

From my own experience, one of two things would happen with that fire. Either it would go out on its own without alerting the people inside of much, or it would quickly grow out of control. Either way, they aren't going to be doing much with a few buckets of water.

It'll probably only grow out of control if they've treated the exterior wood with tar or pitch to prevent termites and rot...or if they've poured water on an oil fire. Or if it gets into the thatch, in which case say goodbye to the town. Generally, you want to set something on fire where people will notice it and run to put it out, but where it won't spread before it can be dealt with.

Of course, smokesticks are even better, since there's little-to-no chance of starting the Great Fire of Ankh-Morpork, or being the probably-humanoid equivalent of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.

[Keltest]

It'll probably only grow out of control if they've treated the exterior wood with tar or pitch to prevent termites and rot...or if they've poured water on an oil fire. Or if it gets into the thatch, in which case say goodbye to the town. Generally, you want to set something on fire where people will notice it and run to put it out, but where it won't spread before it can be dealt with.

Of course, smokesticks are even better, since there's little-to-no chance of starting the Great Fire of Ankh-Morpork, or being the probably-humanoid equivalent of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.

Yeah, but apparently this was a bandit fort. I don't know the specifics, but if I were a player, "Killing everyone inside with fire" sounds like an acceptable plan of attack to me.

[NichG]

That's a curious synonym for 'good time management skills,' given that laziness is generally a negative descriptor, while 'good time management skills' is generally a positive descriptor.

Certainly. That was intentional, since the poster I was responding to was putting a negative spin on something by choosing to call it 'laziness' which, as you say, often has negative connotations. I wanted to demonstrate that that negative connotation wasn't intrinsic to the idea, just to the words they chose to use to describe it. One technique to make that point is to accept the word and show how it can lead to positive outcomes despite that initial negative connotation.

Laziness 'sounds' bad, but in the context of this conversation it just means 'the DM did not put effort into thinking about this door'. The decision not to assign effort to thinking about the door could be many things, but in many cases it can be the right choice to make in the larger context - if there are other things that need the effort more, if they have a limited time, if they're improvising in order to allow the party to go off the rails and don't want to ask the players to sit there quietly for an hour while they plan things out, etc.


Would you call the Player/Character who goes about getting into the vault in the room directly, rather than spending time looking through the rest of the room/building for any possible key or combination lying about in a drawer or under a rug, one who is metagaming, or being spiteful or trying to break the game? Because a giant adamantine door is a form of vault, as far as I can figure. If the Player/Character does go hunting for a key or combination through the rest of the building, is there a rational, in-world explanation as to why that search should be successful besides 'the owner's clearly not very bright or savvy about security protocols'?

It depends on the game and the player, of course. Its less important what they chose to do in this one case, versus why they chose to do it OOC. The reason that what they do doesn't matter so much is that as a one-time incident, its a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of time you might expect to spend playing with that player.

But the 'why' is far more important, because that will tell you what is going to happen the next time something like this comes around. Maybe it won't be a door next time, but it'll be the fact that D&D's economics is just inherently screwed up, or some rules glitch or broken combo, or whatever. If the player goes after entering the vault directly because they perceive that to be where the best gaming will be, then its possible to come to an understanding with their tastes and work together. But if they go after entering the vault directly because they think it will bother the DM, then that's an antagonistic situation, and requires a different response.

In the former case, I can play to the player's preferences. A player who prefers 'I excavate the door from the wall' to 'I roll Open Locks' or 'I Search for the key' is communicating to me that they want their OOC cleverness to matter more. So I can just shift the design of my adventures to assume and even require the sort of thinking the player seems to prefer, and intentionally put in things to exploit but in such a way that the stability of the game assumes that they will be exploited. So e.g. if there's a big, valuable adamantine door then I'll do it in a system or setting where money doesn't equate to combat ability (Dark Sun, for example), or in a situation where they are really really going to need that money for things coming up.

But in the latter case, I'd confront the player OOC about their behavior - first, checking to make sure they understand that the game being fun is also their responsibility not just mine, and if they persist in things like 'well, don't make mistakes then' or other things I'll make it clear that antagonistic play isn't welcome at my table.

[JAL_1138]

Yeah, but apparently this was a bandit fort. I don't know the specifics, but if I were a player, "Killing everyone inside with fire" sounds like an acceptable plan of attack to me.

No argument there; I was just going off on a tangent about how small fires that don't do any actual harm can be extremely useful when engaging in shenanigans or chicanery.

[BayardSPSR]

But if they go after entering the vault directly because they think it will bother the DM, then that's an antagonistic situation, and requires a different response.

I'm curious: how many of us have actually had players doing things with the specific intention of bothering the GM? That's never happened to me, even from the most clownish players.

[Amphetryon]

I'm curious: how many of us have actually had players doing things with the specific intention of bothering the GM? That's never happened to me, even from the most clownish players.

I'm curious as to how we'd know, for sure, that this was the case. I'd imagine it would require the Player specifically announcing the intent, or the relationship between Player and GM already being so antagonistic that they should have already parted company at the roleplaying table.

[ZeroGear]

Somewhat related to other trends, anyone run across the "interruption" and "tunnel vision" tendencies?
An example using the earlier argument:

DM: "You enter the room at the end of the hallway. It is sparely decorated, with walls made of what seems like stone, with a large door at the far end. From what you know about metals, it appears to be made of adamantine. Etched..."
Players: "Adamantine!? Let's loot it!"
DM: "Well, etched on the door are..."
Players: "We don't care, we're taking it anyway."
DM: "But around the door frame..."
Players: "WE'RE TAKING THE DOOR!"
DM: "Fine,everyone roll saves."
Players: "Why?"
DM: "Because, as I was trying to say, the runes on the door say 'only the key holders shall ever open this door', and the runes around the doorframe cast fireball when you start tampering with it."

Ok, little exaggeration on the DM's part, but anyone ever run into a situation like this?

[Amphetryon]

Somewhat related to other trends, anyone run across the "interruption" and "tunnel vision" tendencies?
An example using the earlier argument:

DM: "You enter the room at the end of the hallway. It is sparely decorated, with walls made of what seems like stone, with a large door at the far end. From what you know about metals, it appears to be made of adamantine. Etched..."
Players: "Adamantine!? Let's loot it!"
DM: "Well, etched on the door are..."
Players: "We don't care, we're taking it anyway."
DM: "But around the door frame..."
Players: "WE'RE TAKING THE DOOR!"
DM: "Fine,everyone roll saves."
Players: "Why?"
DM: "Because, as I was trying to say, the runes on the door say 'only the key holders shall ever open this door', and the runes around the doorframe cast fireball when you start tampering with it."

Ok, little exaggeration on the DM's part, but anyone ever run into a situation like this?Generally, situations like this indicate poor communication on both parts, since the DM is presuming that the method they use to loot the door automatically triggers the runes. Perhaps their intended methodology didn't involve tampering directly with the doorframe, after all.

[Lord Torath]

Somewhat related to other trends, anyone run across the "interruption" and "tunnel vision" tendencies?
An example using the earlier argument:

DM: "You enter the room at the end of the hallway. It is sparely decorated, with walls made of what seems like stone, with a large door at the far end. From what you know about metals, it appears to be made of adamantine. Etched..."
Players: "Adamantine!? Let's loot it!"
DM: "Well, etched on the door are..."
Players: "We don't care, we're taking it anyway."
DM: "But around the door frame..."
Players: "WE'RE TAKING THE DOOR!"
DM: "Fine,everyone roll saves."
Players: "Why?"
DM: "Because, as I was trying to say, the runes on the door say 'only the key holders shall ever open this door', and the runes around the doorframe cast fireball when you start tampering with it."

Ok, little exaggeration on the DM's part, but anyone ever run into a situation like this?
Generally, situations like this indicate poor communication on both parts, since the DM is presuming that the method they use to loot the door automatically triggers the runes. Perhaps their intended methodology didn't involve tampering directly with the doorframe, after all.I don't know. The DM is trying to communicate, but the players are not permitting it. I suppose the DM could say something like "Before you start taking the door off the wall, you notice several nasty-looking runes..." instead of "Roll saves." But this is a case where the player is deliberately ignoring the DM's attempt to provide information.

[draken50]

Somewhat related to other trends, anyone run across the "interruption" and "tunnel vision" tendencies?
An example using the earlier argument:

DM: "You enter the room at the end of the hallway. It is sparely decorated, with walls made of what seems like stone, with a large door at the far end. From what you know about metals, it appears to be made of adamantine. Etched..."
Players: "Adamantine!? Let's loot it!"
DM: "Well, etched on the door are..."
Players: "We don't care, we're taking it anyway."
DM: "But around the door frame..."
Players: "WE'RE TAKING THE DOOR!"
DM: "Fine,everyone roll saves."
Players: "Why?"
DM: "Because, as I was trying to say, the runes on the door say 'only the key holders shall ever open this door', and the runes around the doorframe cast fireball when you start tampering with it."

Ok, little exaggeration on the DM's part, but anyone ever run into a situation like this?

I have run into issues like that, but never with ALL of the players. As a GM I work to make sure that no single player dominates/derails my games with their actions. So I often will ignore that player to finish the description for the others. I would then begin to narrate the beginning of the more impulsive players actions giving the other players some measure of decision in regards to their own reactions to that development.

This in turn helps prevent all my players from being punished for the irrational decisions of a single player. "You want to attack the king in the middle of his speech about rewarding you?... okay. The rest of you see the rogue begin to draw his weapon, the kings guards immediately reach for their weapons as several seem to be trying to place themselves between the rogue and the king, though it is likely they will be too slow. What do you do?"

In my games the other players raise their hands over their heads and move away, because they aren't stupid. The king may wind up wounded or killed, and they will have to deal with consequences, but the NPCs will not immediately assume they were aware of the plot simply because they went on an adventure with the person they will assume is an assassin from a rival kingdom or the like.

I haven't had that particular example occur in game, but I have had similar with one player resisting arrest from the city watch ect.

[BayardSPSR]

I'm curious as to how we'd know, for sure, that this was the case.

That's what I'm getting at: is it fair to assume that a problematic player is being deliberately adversarial, when there's a possibility they could honestly be playing their understanding of "how RPGs should work?" Especially if you (as a GM) are planning on resorting to the It's My Game Not Yours school of expectation management.


I don't know. The DM is trying to communicate, but the players are not permitting it. I suppose the DM could say something like "Before you start taking the door off the wall, you notice several nasty-looking runes..." instead of "Roll saves." But this is a case where the player is deliberately ignoring the DM's attempt to provide information.

"Roll saves" is a perfectly valid method of communication. The players will remember to be more cautious next time - or they won't, and the GM can laugh at them for making the same mistake twice, which is another perfectly valid method of communication.

The only problems come up if the GM won't let them trigger in the trap in the first place because "they should be paying attention."



And for the record, this example still wouldn't have come up if the GM hadn't unnecessarily identified the door as being made of adamantine, which is something the players don't need to know to find it impressive.

[JAL_1138]

I have run into issues like that, but never with ALL of the players. As a GM I work to make sure that no single player dominates/derails my games with their actions. So I often will ignore that player to finish the description for the others. I would then begin to narrate the beginning of the more impulsive players actions giving the other players some measure of decision in regards to their own reactions to that development.

This in turn helps prevent all my players from being punished for the irrational decisions of a single player. "You want to attack the king in the middle of his speech about rewarding you?... okay. The rest of you see the rogue begin to draw his weapon, the kings guards immediately reach for their weapons as several seem to be trying to place themselves between the rogue and the king, though it is likely they will be too slow. What do you do?"

In my games the other players raise their hands over their heads and move away, because they aren't stupid. The king may wind up wounded or killed, and they will have to deal with consequences, but the NPCs will not immediately assume they were aware of the plot simply because they went on an adventure with the person they will assume is an assassin from a rival kingdom or the like.

I haven't had that particular example occur in game, but I have had similar with one player resisting arrest from the city watch ect.

Hollering "Look out, sire! Guards! Guards!!" and tackling the rogue might be a good response, too. Yes, it's PVP, but it's one of those scenarios where there's not much other choice. If not tackling him, at least indicating to the other NPCs somehow beyond being passive that you aren't in on the plot.

[Jacob.Tyr]

I think the thing that bothers me most is when players try a random assortment of interactions with every object they encounter.

DM: You see a large door made of adamantium, etched with runes. The frame is covered in arcane marks.
Player: "I poke the bottom rune. I poke the next rune up. I poke the next rune. I pour water on the bottom rune...
45 minutes later
Player: "..then I dip my dagger into my waterskin, and poke the bottom rune. I poke the next rune with the wet dagger..."
45 minutes later
Player: "...pour water on the top hinge. Then I pour water on the bottom hinge..."
ad nauseam.

Every piece of set dressing or obstacle is not some esoteric puzzle that requires random chance to figure out. We aren't playing Monkey Island here.

[Keltest]

I think the thing that bothers me most is when players try a random assortment of interactions with every object they encounter.

DM: You see a large door made of adamantium, etched with runes. The frame is covered in arcane marks.
Player: "I poke the bottom rune. I poke the next rune up. I poke the next rune. I pour water on the bottom rune...
45 minutes later
Player: "..then I dip my dagger into my waterskin, and poke the bottom rune. I poke the next rune with the wet dagger..."
45 minutes later
Player: "...pour water on the top hinge. Then I pour water on the bottom hinge..."
ad nauseam.

Every piece of set dressing or obstacle is not some esoteric puzzle that requires random chance to figure out. We aren't playing Monkey Island here.

In my experience, that is most often a symptom of a past or current DM being fond of overly-obtuse traps or puzzles, such that the player has developed a routine of various trap-checking and door-scanning mechanics out of hand to deal with the excessive amount of unidentified mechanics their DM was overly fond of. Not so much the player's fault, until they continue to do it long after having been informed it isn't necessary or appreciated.

[Darth Ultron]

Wow. You are one terrible railroad engineer. Even a moderately good idea should be rewarded with something not just "you waste your time and oil and probably a spell for no change in the combat. No burning area of the wall for foes to avoid, no divided attention of guards, nothing. Your oil fire is put out instantly by the water the guards have right here already. srsly, learn to play the game exactly how I want you to play it!"

D&D is made for lateral thinking! Don't punish your players for their "odd" desire to play D&D like it was made to be played!

Yea, the vague ''you should reward players for good ideas'' is great. But, the idea must be good, first of all. It's not ''reward every idea'', it's only good ideas.

And even more importunately, the idea must make sense. A good way to know is to ask what the PC's would do if they were the targets?


That said, setting something on fire with one flask of oil is usually a great way to distract the guards and sneak in, or to cause a panic in a crowd and have some confusion going on to cover an eacape, while being reasonably sure no greater harm will befall.

Though it's beyond dumb to have cartoon guards that do the ''Duh! Fire! I'm going to abandon my post and not look around and watch the pretty fire!''. That works great for cartoons and anime and rated G styff, but nothing else.


But lets not get bogged down with the one example. It's basically the players not using the rules and trying to free form. In D&D you can't just ''break something'' or ''burn something'', there are rules for that. A character can't just ''say'' they hack a door down with a sword....

[Keltest]

Though it's beyond dumb to have cartoon guards that do the ''Duh! Fire! I'm going to abandon my post and not look around and watch the pretty fire!''. That works great for cartoons and anime and rated G styff, but nothing else. You think that the guards would just ignore the fire? They might call for backup and leave a single person on watch, but if 90% of the guards are dealing with the fire instead of watching the camp, that's still a positive development if your goal is anything other than "storm the camp".



But lets not get bogged down with the one example. It's basically the players not using the rules and trying to free form. In D&D you can't just ''break something'' or ''burn something'', there are rules for that. A character can't just ''say'' they hack a door down with a sword....

A character can totally say they hack down a door with a sword. The DM should then guide the player through the necessary steps to doing so. That's literally their job.

[Eldan]

How about some more player trends. I've had two, and both of them showed up in my first group's first campaign. Well, technically, I had three, but I'm not writing about myself as a player :smalltongue: (We had rotating DMs.)

Player one was the character changer. He played a sorcerer for about two sessions. Then asked if he could be a bard instead, sorcerers werent' as cool as he thought. Then he found the rogue class and the weapon finesse feat ("wow, so overpowered, I get like +4 to hit", we all thought like that). Then, I think, came the kobold druid. Then the barbarian, then the slightly different barbarian. Basically, he brought in a new character every second or third session.

The other one was the silent character. He played a nameless, mute martial arts monk from the far east. Because that was cool. Well, not actually mute. He just never spoke. It got annoying really quickly.

[Keltest]

How about some more player trends. I've had two, and both of them showed up in my first group's first campaign. Well, technically, I had three, but I'm not writing about myself as a player :smalltongue: (We had rotating DMs.)

Player one was the character changer. He played a sorcerer for about two sessions. Then asked if he could be a bard instead, sorcerers werent' as cool as he thought. Then he found the rogue class and the weapon finesse feat ("wow, so overpowered, I get like +4 to hit", we all thought like that). Then, I think, came the kobold druid. Then the barbarian, then the slightly different barbarian. Basically, he brought in a new character every second or third session.

The other one was the silent character. He played a nameless, mute martial arts monk from the far east. Because that was cool. Well, not actually mute. He just never spoke. It got annoying really quickly.

Ive got one of the character swappers. He knows exactly what he wants to do, there just isn't a single class that can do it all, and multiclassing doesn't give him the level of power he wants.

[cybishop]

People seem to think that the "loot everything" mentality they don't like comes from computer games, but when I think about the "sell the door" problem, I think World of Warcraft, of all places, has an elegant solution to it.

I can't be the only person here who's played WoW. I'm thinking of a dungeon called Blackrock Depths, capital city of the Dark Iron dwarves. And I'm think of the original version, when it was probably the biggest dungeon in the game, before it was broken up into two or more smaller sub-dungeons. (Hey, you kids get off my lawn!) As soon as you enter it you can go straight or left. Straight leads to an armory, and then a drawbridge. On the other side of the drawbridge is a barracks, then a bar, and eventually the emperor's court. Left leads to a parade ground, and then a unique anvil, and then the much longer route through the living quarters and arena to the emperor's court from the other wide. (To be exact, the choices from the entrance are more like straight, left and then right, and left and then left again. And there are multiple minibosses with keys to various shortcuts. And I'm probably misremembering some details and I know I'm leaving many out, but they aren't important here.)

You can take the direct route to the emperor if that's all your group cares about and go straight, or take the longer route, left, through the parade ground if your group cares about the anvil or doesn't have certain keys. But here's the interesting thing: the drawbridge isn't a drawbridge. It's a door across the entire parade ground, so big that the path from the armory to the barracks goes inside it. Sort of like a parapet along the top of the wall, but enclosed. What can I say, dwarves build things big. Your characters can't fly, but even if they could, the path to the barracks is covered with solid rock when the door is open. In theory it's possible to get from the anvil to the armory with the door closed via the living quarters, but that route is so long, absolutely nobody ever did it when this was current content.

The point is, as for the door specifically, size is an obstacle all of its own, separate from magical materials. As for the dungeon in general, there are several ways to the same end goal, but none of them are particularly easy, and many side goals worth pursuing on their own. If your group tries to do everything, then by the time they get to the end, the DM could say, "OK, but after all that, the imperial guards at the end are REALLY alert. Good luck..."

[BayardSPSR]

The other one was the silent character. He played a nameless, mute martial arts monk from the far east. Because that was cool. Well, not actually mute. He just never spoke. It got annoying really quickly.

In my experience this is less of a problem when you have more players, but I'd have to have one of these in a small group.

[NichG]

I'm curious: how many of us have actually had players doing things with the specific intention of bothering the GM? That's never happened to me, even from the most clownish players.

I've been in games with other players who would brag about getting away with stuff and trash talk the GM after game. One such player basically stated outright that he deserved to be able to break the game and also to be able to ruin it for the other players at will because he put so much more work into optimizing and finding the loopholes than the other players, and then tried to work out a way to convince the DM not to try to correct the situation and to just let him run roughshod over things. That campaign later fell apart, largely due to that player causing conflicts at the table making the DM and other players get burned out. I've also had a player with whom I could basically only run an antagonistic style of game, because that's what he'd always bring to the game on his end (he was a bit of a troll OOC too).

I also encounter the sentiment fairly often on GitP, usually something along the lines of 'my DM did something I didn't like, but instead of just leaving I want to get back at him' or stuff like that. Its often newer posters, and thankfully the usual advice from the regulars is 'just walk away, don't ruin everyone else's time too'.

The good thing is, this kind of situation isn't all that common. I haven't really had to deal with it from one of my players in years.

[JNAProductions]

The Elfslayer Chronicles is an old example of this.

[Solaris]

Laziness is what allows game to happen in a reasonable timespan. There exists only so much time and thought to dedicate to things, and the DM has a lot more things to keep track of running 'the world' than you do running 'your character'. Optimizing the use of that time is to the benefit of everyone at the table, because it means that the things which are actually interesting to play out get more focus. The DM can spend those thoughts on making the door really obnoxious to turn into loot, or you could spend those thoughts on statting up the enemies for the next encounter, or on figuring out some way to work in Player C's background story to help engage them in the game. If the DM decides they have to spend their thoughts on 'explicating' the door, then thats a little less detail that everything else in the world gets.

If it's really that hard to design something that takes a little more trouble to go through when we've had several posters throw things out off the tops of their heads, then either don't put an adamantine door in the dungeon, or don't be surprised when the players do what comes naturally to them.
You should also perhaps spend some of your time doing a bit of research and practice, as well, if your planning and improv skills can't handle layering defenses on something you claim has been protected and defended by powerful entities and organizations and you claim is crucial to your plot. I don't need to delve into the rulebook to decide merely touching the door guarding the tomb of the Lich-King of Agoobabooboo without speaking the password results in it radiating negative energy that drains 1d4 levels (Fort save, because rogues suck at those) while speaking the password while touching the door (as opposed to while not touching it) teleports you someplace unpleasant. You don't need to point to a page in the DMG to put it in your dungeon, either. Hard-coded rules are for the players; for DMs, they're merely a guideline.
So yes, if you produce an adamantine door and proclaim it of Vital Importance, and yet neglect to contemplate how your players will react to such a door (and nobody can honestly be surprised by players looting adamantine doors anymore), and don't put in anything to prevent their easily removing it from the wall, you are being lazy. It's not good time management, it's neglecting your due diligence.


If you truly believe that the process of trying to remove the door or the stuff you can do with that wealth is the most interesting gaming you could have had that evening, then that's fine - I might not share those tastes, but its self-consistent. However, if you're just exploiting the situation because you saw a gotcha and you want to punish the DM for a mistake, then the end result of that behavior is that everyone at the table spends an hour bored because you were feeling spiteful. That's the problem here, when 'it makes sense' is used as an excuse for making the game tedious in order to punish the DM.

Generally speaking, it's best to not assume spite and malevolence without evidence. While the end result is the same (unless, you know, you use time-skips - and if you insist on not time-skipping as a DM because you don't want them to get the door, that smells awful spiteful to me when you could just tell the players to not loot the door if you don't want them to get it), they're of two vastly different characters and thus have vastly different solutions.

Normal, non-spiteful players don't loot adamantine doors because the DM made it easy for them, they loot adamantine doors because they're great big slabs of treasure just waiting for someone with the persistence and cleverness to loot them. Players are, by and large, motivated by treasure. Your argument is essentially that someone should be surprised when they get bit after walking into the middle of the wolf pack wearing a suit of sirloin steaks, instead of realizing the nature of the beast and wearing a suit made out of anything but what those bloodthirsty savages crave most. Don't put that adamantine door down there, come up with better uses for the player's time, and tell them that they're wasting their time when they could be acquiring much more interesting shinies after passing through the door if you don't want them to loot it.

Spiteful players, on the other hand, should simply be excommunicated from the group. I'd recommend gathering slightly more evidence than "I don't like that he took time to acquire a massive, relatively easily portable, highly valuable treasure when I think he shouldn't have." I'm not saying I have all of the D&D experience in the world, but I really haven't encountered someone who operates purely out of spite without their doing a lot to make things miserable for everyone who've earned their ire.

[NichG]

Generally speaking, it's best to not assume spite and malevolence without evidence. While the end result is the same (unless, you know, you use time-skips - and if you insist on not time-skipping as a DM because you don't want them to get the door, that smells awful spiteful to me when you could just tell the players to not loot the door if you don't want them to get it), they're of two vastly different characters and thus have vastly different solutions.

The evidence in this case is the text of posts, which goes much deeper than just choosing to pursue an action in game. You'd be right, in that if this is the first time a player does something like loot the door, I shouldn't immediately conclude malevolence. But with forum posts we spend lots of time explaining not just what we'd do, but why. We make value judgements, choose directions of argument, etc. And there's lots of evidence in that content that lets one judge whether it's malevolence or not. Even with that, you'll note that I did qualify my analysis and leave open the possibility that maybe the player could just enjoy logistical challenges.


Your argument is essentially that someone should be surprised when they get bit after walking into the middle of the wolf pack wearing a suit of sirloin steaks, instead of realizing the nature of the beast and wearing a suit made out of anything but what those bloodthirsty savages crave most.

My argument is that you should set the expectation for players to be humans, not beasts. Good players are ones who understand that they have to work with you to make the game enjoyable. Maybe you shouldn't be 'surprised' at getting bitten per se, but the difference between your player being a wolf and being a human who likes steak is if you say 'hey, that hurts, stop biting me', do they stop? The antagonistic player will say 'no, its your fault for wearing steak', whereas the cooperative player will say 'oh, sorry, I didn't realize that that was causing a problem'. I do believe that you should be upset with the person who refuses to stop because your leg is tasty.

[goto124]

The door attacks you.

Sorry, my mental image of a snarling door with a huge mouth and pointy teeth is too funny to resist.

[BayardSPSR]

I've been in games with other players who would brag about getting away with stuff and trash talk the GM after game. One such player basically stated outright that he deserved to be able to break the game and also to be able to ruin it for the other players at will because he put so much more work into optimizing and finding the loopholes than the other players, and then tried to work out a way to convince the DM not to try to correct the situation and to just let him run roughshod over things. That campaign later fell apart, largely due to that player causing conflicts at the table making the DM and other players get burned out. I've also had a player with whom I could basically only run an antagonistic style of game, because that's what he'd always bring to the game on his end (he was a bit of a troll OOC too).

Wow. That's awful. Yeah, that sounds like the kind of player no one should have to GM for.


Sorry, my mental image of a snarling door with a huge mouth and pointy teeth is too funny to resist.

a snarling door with a huge mouth and pointy teeth

Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary folk, I think we have an answer to what kind of door should be used to deter players from touching it.

Plus, it'll make the metagamers think of the Tomb of Horrors.

[Solaris]

The evidence in this case is the text of posts, which goes much deeper than just choosing to pursue an action in game. You'd be right, in that if this is the first time a player does something like loot the door, I shouldn't immediately conclude malevolence. But with forum posts we spend lots of time explaining not just what we'd do, but why. We make value judgements, choose directions of argument, etc. And there's lots of evidence in that content that lets one judge whether it's malevolence or not. Even with that, you'll note that I did qualify my analysis and leave open the possibility that maybe the player could just enjoy logistical challenges.

Then by all means, explain to me how you reached such a conclusion based on what I said, with less evidence than you'd have with an interpersonal interaction. There's 'lots of evidence', so it shouldn't be hard.

If you're talking about my contempt for a DM who's so lazy as to declare something vital to the plot without putting a smidgeon of work into it, that's not malevolence. That's the sort of contempt any good author has for a hack writer or any talented actor has for Nicholas Cage; it's a disgust and repugnance, not a hostility or wish to see them brought to harm. If it detracts from the game to spend prep time on the door, then maybe it's not actually so important as you think it is. If it doesn't detract from the game, then you're just being lazy and substituting a railroad for good adventure design in a place where it's neither necessary nor desirable due to the multiplicity of alternate options presenting themselves with a minimum of effort.

I suppose you could file that contempt under 'malevolence' using the same wonky thesaurus you used to synchronize 'good time management' with 'laziness'. I mean, sure, they look rather superficially similar if you turn off the lights and squint, but their sourcing, behavioral displays, and best methods of resolution are all pretty different.


My argument is that you should set the expectation for players to be humans, not beasts. Good players are ones who understand that they have to work with you to make the game enjoyable. Maybe you shouldn't be 'surprised' at getting bitten per se, but the difference between your player being a wolf and being a human who likes steak is if you say 'hey, that hurts, stop biting me', do they stop? The antagonistic player will say 'no, its your fault for wearing steak', whereas the cooperative player will say 'oh, sorry, I didn't realize that that was causing a problem'. I do believe that you should be upset with the person who refuses to stop because your leg is tasty.

That would be why I said there were different ways for handling the two types of players, yes, and listed "Ask them to stop" towards the back.

The reason you, the DM, should stop wearing steaks for a suit is because it's much easier for the DM to adjust the window dressing (the steak suit) than it is to try forcing the players to play a completely different way (get the wolves to be obligate herbivores). While it's admirable that you have such faith in your fellow man as to think them capable of happily and completely altering their motivations and desires to suit your whims, such faith is misplaced. Remove the temptation for them to bite you, and you'll find you're happier because the players are doing what you want and the players aren't resenting you for shoehorning their actions into your ambiguously-defined set of preferences. Asking them to not loot the door is an option, but it shouldn't be your first option - much like asking the pack of wolves to not bite you is an option, but it shouldn't be your first option.

Honest, gaming works better when the rails are well hidden (or nonexistent) and the DM gives a little rather than demanding the players do so. I've found it significantly easier to play to them and their preferences rather than demanding that they adjust themselves to my own, and that is without wandering into a discussion about the DM trying to assume control over player characters and their actions. If you don't slather delicious sirloins all over things you don't want them to bite, but rather pile it on things you do want them to bite, you're happy because you're not getting bitten and they're happy because they don't have to eat salad.

Thus, I said you ought to simply stop wearing a suit made out of steak if you want the wolves to not bite you. They're fairly well-behaved and respectful beasts, much like players are, but if you present them with a temptation or provocation they're not going to be happy about it even if they have it within themselves to resist.

[Gavran]

Players are, by and large, motivated by treasure. [citation needed]

Still pretty sure most people aren't playing loot driven dungeon crawls. Still haven't seen anyone who makes claims like this comment on how stealing doors is a more reasonable use of their characters' time than doing Plot is, if they aren't (or that they are in fact mostly playing loot driven dungeon crawls.)

[Sith_Happens]

Still haven't seen anyone who makes claims like this comment on how stealing doors is a more reasonable use of their characters' time than doing Plot is, if they aren't (or that they are in fact mostly playing loot driven dungeon crawls.)

Because phat lootz helps you do Plot better and faster.

[Kurald Galain]

DM: "You enter the room at the end of the hallway. It is sparely decorated, with walls made of what seems like stone, with a large door at the far end. From what you know about metals, it appears to be made of adamantine. Etched..."
Players: "Adamantine!? Let's loot it!"
DM: "Well, etched on the door are..."
Players: "We don't care, we're taking it anyway."
DM: "But around the door frame..."
Players: "WE'RE TAKING THE DOOR!"
DM: "Fine,everyone roll saves."
Players: "Why?"
DM: "Because, as I was trying to say, the runes on the door say 'only the key holders shall ever open this door', and the runes around the doorframe cast fireball when you start tampering with it."

Ok, little exaggeration on the DM's part, but anyone ever run into a situation like this?

Kind of, sort of :smallbiggrin:

Player: We open the door.
DM: Ok, you take 12 damage.
Player: What's going on?
DM: Well, you take 12 damage.
Player: Why? What kind of damage?
DM: Stop arguing, just take the damage!

(after a few minutes of back-and-forthing like this, it turns out that in the room behind the door there was some kind of lizardman that threw a spear at us...)

[Grim Portent]

Still pretty sure most people aren't playing loot driven dungeon crawls. Still haven't seen anyone who makes claims like this comment on how stealing doors is a more reasonable use of their characters' time than doing Plot is, if they aren't (or that they are in fact mostly playing loot driven dungeon crawls.)

If the plot is solely character driven and has no pressing time restraints beyond the PCs dying of old age then increasing their wealth by any means can be a perfectly sensible thing to do.

If you're trying to build a rebellion to overthrow an evil king there's no real time issue but you need money to fund your uprising and may not trust the nobility to help you. Looting a door worth more than it's weight in gold makes perfect sense in such a situation.

If you're trying to build an evil empire then looting the door also makes perfect sense, soldiers of doom need paying after all and your elite guard need good quality weapons.

Those are the first ones into my head, largely because I adore GMing for the latter situation, but I'm sure someone who cares to think about things like plot can come up with a few more.

[NichG]

Then by all means, explain to me how you reached such a conclusion based on what I said, with less evidence than you'd have with an interpersonal interaction. There's 'lots of evidence', so it shouldn't be hard.

If you're talking about my contempt for a DM who's so lazy as to declare something vital to the plot without putting a smidgeon of work into it, that's not malevolence. That's the sort of contempt any good author has for a hack writer or any talented actor has for Nicholas Cage; it's a disgust and repugnance, not a hostility or wish to see them brought to harm. If it detracts from the game to spend prep time on the door, then maybe it's not actually so important as you think it is. If it doesn't detract from the game, then you're just being lazy and substituting a railroad for good adventure design in a place where it's neither necessary nor desirable due to the multiplicity of alternate options presenting themselves with a minimum of effort.

I suppose you could file that contempt under 'malevolence' using the same wonky thesaurus you used to synchronize 'good time management' with 'laziness'. I mean, sure, they look rather superficially similar if you turn off the lights and squint, but their sourcing, behavioral displays, and best methods of resolution are all pretty different.

If you brought that contempt to a game as a player then yeah, I'd call it a form of malevolence. It means you're more interested in being right than you are in helping to foster an enjoyable game. Given that you've outright described your outlook as contempt, I don't know that its still necessary for me to go and scrape specific quotes from your previous posts anymore?


The reason you, the DM, should stop wearing steaks for a suit is because it's much easier for the DM to adjust the window dressing (the steak suit) than it is to try forcing the players to play a completely different way (get the wolves to be obligate herbivores). While it's admirable that you have such faith in your fellow man as to think them capable of happily and completely altering their motivations and desires to suit your whims, such faith is misplaced. Remove the temptation for them to bite you, and you'll find you're happier because the players are doing what you want and the players aren't resenting you for shoehorning their actions into your ambiguously-defined set of preferences. Asking them to not loot the door is an option, but it shouldn't be your first option - much like asking the pack of wolves to not bite you is an option, but it shouldn't be your first option.

Another simple option is to not play with wolves.

[Jay R]

I'm curious: how many of us have actually had players doing things with the specific intention of bothering the GM? That's never happened to me, even from the most clownish players.

It's never happened to me. (Or if the players tried it, they totally failed.)

When I rule about what an oil flask does, the ruling is as close to realistic as I can make it. Ruling non-realistically, either to put it back on the rails or to reward lateral thinking, is unfair DMing, just in opposite directions.

If somebody tries to burn up 4-inch thick walls with an oil flask, and I allow it, that doesn't reward lateral thinking, since there was no lateral thinking done. For many D&D players, setting things on fire is as close to tunnel vision as you can get. An idea with a legitimate chance to work should have a legitimate chance to work, but flasks of oil aren't napalm. It should do only as much damage to the wall as it would add to the player's damage if he gets hit by a fireball with oil in his pack.

If the player gives me a chance, I'll tell him that it's not likely to work, but after the second time he interrupts my attempt to save his flask, I will certainly let him make the action he is so determined to make.

[DigoDragon]

My old D&D group had this bad trend of making their 'kill count' a top priority in combat. If they weren't dealing damage each round, they weren't happy. This of course leads to them not having anyone play a support role, nor did it lead itself well to teamwork (except maybe Flanking. Sometimes). I'll paraphrase an actual scene that happened once:

DM (me): "The Iridium dragon strikes you with both front claws. You take a total of 43 points of damage."
Monk: "Dang it! This thing is armored! Does it have a weakness of any kind?"
DM: "If you spend a standard action on a knowledge check, you might be able to recall some weaknesses from that old lore book you read a week ago on unique dragons. DC is 10"
Monk: *Has a modifier of +3, but doesn't want to spend the action to try)
Ranger: *Has a modifier of +8, but doesn't want to spend the action to try)
Wizard: *Has a modifier of +13, but doesn't want to spend the action to try)
Monk: "I'll just keep punching it. It'll eventually go down."

Spoiler: It didn't. Had anyone attempted the check, they would have picked up that its weakness was cold. They had cold weapons and spells! But because their top tier equipment was fire based (this dragon resisted fire) they were fighting it sub-optimally and eventually had to retreat before a TPK arrived).



The door attacks you.
Sorry, my mental image of a snarling door with a huge mouth and pointy teeth is too funny to resist.

That brings me back to the Trap Doors (http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120123103641/finalfantasy/images/2/2e/FF4PSP_Enemy_Ability_Target.png) from Final Fantasy IV.

[Solaris]

Still pretty sure most people aren't playing loot driven dungeon crawls. Still haven't seen anyone who makes claims like this comment on how stealing doors is a more reasonable use of their characters' time than doing Plot is, if they aren't (or that they are in fact mostly playing loot driven dungeon crawls.)

Try playing a D&D game without any sort of treasure. By its absence, you'll see its importance.
There's also the fact that most instances where you're likely to encounter the 'I steal the door!' scenario are some sort of dungeon-crawl, which are largely treasure hunts that involve killing things. An adamantine door is tens of thousands of gold pieces just sitting there waiting for someone with the means to loot it. I can't think of many plot situations that wouldn't benefit from the infusion of piles of treasure, at least from the PCs' perspective. The only exception is where there's something time-sensitive going on, at which point if the players stop to loot an adamantine door they deserve what happens to them.


If you brought that contempt to a game as a player then yeah, I'd call it a form of malevolence. It means you're more interested in being right than you are in helping to foster an enjoyable game. Given that you've outright described your outlook as contempt, I don't know that its still necessary for me to go and scrape specific quotes from your previous posts anymore?

You could call it that, but you'd be wrong. You're also incorrect about my motivations, but that's about what I expect out of you at this point.

You see, you have contempt for actions and behavior, and you're malevolent (or hostile) towards a person. My contempt is brought about by their actions and their childish refusal to acknowledge the consequences thereof - and, in fact, because they're actively striving to damage or destroy the game's enjoyment for everyone but themselves by forcing them to play the way they want to play, rather than the way the players would like to play. Malevolence and hostility tend to be more personal in nature, whereas my contempt for them can be abrogated simply by taking a few moments to realize the fact that the players have just as much a right to enjoy themselves as the DM does.

So yes, the burden is still on you to establish that I'm hostile in my intent.
After that, you can establish how the DM's fun trumps the player's fun, and how it's a bad thing to refuse to pander to a DM who demands the players adjust everything about themselves when the DM could, without materially changing a thing of importance, adjust to the players. That is, after all, what you're arguing here.


Another simple option is to not play with wolves.

I've found playing games by myself to be not quite as much fun.

[Maglubiyet]

When I rule about what an oil flask does, the ruling is as close to realistic as I can make it.


I find that some people have a tenuous grip on what is actually possible and not possible in the real world. Whether it's from being raised solely on a diet of manga/comics/videogames or simply being young, there is a lack of life experience that can create unrealistic expectations.

Even though we are attempting to simulate worlds of epic heroes, populated by fantastical monsters, sentient objects, aliens, etc. where the laws of physics can be bent by magic, psionics, and superscience, I still like to maintain a core of believability. You can suspend your disbelief for the remarkable if the background mundane works the way you expect. Otherwise it spirals into complete nonsense.

I've been around the block a few times, so I'm a harsh critic of the implausible. I'm not claiming to be the final authority on reality -- if someone can demonstrate to me or show me a relevant article, image, or video, I can be swayed.

[NichG]

You could call it that, but you'd be wrong. You're also incorrect about my motivations, but that's about what I expect out of you at this point.

You see, you have contempt for actions and behavior, and you're malevolent (or hostile) towards a person. My contempt is brought about by their actions and their childish refusal to acknowledge the consequences thereof - and, in fact, because they're actively striving to damage or destroy the game's enjoyment for everyone but themselves by forcing them to play the way they want to play, rather than the way the players would like to play. Malevolence and hostility tend to be more personal in nature, whereas my contempt for them can be abrogated simply by taking a few moments to realize the fact that the players have just as much a right to enjoy themselves as the DM does.

So yes, the burden is still on you to establish that I'm hostile in my intent.

Hm, so lets see. This particular quote is what bothered me most:



If these beings or organizations of immense power can think of nothing better than a slab of extraordinarily pricey metal to protect something, they deserve what happens next.


True, you're referring to in-character entities here, but in a context where the discussion is about the DM choosing to put the door there. The implication being that the DM, as the actual force behind those 'beings or organizations of immense power', is the one who deserves it.

That idea, that the DM 'deserves' what follows (which is likely the game becoming intractable if they go along with the players, or ending in a moment of unpleasant fiat), is a strong sign an antagonistic outlook.



After that, you can establish how the DM's fun trumps the player's fun, and how it's a bad thing to refuse to pander to a DM who demands the players adjust everything about themselves when the DM could, without materially changing a thing of importance, adjust to the players. That is, after all, what you're arguing here.

I'm arguing that the game as a whole - the DM and all the players together - comes first. Both the DM and players need to be able to adjust, and ideally should take actions to keep things fun and avoid things that will make the game break down.

It's not about who is right or wrong in the situation, who 'deserves' what, or about winning points in an out-of-character power struggle.


I've found playing games by myself to be not quite as much fun.

Then I'm sorry you live in a place where your only option for gaming is to play with jerks. But in my experience, most players will be reasonable if you actually try explaining and ask them to also take responsibility for the game being functional.

[Mr.Moron]

I'm arguing that the game as a whole - the DM and all the players together - comes first. Both the DM and players need to be able to adjust, and ideally should take actions to keep things fun and avoid things that will make the game break down.

I would go so far as to say if it requires a significant realignment/adjustment on that part of anyone someone is playing with the wrong group. The players and the GM should generally be on the same page and working for the same goals. If that isn't case either the GM is GMing for the wrong group, or there are one or more players in the wrong group/playing under the wrong GM.

The idea that there is somebody's fun would be "Coming First" is totally wrongheaded. When things are working correctly enjoyment is a positive-sum game.

[Yukitsu]

Given my goal as a DM should always be making a campaign that the players think is fun and memorable rather than one where I just have some kind of arbitrary influence over how they act, I can't really agree that it's on the onus of the players to change. I mean, why would I have more fun if the players decided to stop looting any of the treasure, if they didn't think away stupid problems or challenges that had obvious solutions that I didn't intend to be there? Obviously any intelligent party is going to know the rules well enough to portion out an adamantium door into blocks and sell it for a ton of money. Making my players adjust to keep that intact, I can't really fathom how that enhances my fun as a DM, and I can definitely see why the inverse is a massive dip to verisimilitude or why bullying the players into acting that way would detract from their experience.

Sometimes I think it's an ego thing when a DM says that such and such action detracts from their fun. I generally get the feeling that the DM doesn't want to admit to themselves that they were narrow sighted enough to be surprised by a much more obvious solution to what they probably thought was a clever way of challenging the party. Other times I get the impression that the DM just wants the narrative to flow in a certain way and gets upset when the players don't follow the rails or read the DM's mind to solve something in exactly the way they imagined it being solved.

That said though, my least favourite player trend is players who won't take enough initiative, they don't ask questions, they don't move the plot anywhere, either forward or sideways or anything else. Fortunately, you tend to only get one per group.

[Knaight]

Try playing a D&D game without any sort of treasure. By its absence, you'll see its importance.
There's also the fact that most instances where you're likely to encounter the 'I steal the door!' scenario are some sort of dungeon-crawl, which are largely treasure hunts that involve killing things. An adamantine door is tens of thousands of gold pieces just sitting there waiting for someone with the means to loot it. I can't think of many plot situations that wouldn't benefit from the infusion of piles of treasure, at least from the PCs' perspective. The only exception is where there's something time-sensitive going on, at which point if the players stop to loot an adamantine door they deserve what happens to them.

Exactly. D&D is an extremely treasure focused game - to the point of being more focused than several heist games I can think of (e.g. Leverage). Dungeon crawling is the sort of thing where treasure gets yet more emphasized. If you're communicating the expectation that treasure is important through the choice of system and setting, players taking that into account aren't being antagonistic.

Personally, I generally find that style of play uninteresting, and as such tend to steer away from systems and settings where it is the norm - though it is a fun niche to occasionally use.

[NichG]

Given my goal as a DM should always be making a campaign that the players think is fun and memorable rather than one where I just have some kind of arbitrary influence over how they act, I can't really agree that it's on the onus of the players to change. I mean, why would I have more fun if the players decided to stop looting any of the treasure, if they didn't think away stupid problems or challenges that had obvious solutions that I didn't intend to be there? Obviously any intelligent party is going to know the rules well enough to portion out an adamantium door into blocks and sell it for a ton of money. Making my players adjust to keep that intact, I can't really fathom how that enhances my fun as a DM, and I can definitely see why the inverse is a massive dip to verisimilitude or why bullying the players into acting that way would detract from their experience.

Sometimes I think it's an ego thing when a DM says that such and such action detracts from their fun. I generally get the feeling that the DM doesn't want to admit to themselves that they were narrow sighted enough to be surprised by a much more obvious solution to what they probably thought was a clever way of challenging the party. Other times I get the impression that the DM just wants the narrative to flow in a certain way and gets upset when the players don't follow the rails or read the DM's mind to solve something in exactly the way they imagined it being solved.

That said though, my least favourite player trend is players who won't take enough initiative, they don't ask questions, they don't move the plot anywhere, either forward or sideways or anything else. Fortunately, you tend to only get one per group.

The issue with something like the adamantine door is that its a DM mistake that has huge ramifications to the stability of the campaign, because it utterly destroys WBL. Its basically a form of accidental Monty Haul.

In that situation, where the door has already been put in place and the players spring the looting plan, there's no ideal outcome which is going to feel like a perfect, flawless game. That moment has already passed. But the question is, what do you do then? I'd say the DM ego thing would be to basically bull through and pretend like you can just make the problem go away through IC things in a way that the players won't notice - the problem is there, ignoring it won't fix things, and its going to generate even more bad feelings if the players feel like they're being punished for being clever. So what you do is to say 'Hey guys, I screwed up, and if you sell that door then WBL is going to go out the window. The game assumes a certain relationship between level and wealth and when that isn't followed then things get wonky and don't work so well. So, can we please leave off trying to loot it/lets just retcon it to be made out of something else/etc'.

Even better, if you say early on 'during game if you see me messing up in a way that's going to cause problems, could you just let me know and I'll fix it on the spot?'

[Jay R]

Given my goal as a DM should always be making a campaign that the players think is fun and memorable rather than one where I just have some kind of arbitrary influence over how they act, ....

There's a lot of assumption built in here that I think is incorrect, or at least doesn't apply to the situation.

As it happens, I think that exploring the evil hordes, facing the great lich, and winning the large treasure of gems, jewelry and magic items would probably be more fun than taking the hinge off a door and carrying it to town. Even if the players get focused on one thing, I may have more knowledge than they do about what the alternatives are.

I might even know that the appearance of the door as adamantium is an illusion, and they are spending all that time for nothing.

So describing my attempts to create the most exciting adventure I can as "hav[ing] some kind of arbitrary influence over how they act," and contrasting it to "making a campaign that the players think is fun and memorable," seems inaccurate, or at least short-sighted.

[Broken Twin]

Wouldn't the easiest WBL breaking issues be simply solved by "Once you are able to dismount and examine the door more closely, you are able to determine that it is not solid adamantine, but merely plated for strength and durability. What, did you think it was solid? Do you know how much that would cost?" :smallbiggrin:

Regardless, if your players are "loot everything that isn't strapped down, and everything that is for good measure" style, why would you put an obvious item of massive value in front of them and NOT expect them to try to take it? If you don't want the focus to be on the material (and value) of the door, don't mention the material when describing the door. In a world of magic, there's much better safeguards than mere metal anyway.

[Yukitsu]

There's a lot of assumption built in here that I think is incorrect, or at least doesn't apply to the situation.

As it happens, I think that exploring the evil hordes, facing the great lich, and winning the large treasure of gems, jewelry and magic items would probably be more fun than taking the hinge off a door and carrying it to town. Even if the players get focused on one thing, I may have more knowledge than they do about what the alternatives are.

I might even know that the appearance of the door as adamantium is an illusion, and they are spending all that time for nothing.

So describing my attempts to create the most exciting adventure I can as "hav[ing] some kind of arbitrary influence over how they act," and contrasting it to "making a campaign that the players think is fun and memorable," seems inaccurate, or at least short-sighted.

It really isn't though, the issue of the adamantium door is just emblematic of a small issue that doesn't have to be there at all. There being an interesting encounter where hypothetically I can tackle it in one way or another doesn't excuse this door being extremely narrowly focused and dull (when just opened like it were nothing interesting).

OK, so you have a jewelled room filled with liches and a bunch of magic items. This has the potential to be fun and interesting. That doesn't then detract from the fact that you've put in this arbitrary block elsewhere that A) as a player I guarantee I'm going to want to look behind and B) feel it would be greatly beneficial to me to take. If I just hadn't put that there, we could have gotten to the room with liches and jewels much more quickly, or instead of putting a door that the players would want to steal there, I could have replaced it with something interesting or interactive instead.

The problem I have with what you're saying is, is that as a DM you're promising "don't worry it gets better later guys" instead of trying to make that moment fun or interesting. Maybe it does get better, but right then and there, if I have to ever say that, I've screwed up.


The issue with something like the adamantine door is that its a DM mistake that has huge ramifications to the stability of the campaign, because it utterly destroys WBL. Its basically a form of accidental Monty Haul.

I agree, but the fault should clearly be placed on the DM in this place, not the players.

[Grim Portent]

Wouldn't the easiest WBL breaking issues be simply solved by "Once you are able to dismount and examine the door more closely, you are able to determine that it is not solid adamantine, but merely plated for strength and durability. What, did you think it was solid? Do you know how much that would cost?" :smallbiggrin:

Well the easiest way to avoid the WBL issues is to not use a brick of adamantine as an obstacle in the first place. :smalltongue:

I find myself curious as to why people would stick something like admantine furniture in front of players at levels where they wouldn't be facing adamantine wielding enemies or foes with expensive magic gear anyway. Surely no one would put a +5 Flaming Keen Vorpal Longsword wielding goblin commoner 1 in front of a level 2 party of adventurers and expect them not to take the sword, so why put furniture that outclasses their WBL so much in front of them and expect them to ignore it? Would you do the same thing with gold and jewels? :smallconfused:

[Broken Twin]

@Grim Portent: Haha, well, yes, obviously. I was more coming from the perspective of "The door's been introduced, now what?"

Really though, it's all about priorities. I'm assuming the theoretical GM is intending the door to serve as a reminder to come back later for good stuff, but that only works if the party currently has something they're prioritizing over opening/obtaining the door. If me and my team are exploring an ancient ruin for loot, you're damn skippy I'm gonna try to take what looks like the most expensive piece in there with me. If we're racing to stop the lich before he turns the world to ash... the door can wait.

[BayardSPSR]

More door talk? Okay. Why can't the door just retroactively be an illusion that hides a portal that is triggered when the appropriate key is placed in the illusory keyhole? Failing that, easy solution: "sorry, did I say adamantine? I meant steel." Or obsidian, with which it menaces spikes and blades of. Or "sorry, I meant magnetite; I was using the medieval definition based on derivation from the Latin adamare." Or "sorry, I meant that in the traditional sense, in poetic reference to the fact that it's really f#$@ing hard."

It doesn't how you do it. Making the door not adamantine, in the sense of "in the rules it says it's hard and valuable" adamantine, makes the problem evaporate like the war we were never in with Eurasia.

Of course, to do that, we have to admit that it was an error for a GM to use the word "adamantine" in front of this particular group. It's not a major error, because it can be easily corrected (see above and the rest of this thread), so no one needs to be punished for it, but we need to acknowledge it was an error to correct it.



Furthermore, let it be entered into the record that had this group not been playing D&D, which assigns sale values to materials, rewards the collection of loot, and has a WBL system to break, this problem would never have occurred. This problem is the direct product of those rules and practices.