What are the most dangerous encounters?

[Quertus]

Conceptually, what kind of encounters should put fear into the hearts of the PCs? What encounters should wise PCs do the most planning and recon to prepare for?

For context, I ask because, in another thread, it was asked how many works of fiction involve the PCs haggling for one or more entire chapters. And I responded that I wrote a spoof story where the characters actually spent 3 whole chapters on such an endeavor, because they were paranoid about how to approach a powerful shop owner.

But, since then, I've been thinking. If the campaign's focus isn't on "humans vs monsters", if PvP (or human vs human, even if it's PC vs NPC) is a thing, isn't approaching an archmage, capable of crafting magical items, in their place of power, warded against theft and intruders, a lot scarier than any monsters or dungeons that the PCs are likely to have survived? Isn't the Magic Item Shop among the scariest places the PCs will ever visit?

"But wait," you might say, "what about interacting with nobles?" Well, sure, nobles that can have commoners executed for the slightest of offenses are scary, and so one might expect any interactions with nobility (who often act as quest-givers, McGuffins, quest points, or even BBEGs or servants thereof) should demand some caution and research. And I'll agree in general, that any interactions with nobility require a certain knowledge and etiquette. But the thing is, at least in D&D, if you look at how well equipped even starting D&D PCs are, and the heroes of the source material (where the party included a king, 2 princes, and an angel), the PCs really should be nobility, familiar with interacting with nobility, not clueless commoners. So interactions with the nobility should be old hat, not something they need to plan extensively for - at least in D&D. In many other RPGs and settings, yes, this can fit the bill.

Offhand, the only kind of encounter I can think of that might be on a scale with interacting with a shopkeep at a Magic Item shop would be preparing to enter a Quarantine Zone of some sort, whether that's plague, null-magic, temporal distortion, FATAL, or some other similarly catastrophic scenario everyone would want contained.

So, what do y'all think? What class of events do you think demand that the PCs give it 100%, where even the slightest mistake, any failure to plan, might mean their death? Where what they hit the ground knowing isn't enough, and they need to actually prepare before engaging if they want to have any hope of surviving? What things are truly among the most dangerous class of encounters?

[GloatingSwine]

Encounters at sea. That's a tragedy waiting to happen.

[InvisibleBison]

I think this is almost entirely setting-specific, or perhaps genre-specific. For example, you propose a magic item shop as an enormously dangerous situation should things go wrong, but there's no reason why someone who is able to craft magic items would necessarily be a dangerous combatant. Combat ability and crafting ability are two separate things, and it's quite possible that in a given setting they aren't connected to each other, or are even mutually exclusive.

But if I had to try and answer the question, I'd say the most dangerous sort of encounter is one where you're fighting against your loved ones. In such a fight, there's almost no way to avoid suffering some sort of terrible loss, no matter how carefully you plan.

[NichG]

Conceptually, what kind of encounters should put fear into the hearts of the PCs? What encounters should wise PCs do the most planning and recon to prepare for?

For context, I ask because, in another thread, it was asked how many works of fiction involve the PCs haggling for one or more entire chapters. And I responded that I wrote a spoof story where the characters actually spent 3 whole chapters on such an endeavor, because they were paranoid about how to approach a powerful shop owner.

But, since then, I've been thinking. If the campaign's focus isn't on "humans vs monsters", if PvP (or human vs human, even if it's PC vs NPC) is a thing, isn't approaching an archmage, capable of crafting magical items, in their place of power, warded against theft and intruders, a lot scarier than any monsters or dungeons that the PCs are likely to have survived? Isn't the Magic Item Shop among the scariest places the PCs will ever visit?

"But wait," you might say, "what about interacting with nobles?" Well, sure, nobles that can have commoners executed for the slightest of offenses are scary, and so one might expect any interactions with nobility (who often act as quest-givers, McGuffins, quest points, or even BBEGs or servants thereof) should demand some caution and research. And I'll agree in general, that any interactions with nobility require a certain knowledge and etiquette. But the thing is, at least in D&D, if you look at how well equipped even starting D&D PCs are, and the heroes of the source material (where the party included a king, 2 princes, and an angel), the PCs really should be nobility, familiar with interacting with nobility, not clueless commoners. So interactions with the nobility should be old hat, not something they need to plan extensively for - at least in D&D. In many other RPGs and settings, yes, this can fit the bill.

Offhand, the only kind of encounter I can think of that might be on a scale with interacting with a shopkeep at a Magic Item shop would be preparing to enter a Quarantine Zone of some sort, whether that's plague, null-magic, temporal distortion, FATAL, or some other similarly catastrophic scenario everyone would want contained.

So, what do y'all think? What class of events do you think demand that the PCs give it 100%, where even the slightest mistake, any failure to plan, might mean their death? Where what they hit the ground knowing isn't enough, and they need to actually prepare before engaging if they want to have any hope of surviving? What things are truly among the most dangerous class of encounters?

The actual danger-of-TPK situations I've seen in play are about 1/3 'GM didn't quite grok the consequences of aspects of the system' and 2/3 'compounding long-term consequences of decisions which are hard to reverse'.

In the first category, for example, a near-TPK from 3 bog standard bandits in a random encounter on the road in an L5R campaign because of the severe death spiral that system has. An extra round or two of attacks due to surprise in the ambush, and the fact they were using bows and we were playing into the fiction as honorable sword idiots, and we were rocking -20s to hit and defend ourselves by the time we actually closed.

In the second category, wilderness travel in by the book 1e with hirelings when we rolled and found that a few of the hirelings got sick, and then discovered that the rules for traveling with sick characters means your overland speed drops precipitously - meaning that now we had to deal with 3-4 times as many random encounter rolls, which was really going to kill us. So a couple of the secretly evil PCs met in the middle of the night and gave the ill hireling 'explosive dysentery' with a mace.

Also in the second category, also in that same 1e campaign - we were in a dungeon that was 5 days of overland travel away from town, we got hit with a contact poison that basically took 12 hours to recover from and various injuries that we couldn't magically heal at any sort of reasonable rate, so we decided to barricade ourselves in a room in the dungeon overnight to rest where at least we could have barricades and traps, rather than camping on the trip home and again risking an ambush that would pick us off at our 1-2 hp left state. Of course we rolled an encounter during the night at the dungeon, but if we hadn't trapped and barricaded the room sufficiently or if we had had that encounter on the road, probably TPK.

In the second category (again), in 3e, a 'dungeon crawl classics' module where there were a bunch of sources of stat drain the pregens weren't equipped adequately to heal, and no real way to truly rest over the course of the three floors of dungeon and 12 or so combat and trap encounters. By the end, we were keeping ourselves upright by sharing a wand of Bull's Strength, which was conspicuously part of the starting gear and clearly a gimmick the module creators were trying to make happen. And we did TPK in the second-to-last fight of the module.

[Satinavian]

So, what do y'all think? What class of events do you think demand that the PCs give it 100%, where even the slightest mistake, any failure to plan, might mean their death? Where what they hit the ground knowing isn't enough, and they need to actually prepare before engaging if they want to have any hope of surviving? What things are truly among the most dangerous class of encounters?The ones initiated by intelligent NPCs.

When the PCs have lost the inforrmation gathering game and are unaware midled but the opposition has managed to collect good info about the PCs and devised a plan targetting their weaknesses with enough ressources that success seems certain if the information is accurate.

Usually those encounters are really hard and can often only be survived with some hidden trump cards. or at great cost. Or, of course, surrender.

[Quertus]

Encounters at sea. That's a tragedy waiting to happen.

Very true. -1 gamer cred to me for not realizing any water larger than a pitcher should provoke fear in adventures, and require the utmost preparation. Cornering the market on paper towels until the problem goes away being one example of a sane response to water.


I think this is almost entirely setting-specific, or perhaps genre-specific. For example, you propose a magic item shop as an enormously dangerous situation should things go wrong, but there's no reason why someone who is able to craft magic items would necessarily be a dangerous combatant. Combat ability and crafting ability are two separate things, and it's quite possible that in a given setting they aren't connected to each other, or are even mutually exclusive.

Touché. I hadn’t considered any settings where that might be true. That said, I’m drawing a blank on any setting (not just system) where great skill at crafting inherently indicates an inability to fight (outside purely stereotyped “scientists”, but I don’t know any settings where it’s guaranteed that a scientist inherently cannot hit the broad side of your character sheet with their death ray), or even one where having the *ahem* experience to be a great crafter wouldn’t make one scared that they couldn’t also have the skill to be a combatant.

Can you give an example of a setting where, just by telling me someone is a skilled crafter, I’d expect the characters to relax wrt their threat potential? Where “Don’t worry that he’s got mechs, the Death Star, the infinity gauntlet, the Eye of Azathoth, a vorpal holy avenger, and a dozen other magic artifacts, because he’s the guy who created them.” is a reasonable statement that actually puts people at ease.


But if I had to try and answer the question, I'd say the most dangerous sort of encounter is one where you're fighting against your loved ones. In such a fight, there's almost no way to avoid suffering some sort of terrible loss, no matter how carefully you plan.

Ouch. I’m not sure that has the same “I’m not experienced with this - I need to prepare” vibe, but I agree, that’s the worst.


The actual danger-of-TPK situations I've seen in play are about 1/3 'GM didn't quite grok the consequences of aspects of the system' and 2/3 'compounding long-term consequences of decisions which are hard to reverse'.

In the first category, for example, a near-TPK from 3 bog standard bandits in a random encounter on the road in an L5R campaign because of the severe death spiral that system has. An extra round or two of attacks due to surprise in the ambush, and the fact they were using bows and we were playing into the fiction as honorable sword idiots, and we were rocking -20s to hit and defend ourselves by the time we actually closed.

In the second category, wilderness travel in by the book 1e with hirelings when we rolled and found that a few of the hirelings got sick, and then discovered that the rules for traveling with sick characters means your overland speed drops precipitously - meaning that now we had to deal with 3-4 times as many random encounter rolls, which was really going to kill us. So a couple of the secretly evil PCs met in the middle of the night and gave the ill hireling 'explosive dysentery' with a mace.

Very pragmatic evil. I approve.

I’m not sure how much preparation and planning would help… ok, I guess “honorable sword idiots” could have learned from the encounter. Seems a slightly different vibe, but I guess “recon the rules of combat others use or die” could count. I’m struggling to generalize it - “underhanded foes”? Tricksters?


Also in the second category, also in that same 1e campaign - we were in a dungeon that was 5 days of overland travel away from town, we got hit with a contact poison that basically took 12 hours to recover from and various injuries that we couldn't magically heal at any sort of reasonable rate, so we decided to barricade ourselves in a room in the dungeon overnight to rest where at least we could have barricades and traps, rather than camping on the trip home and again risking an ambush that would pick us off at our 1-2 hp left state. Of course we rolled an encounter during the night at the dungeon, but if we hadn't trapped and barricaded the room sufficiently or if we had had that encounter on the road, probably TPK.

Wait. It sounds like you’ve listed both “resource attrition” and “death spiral” as your responses. And, I guess at a meta level that’s true, but it’s also a normal part of the worlds the characters live in. So it’d only be something for them to need to explicitly plan and prepare for (else Death) if it was unique to a specific area or Enemy or something.

Case in point,



In the second category (again), in 3e, a 'dungeon crawl classics' module where there were a bunch of sources of stat drain the pregens weren't equipped adequately to heal, and no real way to truly rest over the course of the three floors of dungeon and 12 or so combat and trap encounters. By the end, we were keeping ourselves upright by sharing a wand of Bull's Strength, which was conspicuously part of the starting gear and clearly a gimmick the module creators were trying to make happen. And we did TPK in the second-to-last fight of the module.

This sounds like switching from… or, rather, adding a death spiral to attrition mechanics.

And, yeah, I’ll agree, if switching between them is rough, putting both together definitely sounds like something that requires planning and preparation, requiring the utmost effort to keep from dying. Add in a third mechanic (like the “instant death” effects that older editions were known for) and it’s even worse.

[Vahnavoi]

From a game design perspective, it doesn't even make sense to talk about characters at this level of genericity. To prevent spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum arguments, you ought to be talking about players and how they assess risks in games. Which of course means paying attention to what players concretely have to do. The answers are still game specific, you can't use relative terms like "most" without specifying a framework.

[Telok]

Intelligent self replicating anything.

Not so much as a single encounter and not in "level appropriate" games. As a series of events where the characters can just progressively make the situation worse by doing things that enable more replication.

0. Do zero research and ask zero questions before setting out.
1. Activate them.
2. Leave the door open behind you when you flee.
3. Don't tell anyone. Still doing no checking and ask no questions.
4. Send others back there, not telling them what's there, giving the threat ships/abilities to expand with.
5. Lie about it when asked (to deflect blame) so civilization prepares the wrong defenses.

[Quertus]

The ones initiated by intelligent NPCs.

When the PCs have lost the inforrmation gathering game and are unaware midled but the opposition has managed to collect good info about the PCs and devised a plan targetting their weaknesses with enough ressources that success seems certain if the information is accurate.

Usually those encounters are really hard and can often only be survived with some hidden trump cards. or at great cost. Or, of course, surrender.

"Intelligent opponents", especially ones playing information warfare (at least on the "gathering information about the PCs" end), that have adapted to what they know about the party? Yeah, that's definitely something that, if the PCs have to face it, they should want to go in informed against.


From a game design perspective, it doesn't even make sense to talk about characters at this level of genericity. To prevent spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum arguments, you ought to be talking about players and how they assess risks in games. Which of course means paying attention to what players concretely have to do. The answers are still game specific, you can't use relative terms like "most" without specifying a framework.

So, I've been a zombie all day, and I'm pretty sure I'm not understanding even half of what you're saying. But the one piece I think I've been able to understand is, that you think that the focus should be on the players, right? Only... I don't know that I've ever seen players approach a Magic Item Shop with anywhere near the level of paranoia and planning and research that I've come to think that it deserves. So I feel that my point was almost that players can't be counted on to approach things reasonably, and I was then asking, what other encounters are actually in the "recon, plan, and prepare, or die" level of threat that a potentially hostile Magic Item Shop is?


Intelligent self replicating anything.

Not so much as a single encounter and not in "level appropriate" games. As a series of events where the characters can just progressively make the situation worse by doing things that enable more replication.

0. Do zero research and ask zero questions before setting out.
1. Activate them.
2. Leave the door open behind you when you flee.
3. Don't tell anyone. Still doing no checking and ask no questions.
4. Send others back there, not telling them what's there, giving the threat ships/abilities to expand with.
5. Lie about it when asked (to deflect blame) so civilization prepares the wrong defenses.

Gah. There's the slight issue of variants on this where "scouting them out" or "knowing about them" is what gives them power / causes them to replicate, or that squishy organic beings like Goblins and Humans tend to think they're intelligent and self-replicating, yet one can wade through them like they were human. So I fear the category may be slightly too broad, but, yeah, I can certainly see a subset of these being things one wouldn't want to mess up dealing with, else death may occur - and potentially on more than just an individual scale.

[Vahnavoi]

@Quertus:

A basic risk assessment matrix has two dimensions: frequency of event and severity of event. By adding those, you get a measure of risk, which then tells how seriously you ought to take it.

Without empirical data from a game setting or hard numbers from a game system to establish those dimensions, there's nothing to go on. You are just throwing ideas around, but there's no framework to compare them in.

[MonochromeTiger]

Touché. I hadn’t considered any settings where that might be true. That said, I’m drawing a blank on any setting (not just system) where great skill at crafting inherently indicates an inability to fight (outside purely stereotyped “scientists”, but I don’t know any settings where it’s guaranteed that a scientist inherently cannot hit the broad side of your character sheet with their death ray), or even one where having the *ahem* experience to be a great crafter wouldn’t make one scared that they couldn’t also have the skill to be a combatant.

Can you give an example of a setting where, just by telling me someone is a skilled crafter, I’d expect the characters to relax wrt their threat potential? Where “Don’t worry that he’s got mechs, the Death Star, the infinity gauntlet, the Eye of Azathoth, a vorpal holy avenger, and a dozen other magic artifacts, because he’s the guy who created them.” is a reasonable statement that actually puts people at ease.


Because it's a general conceit of most games that "the shop trying to sell me stuff" and "the people trying to kill me on sight using every resource at their disposal" don't have overlap outside of situations where you specifically know they want to murder you and have all those resources on hand ahead of time. It's why "the shop keeper/tavern owner is actually a retired 20th level adventurer who keeps all their old equipment under the counter and can put it on in an instant" is a gotcha moment for murder hobos and not the standard assumption for every single person running a store. Few people approach a shop selling magic items expecting the shopkeeper to randomly pull out a wand of disintegrate and start firing it off at everyone in sight because that's generally only the result of an adversarial DM/GM looking for a body count or tired of the players doing something that should've been resolved with a talk outside the game.

Further having a magic item shop isn't the same thing as that person making all those magic items personally. There are games where the only prerequisites for making magic items are crafting skills and feats you could easily get from pitifully weak NPC classes. It's like how you don't expect the bar owner to personally brew or gather the materials for every drink they sell or you don't expect the cook to go out and personally hunt every animal whose meat they prepare or every spice or herb they season it with. Additionally you don't tend to keep a business running if you kill off every person who has reason and means to buy, sure you can take the money off them later but then shockingly they have a very hard time going out to get more money to then give you for more of the goods you've randomly decided to use on them instead of giving them.

Really a bunch of the encounters listed here are less "what's dangerous and the PC should approach carefully" and more "what did the DM/GM specifically prepare to mess with them that they couldn't reasonably have prepared for".

Enemy having more foreknowledge of the players than they have of the enemy? Cool, how are they supposed to know this ahead of time short of the enemy actively letting them know since they're apparently incapable of the same level of information gathering? How do they go into surprise attacks or situations specifically designed to counter them with the level of foreknowledge needed to "scout it out" without the enemy either conveniently losing that level of super competence long enough to give warning or without already being in the mindset of approaching everything as a massive potential threat?

Self replicating enemy? Again, if they have such a lack of knowledge about them that they go in completely blind and set it all off how is that "an encounter they should fear and treat cautiously" and not "they threw something much harder at us than we expected without warning and used it as a plot hook"?

Even water encounters can be arguable because they're so universally hated that most players will just flat out avoid them unless the DM/GM forces them on the group or they're completely oblivious to how bad most rule systems handle them, and that's less to do with the threat itself and more to do with the rules being quick to drown anyone over a skill most people don't make use of.

[Quertus]

@Quertus:

A basic risk assessment matrix has two dimensions: frequency of event and severity of event. By adding those, you get a measure of risk, which then tells how seriously you ought to take it.

Without empirical data from a game setting or hard numbers from a game system to establish those dimensions, there's nothing to go on. You are just throwing ideas around, but there's no framework to compare them in.

Ah, thanks, that's words even "zombie me" can understand.

I've been ignoring the "frequency of the event" axis, concerned only with the "severity of the event" axis. In that vein, my question would be, "If you know that you're considering having this type of encounter (for example, attempting to haggle in a Magic Item Shop), what types of encounters are the most dangerous, requiring careful study, planning, and preparation in order to have any chance of success if things go wrong (again, Magic Item Shop proprietor decides to kill you for your loot) / to keep them from going wrong (knowing not to haggle with Magic Item Shop proprietor, knowing how to not insult a noble, knowing not to taunt Super Happy Fun Ball, knowing that Magic Item Shop proprietor is a Noble Super Happy Fun Ball, etc)?".

Especially given my comments about how the LotR included definite nobility, and that "dealing with nobility" should be an expected skill of D&D characters, I guess another way of looking at my question might be, "For what encounters is there information that cannot be expected to be known by the PCs by default / that can be expected to not be known by the PCs, where the difference between having and not having that information can be a literal matter of life and death to the outcome of the encounter?" Or perhaps even, "what are the most dangerous encounters that the PCs can be expected to survive / avoid with information they do not have but can be expected to be able to obtain with enough skill & effort?".

"Suddenly, the reader dies" is something one would certainly expect to kill all the characters that live in their head, alongside their entire world, all their accomplishments, everything. But it doesn't feel like the class of problem I'm trying to ask about. So I think I'm after the most dangerous problems that can reasonably be expected to be resolved or avoided by PCs who do proper research and preparation. I think that's the question I was trying to ask.

Does that make it still feel like just "throwing ideas around" to you, or does that help provide a better framework?

[Quertus]

Because it's a general conceit of most games that "the shop trying to sell me stuff" and "the people trying to kill me on sight using every resource at their disposal" don't have overlap outside of situations where you specifically know they want to murder you and have all those resources on hand ahead of time. It's why "the shop keeper/tavern owner is actually a retired 20th level adventurer who keeps all their old equipment under the counter and can put it on in an instant" is a gotcha moment for murder hobos and not the standard assumption for every single person running a store. Few people approach a shop selling magic items expecting the shopkeeper to randomly pull out a wand of disintegrate and start firing it off at everyone in sight because that's generally only the result of an adversarial DM/GM looking for a body count or tired of the players doing something that should've been resolved with a talk outside the game.

Further having a magic item shop isn't the same thing as that person making all those magic items personally. There are games where the only prerequisites for making magic items are crafting skills and feats you could easily get from pitifully weak NPC classes. It's like how you don't expect the bar owner to personally brew or gather the materials for every drink they sell or you don't expect the cook to go out and personally hunt every animal whose meat they prepare or every spice or herb they season it with. Additionally you don't tend to keep a business running if you kill off every person who has reason and means to buy, sure you can take the money off them later but then shockingly they have a very hard time going out to get more money to then give you for more of the goods you've randomly decided to use on them instead of giving them.

Really a bunch of the encounters listed here are less "what's dangerous and the PC should approach carefully" and more "what did the DM/GM specifically prepare to mess with them that they couldn't reasonably have prepared for".

Enemy having more foreknowledge of the players than they have of the enemy? Cool, how are they supposed to know this ahead of time short of the enemy actively letting them know since they're apparently incapable of the same level of information gathering? How do they go into surprise attacks or situations specifically designed to counter them with the level of foreknowledge needed to "scout it out" without the enemy either conveniently losing that level of super competence long enough to give warning or without already being in the mindset of approaching everything as a massive potential threat?

Self replicating enemy? Again, if they have such a lack of knowledge about them that they go in completely blind and set it all off how is that "an encounter they should fear and treat cautiously" and not "they threw something much harder at us than we expected without warning and used it as a plot hook"?

Even water encounters can be arguable because they're so universally hated that most players will just flat out avoid them unless the DM/GM forces them on the group or they're completely oblivious to how bad most rule systems handle them, and that's less to do with the threat itself and more to do with the rules being quick to drown anyone over a skill most people don't make use of.

The overlap between "people trying to kill you" and "people you've told you have something phenomenally valuable" or "people you've told you have the funds necessary to purchase something like that", OTOH, do have high overlap. If, in a fantasy setting, I wanted to fleece people of huge sums of money, is there much in the way of better covers than Magic Item Shop proprietor?

You're right, the class of object "Magic Item Shop shopkeep" does not exclusively contain individuals who can craft magic items. It only needs some reason why its goods on hand (if any) haven't been stolen. I think that in and of itself is good reason for investigating the shop in case it decides to initiate PvP rather than going in blind.

However, I was (with my poor wording / assumptions) asking about the subset of such shops where the shopkeep actually crafts the items themselves. In my defense, my senile mind doesn't remember a single time that the Magic Item Shop the PCs used couldn't handle upgrades to existing items or custom requests or such, in any system where there was any way to unintentionally / accidentally verify that, yes, the shopkeep makes his own items (and, in several cases, characters have intentionally verified this fact). So I may be a bit biased in that threat / probability matrix @Vahnavoi was discussing.

Regardless, there's 3 cases: 1) The shopkeep makes the items; 2) the shopkeep does not make the items, but the shop is still secure and dangerous enough that the shop has items; 3) the "shop" does not have any items. I don't see any of these as reassuring me if the shop (or "shop") decides to PvP the PCs for their items / wealth.

-----

As to your other concern? Hmmm... I guess it could be tricky to answer whether the PCs could reasonably be expected to be able to obtain information in a general sense, with no sense of the specifics of the PCs, the challenge, the world. Gandalf read the word "precious" in the libraries of Gondor, but that doesn't mean that all cursed artifacts in all settings are able to be researched.

This feels like, at best, one could make a "reasonable person" level of argument about what is and isn't reasonable. Or try to make arguments that are limited to the subset of such encounters that are researchable, with a similarly fuzzy "and enough of them should be researchable for this to be worth talking about".

I can't say that this is a pleasing discovery, but I admit it's an unforeseen weakness of question.

[Pauly]

The most dangerous encounters.

1) Threats the party is not prepared to deal with. Classic example from my past is running into a group of invisible enemies when no one in the party had detect invisibility, blind fight or anything like that. We just hadn’t considered the possibility of having to fight an invisible enemy.

2) Enemies that can’t be killed. This can be a single unkillable enemy or unlimited reinforcements. It’s a problem that can’t be solved by ‘I put my axe through it’s brain”, which is the default method of problem solving in RPGs especially D&D.

3) Mind control. Apart from the mechanical in game effects the idea of taking a player’s personal property (their character) away from them and then doing a bunch of stuff with it that they can only watch is deeply distressing to players.

4) Devious enemies. More so for social games. Things like when the PCs find out they’ve been advancing the BBEG’s cause because they trusted the wrong NPC. In a setting where the social rules prevent overt retaliation this can be very dangerous. Any BBEG like Xanatos.

[Telok]

Gah. There's the slight issue of variants on this where "scouting them out" or "knowing about them" is what gives them power / causes them to replicate, or that squishy organic beings like Goblins and Humans tend to think they're intelligent and self-replicating, yet one can wade through them like they were human. So I fear the category may be slightly too broad, but, yeah, I can certainly see a subset of these being things one wouldn't want to mess up dealing with, else death may occur - and potentially on more than just an individual scale.

Oh, right. I was thinking more of clockwork horrors, nanotech waves, tyrannid knockoffs, active wraiths, plague zombies, that sort of thing. Stuff that does quite rapid* population explosions but is fairly tame in small doses and isn't as issue if you don't actively give it opportunities to grow.

* "Rapid" is relative. On human scales humans and the like don't reproduce "rapidly". But for a theoretical low activity species they could be. Fantasy often uses elves for that. On the human scale "rapid" is often more like a couple weeks or days.

[Satinavian]

Really a bunch of the encounters listed here are less "what's dangerous and the PC should approach carefully" and more "what did the DM/GM specifically prepare to mess with them that they couldn't reasonably have prepared for".

Enemy having more foreknowledge of the players than they have of the enemy? Cool, how are they supposed to know this ahead of time short of the enemy actively letting them know since they're apparently incapable of the same level of information gathering? How do they go into surprise attacks or situations specifically designed to counter them with the level of foreknowledge needed to "scout it out" without the enemy either conveniently losing that level of super competence long enough to give warning or without already being in the mindset of approaching everything as a massive potential threat?
Usually enemies that know more about the players and can prepare don't come out of nowhere. They tend to be the result of the players having lost the information warfare earlier.

How can the players be forewarned about that ? Many ways. Jut because the enemy knows more does not mean the PCs know nothing. Often they do know that their enemies have a huge informant network or whatever. Or some of the information gathering was found out. Maybe they did finally catch the spy in their entourage knowing he has been active for months. Or maybe they once noticed the invisible summoned creature following them. I once did even the "party scies on the enemy only to find the enemy scrying on the party" thing but scrying is boring and i tend to play systems without it. Of course it is also possible that their enemies are their former patrons/allies or something like that.

It is not something the GM does specifically to screw with the party. But it does tend to mostly come up as result of earlier mistakes or defeats that brought the party in a really bad position. And a really bad position it is.

[Telok]

It is not something the GM does specifically to screw with the party. But it does tend to mostly come up as result of earlier mistakes or defeats that brought the party in a really bad position. And a really bad position it is.

Oh yeah, like the GM and two players telling the rest of the group "we've been scry & die on this evil religion a bunch, we're high enough level they'll do it back to us, you need to use some of these magic items". Repeat that a couple sessions then the GM goes "hey dumb fighter, willpower save at midnight, and are you on watch? No and no? Listen checks, five of them... All failed? Ok <many rolls> take 236 damage and make 10 fortitude saves". Then repeat that for the other characters/players who insisted the next +1 on their weapon or armor was more important than a scrying defense or teleport denial.

[GloatingSwine]

Very true. -1 gamer cred to me for not realizing any water larger than a pitcher should provoke fear in adventures, and require the utmost preparation. Cornering the market on paper towels until the problem goes away being one example of a sane response to water.



Though "at sea" is also an example of a broader set of encounters that are inherently dangerous.

If you're getting into an encounter at sea you're probably going to be encountering specialists in their favoured environment on their terms and timetable.

An adventuring party looking to get on a boat should be preparing to fight underwater and to be able to survive sinking to the bottom and walking the rest of the way.

[Vahnavoi]

@Quertus:

Let's start solving this by detailing a simple risk assessment matrix of the sort you'd find for workplace safety. It has three steps on both frequency and severity dimensions: low, mid, high. Or, in numbers: 1, 3, 5.

Low frequency means less often than once in two years. Mid frequency means once in two years. High frequency means more than once in two years.

Low severity means a person is incapacitated for at most two weeks. Mid severity means a person is incapacitated for more than two weeks. High severity means incapacitation without end - practically, in the real world, death.

So the worst risks in this matrix get a solid 10 - more than one person will die in two years. This would be intolerable risk - when addressing risks, things in this categiry would be on top of your list. The lowest risks get a 2 - someone has to take a forced leave for up to two weeks in intervals of over two years. This would be negligible risk - this is the target you're trying to achieve and once you reach it, you don't worry about it anymore.

Obviously this matrix is concerned with values real people would meet and notice at a human level. For extremely values, you might want to extend the scales. Events with no chance of incapacitation would reasonably net 0 points on the severity scale; extremely rare events would reasonably score 0 or even negative points on the frequency scale.

Now let's talk about quality of a risk: inherent risk, unmitigated risk, mitigated risk and minimal risk. Inherent risk is an event that is an ineliminable part of an activity. A simple example would be a boxing match: the inherent risk is that people are going to get hit with fists. That is the basic goal of contestants, to hit each other with fists, and you wouldn't have a boxing match without that, would you now? These are what you want to identify and get to work on.

Unmitigated risk is the placement of an event before you've done anything about it, mitigated risk is the placement once you've done at least something. So you might notice a no-rules-no-gloves boxing match has intolerable risks, so you give the contestants rukes and gloves and then redo your risk assessment. Minimal risk is what you're left with once you've done all you reasonably could. It is not given minimal risk will be negligible, it might be that even after doing all you can, the inherent risk is still intolerable. At that point, it would be wisest to just avoid the activity entirely. That is why the simple matrix doesn't concern itself with scores higher than 10 - when will you face situations where you have to rank and choose between different unavoidable risks that kill people yearly?

So, conceptually, the "most dangerous" scenarios are those where the minimal risks all stand at 10. But which specific things would those be? That's impossible to say without knowing what activity is being discussed, who the people facing it are and what they can do. Yes, travel at sea, for example, has obvious inherent risk of falling into water, but where that places on the matrix rather depends on whether you are a 10-year-old human girl or a shark.

The reason why we want to talk about players is, of course, because we're talking of games and players take inputs from game rules to base their risk assessment on: a typical player takes no precautions going into a magic item shop because nothing bad ever happens in a magic item shop. No amount of out-of-game speculation matters for that, it's all spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum before being backed by actual game events.

[King of Nowhere]

my setting assumes that the archmages that craft the really expensive items are professionals at that job, which they run full time. So you can be quite relaxed interacting with them, because they interacted with a lot of other adventurers before you. It helps that there are only a double handful such people worldwide, so they have a reputation.
Also, a lot of interaction is done by intermediaries. you enter into a regular shop, order an animated +3 spell turning shield, the employee checks on some lists and tell you you'll have to wait six months - unless you want to take one of the somewhat similar shields they have available right now. then if you order the shield he forwards the request to the available crafter, that will craft the item. Six months later, you will come collect the item. or it will be delivered to your stronghold, again by a regular employee.
I suppose in that case security during the delivery may be an issue on a regular world. But in my campaign world, the crafters and traders of magic items have a guild and they really don't like thieves, and they have access to a lot of very powerful spellcasters and a lot of money. As a result, employees of the guild can walk around with extremely expensive magic gear with no security whatsoever, just displaying the guild symbol, and nobody bothers them. At least, nobody sane bothers them, and nobody bothers them twice.


The most dangerous encounters in my campaign are those with boss level npcs. Not only they are nearly as strong as the party, but my immersion and suspension of disbelief requires that such people - who have been described as very competent and very successful - would not engage the party unless they had a realistic plan to win.

well, I suppose that time the party stormed a god's demiplane was even more dangerous, but it wasn't something that's done regularly.

[NichG]

Wait. It sounds like you’ve listed both “resource attrition” and “death spiral” as your responses. And, I guess at a meta level that’s true, but it’s also a normal part of the worlds the characters live in. So it’d only be something for them to need to explicitly plan and prepare for (else Death) if it was unique to a specific area or Enemy or something.


The point wasn't that 'death spiral makes for a dangerous encounter in general', but in that particular case the fact that the GM didn't understand that specific aspect of that game led them to tossing in a random encounter they thought would be a throw-away combat tutorial which instead ended up being a near TPK.

Whereas with resource attrition, I suppose the issue is also more general there - anything where you can make any sort of accumulative errors lends itself towards a case where you might commit to a course of action but not realize you were doomed three encounters ago because you just won't have the position to push through or to retreat. Resources are one example of where this can happen, but also big mistakes like letting a PC get kidnapped or separated from the group and then needing to get into even more danger to rescue them, or alienating all three local factions when at some future point without having at least one faction to support you is going to make certain things impossible or leave you with no friends when your group later gets framed for a crime.

[KorvinStarmast]

When the PCs have lost the inforrmation gathering game and are unaware Bingo. When the PCs are surprised or on the back foot, the encounter risk/difficulty ramps up quickly.

2) Enemies that can’t be killed. Classic example: werewolf versus only mundane weapons.

3) Mind control.
We had an enemy try to dominate my Champion Fighter a few sessions ago. Rather than removing him from the fight, that spell would have allowed the enemy to make me (a fairly powerful fighter) an added threat/danger to the party. Lucky for the party, I made my save.


The most dangerous encounters in my campaign are those with boss level npcs. Not only they are nearly as strong as the party, but my immersion and suspension of disbelief requires that such people - who have been described as very competent and very successful - would not engage the party unless they had a realistic plan to win. This. :smallsmile: I had an adult blue dragon, and her draconian underlings, in her lair last Wednesday and was not sure how smart the party would play it. This was a deadly Plus encounter in the making. The party surprised me: we never rolled initiative. The dragonborn sorcerer first paid tribute out of the party's stash, and then negotiated a deal to do a favor for the blue dragon. (Which is the next two or three sessions, taking out one of her rivals).

well, I suppose that time the party stormed a god's demiplane was even more dangerous, but it wasn't something that's done regularly. Low frequency, lethal danger, per Vahnavoi's risk assessment discussion a little furhter up. :smallwink: (That's stuff I used to do at work with some regularity ...)

[Ionathus]

So, what do y'all think? What class of events do you think demand that the PCs give it 100%, where even the slightest mistake, any failure to plan, might mean their death? Where what they hit the ground knowing isn't enough, and they need to actually prepare before engaging if they want to have any hope of surviving? What things are truly among the most dangerous class of encounters?

My answer is less about "what encounters should the PCs take seriously/plan for" and more about "what encounter do DMs need to be careful when planning?"

Assassins.

It seems like a fairly easy and even trivial fight, something that the PCs should breeze through. It's just some baddies in cloaks with poison crossbow bolts, and as soon as the PCs find and catch their attackers, the assassins will melt like tissue paper, right? In reality, I've found several elements of assassin-style ambush encounters that make the fight very swingy.

Assassins are almost impossible to catch ahead of time. Assassins are professional killers, they're not stupid thugs. They won't attack unless the odds are in their favor, unless they have a decent chance of killing their targets, and they will bide their time until the party is at its most unsuspecting.
Assassins are boring if they go last, horrifying if they go first. I'm just talking about the 5e MM statblock, but any assassin in any system is going to have similar mechanics: surprise, hitting hard and fast before the group can react or defend themselves. Using my 5e example: it's difficult to tune their poison and sneak attack damage to have a real chance of downing a PC, without also being in the "whoopsie TPK" range.
Assassins target the weak spot. Most of the normal rules and assumptions of combat don't apply. The barbarian isn't going to be their first target: the squishy wizard who can trivialize the fight with a Teleport or a Wall of Force is their first target. And poison that's tuned to work against a barbarian is going to chew through a wizard.
Assassins play for keeps. If the encounter gets away from you and the PCs lose, there's no reason for the assassins to keep them alive. They were, after all, paid to do murder. You can retcon this after the fact I suppose, say "oh no they just used the poison until the first PC was dead" and then have them capture everyone else. People will probably see through this.
Victorious assassins feel like DM fiat. At the end of the day, if an assassin is on the power-level to be a threat to the heroes, they're going to be nearly-impossible to detect. There is no preparation the PCs can do, and no telegraphing that you can do as the DM, without ruining the core "oh ****" moment of a good assassination attempt. This goes back to "boring if they go last" above. So if that encounter turns fatal, especially TPK fatal, you're going to have some bitter feelings at the table about it. It's not great encounter design to drop a surprise combat with extremely swingy numbers on your players, so if it goes wrong it will go very wrong and people will rightfully blame you.

Roleplaying, mechanical, and encounter-design factors all combine to make a particularly nasty cocktail when it comes to assassins. The first time I ran them, I was shocked by how much more effective they were than I expected. When my friend DM told me he was sending assassins after his players, I warned him that they would punch way above their weight. He came back to me later and said "holy crap you were right, I was not prepared for how close I came to killing my players and would've felt awful."

That said, assassin fights can be super fun. It's a unique combat design, and the roleplaying value of "someone powerful hates us this much" almost feels like a compliment. You just have to be super careful with them, because when they go south they go SOUTH, and the fail-state is uniquely bad.

[False God]

Tactically minded enemies. All of the defeats my parties have had have almost universally been at the hands of NPCs they've underestimated tactically.

[Quertus]

Though "at sea" is also an example of a broader set of encounters that are inherently dangerous.

If you're getting into an encounter at sea you're probably going to be encountering specialists in their favoured environment on their terms and timetable.

An adventuring party looking to get on a boat should be preparing to fight underwater and to be able to survive sinking to the bottom and walking the rest of the way.


@Yes, travel at sea, for example, has obvious inherent risk of falling into water, but where that places on the matrix rather depends on whether you are a 10-year-old human girl or a shark.

I think these two are good for painting a picture of how complex these categories can be to define.

So, why are Water encounters known to be so dangerous?

Well, one reason is the assumption that the PCs are out of their element, while their opponents are not. This is obviously not true of all parties, or even all characters within a party.

But this readily leads to a second reason: changed party dynamics. Who you can count on to do what, to cover what role, or to need protection can vary in aquatic encounters.

Which is related to a third: changed effects. D&D isn’t the only RPG to have spells or swords or guns behave differently underwater.

Also related is a fourth: new hazards. Not just the obvious “drowning”, but also things like weather hazards, slippery / moving surfaces, fire risks, being thrown overboard, sinking, and even damage to the ship.

Speaking of damaging the ship, almost every aquatic encounter is part of an escort mission. The trick being, it’s the ship that the PCs are escorting and need to protect.

Another is disparity of information. It’s generally assumed that the kraken or merfolk or sea ghouls or whatever can see your ship, but the PCs don’t become aware of such opposition until they attack.

This leads to another threat: active vs passive / reactive. As a rule, the merfolk don’t attack, and the other ship doesn’t raise the Jolly Roger, unless they like their odds. The PCs aren’t the ones performing a home invasion, they’re on the defensive, reacting to hostile action.

Worse, being out of their element, and by the nature of most aquatic encounters, the PCs rarely if ever get any kind of “home field advantage” while being on the defensive.

There’s also a bit of conditioning that leads to “for realism” issues. Not just that the GM is more likely to replace the rules with their own view of how physics work, “for realism”, but I’ve seen far more ships attacked by random (or “random”) krakens than I’ve seen ancient Dragons as random encounters, despite spending more time on land.

We can look at this list of reasons why aquatic encounters are so feared, and divine and/or compare with other similar encounters. For example, “space” has many of these characteristics, like “PCs out of their element, NPCs not”, “changes effects”, and “new hazards”. But, at the same time, Space boarding actions are much more like standard home invasions (including both/either “PCs are active” and “home field advantage”), but also being a place where the PCs are often “in their element” in a way that the NPCs are not (“hacking the other ship, letting the air out” being the most common example of a “usually PC only” action).

Now, let’s look at this example:



In the first category, for example, a near-TPK from 3 bog standard bandits in a random encounter on the road in an L5R campaign because of the severe death spiral that system has. An extra round or two of attacks due to surprise in the ambush, and the fact they were using bows and we were playing into the fiction as honorable sword idiots, and we were rocking -20s to hit and defend ourselves by the time we actually closed.
The point wasn't that 'death spiral makes for a dangerous encounter in general', but in that particular case the fact that the GM didn't understand that specific aspect of that game led them to tossing in a random encounter they thought would be a throw-away combat tutorial which instead ended up being a near TPK.


Yes, I considered that that was your point, as you certainly worded things well for that to have been your point. And I agree that “the GM tried to create a balanced (or even simple) encounter, and instead created a TPK threat, because ignorance and skill issues” is definitely, definitionally, undeniably dangerous.

Two issues.

The first issue is, as I’ve not only worded poorly, but, upon consideration, I think is a difficult topic to discuss at all, is that that answer involves looking at the problem from a different direction than I was going for. Happily, there’s some easy words, some low-hanging fruit that at least come close to describing the difference: “that’s meta”, or “that’s more meta than I was thinking”.

The second issue is, as again I worded poorly (but, this time, should have been easy to discuss), I was after a specific feel of learning (or something - I’m still struggling here). And the Union of “GM failed at encounter design” and “learning”… sounds like it would involve the players learning that the GM is a fallible human, that even CaS encounters aren’t guaranteed to be “sporty”, and produce players who are afraid to overcommit… leading to a GM trying to build scenarios designed to force players to commit heavily enough.

Anyway, that’s the 2 reasons I ignored what should have obviously been your intended point, in an attempt to move this thread towards a more monotone existence. In retrospect, that was a suboptimal decision.

So, your bandit example is obviously an example of what can happen when the GM messes up. And, arguably, every single encounter ever could fall into this category.

That said, it’s much more likely for this type of failure to occur when one can use the phrase “first” when describing the encounter: “first time in this system”, “first time against multiple opponents”, “first time running a dragon”, etc. Ignorance isn’t a prerequisite for mistakes, but it certainly contributes.

One could look at it from a different PoV, and view it as a result of the players expecting a “sporting challenge”, and the GM not delivering. This could occur by mistake, or could simply result from miscommunication of the GM had no intention of providing sporting challenges in the first place.

This of course is different from an encounter that would have been easy the way the GM pictured it, but the players misunderstood, the PCs chose differently, or the players or characters made things harder for themselves.

Which brings us to another death spiral: the death spiral of bad choices. Sometimes, a bad choice (like choosing to be an “honorable sword idiot”, writing “Fighter” on your character sheet, or alienating a plot-relevant NPC) limits your options moving forward.

Of course, from another PoV, this challenge was so difficult because of surprise by an “ambush predator”: the bandit opponents got to start pushing the PCs down the death spiral while the PCs couldn’t act. This is the kind of thing I routinely prepare against with minions / cannon fodder, decoys, or simply denying access (being invisible, or inside the vehicle until Combat starts, for example).

Or one could view this as a “Ranged vs melee” thing, where the Ranged attacker gets to start pushing the melee (melee only) guys down the death spiral first.

Or, related to that, it could be an “encounter distance” issue.

And, obviously, as I’ve mentioned “death spiral” a few times, it could be viewed as a death spiritual issue.

Point being, there are a great many ways to view this encounter when evaluating why it was so difficult, so many lessons that the GM, players, and/or characters could learn from this single incident.

And while I was originally trying to focus on… hmmm… “encounters that are super difficult going in blind, but with proper recon / planning / preparation, they can usually be aced (or avoided), to the point of being suitable (or even too easy) for CaS play”, I’ve since realized that focus was far too restrictive, as there’s far more untapped potential in this topic than I envisioned.

So instead I’m trying to paint with all the colors, and see what we can come up with.

[gbaji]

The ones initiated by intelligent NPCs.

When the PCs have lost the inforrmation gathering game and are unaware midled but the opposition has managed to collect good info about the PCs and devised a plan targetting their weaknesses with enough ressources that success seems certain if the information is accurate.

Usually those encounters are really hard and can often only be survived with some hidden trump cards. or at great cost. Or, of course, surrender.

This probably the highest danger. It's honestly one of those things that can be difficult to deal with as a GM, and one of the quickest ways for an adventuring party to just die. Sufficiently intelligent and powerful NPCs should have the ability to just kill the PCs if they know who and where they are, with the PCs having very little ability to avoid said death. Sure some of the party members may be tough enough, or have the right magic/whatever to escape. But usually about 80% of any given party can probably just straight up be killed remotely via either scry and die, or assassination if they find themselves in the crosshairs of an intelligent and resourcefull enemy NPC.

I have on occasion had to go to great lengths to rationalize why the enemy NPC *didn't* just wipe out the PCs. This goes double for really really powerful/evil NPCs. In those sorts of scenarios, it's almost a Call of Cthulhu style game. Success depends entirely on the PCs investigating and figuring out what the uber powerful bad guy is doing, and how to stop him, but if at any point that bad guy learns that they even exist at all, they are toast. And in those adventures, I make a point of reminding the players that if they leave sufficient clues (or minions left to tell the tale) of who they are and that they're working to thwart the evil guys plot, "bad things" are going to happen. That's usually sufficient. And yeah, it totally ups the scale of difficulty for the players when they know that these are the stakes.


... what other encounters are actually in the "recon, plan, and prepare, or die" level of threat that a potentially hostile Magic Item Shop is.

I guess I'm confused here though. I get that maybe you are presenting this as a whimsical hypothetical? Maybe? Because one would assume that if someone bothered to open up a shop, that they presumably, you know want to buy/sell stuff. Why kill off their customers? That just does not seem like a highly reasonable or likely source of danger for any given adventuring group IMO. I mean, unless they try to steal from said shop owner maybe? But I'm just not seeing how "haggling with the magic shop guy" is something PCs should be particularly concerned about, much less think might be a "dangerous encounter".


Classic example: werewolf versus only mundane weapons.

Hah. Yup. And that one can be quite random. We once had a fairly large group of adventurers, and realized we were being followed, but weren't sure by what/who. So we had a small sub group fall behind and hide and wait to see who was following us. Turned out to be a pack of werewolves. And yeah, our small group just thought "welp, we're dead now". We'd left our sneaky types behind and not our best fighters, so we assumed the worst. Turned out to be a slaughter (for the wolves). As it happend, our sneaky types had more magic damage capability than the big front line fighter types did. Could have gone really really bad though (don't split the party you say?).


We had an enemy try to dominate my Champion Fighter a few sessions ago. Rather than removing him from the fight, that spell would have allowed the enemy to make me (a fairly powerful fighter) an added threat/danger to the party. Lucky for the party, I made my save.

Recently ran a really high level tough scenario (the party was literally fighting the remnant of a darkness deity, and her very powerful Vampire lover). She had a following of "dark witches" (who had lots of sorcery stuff), and he had a following of vampires he'd created. Very very tough. Lots of heavily buffed up enemies (oh, there were zombies and skeletons as well, cause why not?). And lots of direct spell casting. Mostly mind control stuff too. They managed to defend against much of it (they had a couple pretty powerful spell casters themselves), but I did manage to get 2 of the PCs dominated by the time they got to the final combat without them realizing it.

Let's just say that it made the fight "interesting". Fortunately, it was a couple of the less powerful folks though. So it was more a matter of them sandbagging their attacks, "accidentally" hitting their friends, mistargetting spells, etc. Until someone finally figured it out.


I would also add that sometimes it's just a miscalculation on the part of the GM. It's one of the reasons why I always try to have a handful of minor combats/encounters before I get into anything serious in an adventure. Sometimes, you'll be surprised as the GM when you realize that "oh. no one in this group actually has the ability to get rid of <some effect you used>". And that can rapidly result in unintended TPKs. This can happen readily in encounters where the PCs are hit by surprise, and you are assuming that they have a certain amount of healing/recovery magic/abilities, such that they can be put at a disadvantage initially, but then come back over time.

In some encounters, there's like a one round almost "critical edge" condition, where things look grim for the party, but then someone manages to get an advantage, and the odds shift suddenly, and then it turns into a roll up of the enemies. Those are really really satisfying fights from the player perspective (and great when you can pull off correctly as a GM). Very difficult, takes some luck and planning, but once you get the one break you are waiting for, you've kinda got the fight. But yeah, those are the exact kinds of combat scenarios that a GM can "oops" by assuming that the PCs can handle "just a little bit more" than they really can, and accidentally overwhelm them. Or sometimes, just <someone> gets killed because they get split off from the rest, and take some huge hit (or combo of hits), and no one else is nearby to help them out.

It happens. Usually, the players are clever enough to avoiding such things. Sometimes though, they just make baffling decisions that turns what you as the GM thought would be at most a moderate encouter, into a near wipe out.

[Quertus]

I guess I'm confused here though. I get that maybe you are presenting this as a whimsical hypothetical? Maybe? Because one would assume that if someone bothered to open up a shop, that they presumably, you know want to buy/sell stuff. Why kill off their customers? That just does not seem like a highly reasonable or likely source of danger for any given adventuring group IMO. I mean, unless they try to steal from said shop owner maybe? But I'm just not seeing how "haggling with the magic shop guy" is something PCs should be particularly concerned about, much less think might be a "dangerous encounter".

Initially, the idea was quite facetious; however, by the time I made this thread, I was taking my own joke seriously.

So, imagine a world where "PvP" is a thing. Someone opens a shop. When they do, you don't know that they want to buy/sell stuff. You only know that it looks like they want to buy/sell stuff.

So as to move it out of D&D, imagine that 1 of 3 scenarios is true:

I am able to craft Infinity Stones, and am willing to sell them.
I cannot craft Infinity Stones, but I have them sitting on a shelf, where no one has stolen them.
I claim to sell Infinity Stones, but actually have no such thing, and expect to survive customers who came to buy said stones.


In which of those scenarios would you feel comfortable dealing with me on a PvP server? In which of these scenarios would you feel comfortable bringing me huge sums of cash on a PvP server?

It's difficult for me to imagine many scenarios that advertise "maximum threat" more than a sign reading "Infinity Stones for Sale!", or the more common D&D counterpart, "Magic Item Shop". It feels to me that there are few places PCs should want to do recon, ask around, find out if this person is on the level, find out how long this shop has been around, find out how many deaths and disappearances might be linked to their store, etc, than when dealing with a Magic Item Shop.

Yes, this concept started as a joke, because I wrote a story where the PCs spent 3 chapters being paranoid and investigating and performing recon and interrogating a shopkeep, rather than simply taking the "buy item X from shop Y" action. But once I started talking about it in another thread, it occurred to me that I was unable to describe their paranoia as anything but justifiable, as I could neither imagine many encounters that advertised as much potential threat, nor imagine a better way for a PvP player to earn cash & kills quickly than by opening up a fake Magic Item Shop. It's even a great ruse for Assassins, especially if it's the PCs' first visit to the town.

So, back to D&D terms, if we're on a PvP server, are you willing to hand over your magical items and huge sums of money to me simply because I have a sign saying "Magic Item Shop" over my door?

[MonochromeTiger]

Initially, the idea was quite facetious; however, by the time I made this thread, I was taking my own joke seriously.

So, imagine a world where "PvP" is a thing. Someone opens a shop. When they do, you don't know that they want to buy/sell stuff. You only know that it looks like they want to buy/sell stuff.

So as to move it out of D&D, imagine that 1 of 3 scenarios is true:

I am able to craft Infinity Stones, and am willing to sell them.
I cannot craft Infinity Stones, but I have them sitting on a shelf, where no one has stolen them.
I claim to sell Infinity Stones, but actually have no such thing, and expect to survive customers who came to buy said stones.


In which of those scenarios would you feel comfortable dealing with me on a PvP server? In which of these scenarios would you feel comfortable bringing me huge sums of cash on a PvP server?

See, this is where there's a pretty big mismatch of values. You're talking "PVP server" like it's pulling a scam in a survival game or Runescape or something where it's just an underhanded trick to take advantage of new naive players with no risk of losing anything but what's brought with you. Even in those scenarios most people will point out it's actually a bad idea assuming you'll come out on top of all of those and you deserve whatever ends up happening to you when your luck runs out.

It makes far less sense in a setting where you aren't only risking whatever gear you scrounged up for the scam and any money you have on you, you're risking your life as well.


It's difficult for me to imagine many scenarios that advertise "maximum threat" more than a sign reading "Infinity Stones for Sale!", or the more common D&D counterpart, "Magic Item Shop".

And here's another value mismatch. Your examples have been "Infinity Stones", "Death Star", and similar things, and pretty much all of them except the sword are just instant "I get whatever I want or blow up everything" buttons in their own settings. Magic item shops themselves are a conceit that pretty much exists just so going to buy and sell in towns stays relevant for adventurers who have long outpaced the need for mundane equipment but that doesn't put all magic items on par with Infinity Stones that can basically accomplish whatever the holder wants to happen or a Death Star where it will blow the planet to pieces.

If a character doesn't have things on that scale then sure they've got a shop full of magic gear, it doesn't mean they're going to be able to use all of it let alone when dealing with a party of Adventurers whose entire jobs are going out and doing that, or that they'll do it well enough to be threatening to said party. If a character does have something on that scale they have absolutely no reason to sit around in some random magic shop, they've either got what they need to have every comfort they could think of given to them or something that can wipe out any opposition and the only reason to even have a trick like this in the first place becomes "I really want to kill people" which they then don't need the shop scam for to begin with.


It feels to me that there are few places PCs should want to do recon, ask around, find out if this person is on the level, find out how long this shop has been around, find out how many deaths and disappearances might be linked to their store, etc, than when dealing with a Magic Item Shop.

Yes, this concept started as a joke, because I wrote a story where the PCs spent 3 chapters being paranoid and investigating and performing recon and interrogating a shopkeep, rather than simply taking the "buy item X from shop Y" action. But once I started talking about it in another thread, it occurred to me that I was unable to describe their paranoia as anything but justifiable, as I could neither imagine many encounters that advertised as much potential threat, nor imagine a better way for a PvP player to earn cash & kills quickly than by opening up a fake Magic Item Shop. It's even a great ruse for Assassins, especially if it's the PCs' first visit to the town.

Except it's a terrible plan.

1. If they don't have anything to sell they're basically just opening up shop, drawing in parties who are experienced and equipped enough to consider casually buying magical equipment a normal thing to come in and realize "oh this is a scam" all for the payoff of attacking the likely heavily armed adventurers to take their stuff.
2. If they do have things to sell then they'd genuinely be better off and have less risk to themselves just selling it. Person A walks into the store, is willing to put down money for item A, shopkeeper B doesn't try to stab them, parts with the item they're apparently willing to just display there for show, gets money without risking a fight they might lose and, importantly, lets person A go out to get more money to bring back later instead of killing them and cutting off all future income from them.
3. Unless this shop is in the absolute middle of nowhere with nobody around for miles everyone else around is going to start taking issue with the guy killing all the wealthy people going through their town to trade. If it's not in a vacuum you'd need to take into account that people would pretty quickly put together that the loud fighting noises coming from the shop and an adventurer or two going in and not coming out is kind of a bad sign and either quietly warn people away or subtly hire more adventurers to get the very obvious attempted serial killer out of their town before the shortsighted scheme extends to "wait the townspeople have money I can kill them too."

It's so much unnecessary risk, so many ways it can come crashing down, all for such minor gain to anybody actually capable of pulling any version of it off that they'd be better off doing the exact thing the scam revolves around them pretending to do instead.



So, back to D&D terms, if we're on a PvP server, are you willing to hand over your magical items and huge sums of money to me simply because I have a sign saying "Magic Item Shop" over my door?

And this is where terminology really hits on the value mismatch. "D&D terms" and "PVP server", one is a cooperative roleplaying game where pulling something like this on the rest of your group would probably end in arguments and getting kicked out, the other is a thing that isn't present in D&D or other tabletop RPGs at all that implies conflict between players is not only allowed but a goal and bragging point. Then we further raise questions of the conceit of "hand over your magical items and huge sums of money", they're going to get more magic items, they're willing to give money to get them, you could get the money by just giving the magic items that you'd need to have for them not to immediately walk out since you have nothing to trade.

The sign changes nothing about the situation. The job the person pulling this claims to have does nothing to change the situation. Either they have all this stuff and are arbitrarily choosing to risk their lives to murder and loot the people who go out to murder and loot professionally or they don't have any of this stuff and the complete lack of anything worth the adventurers' time means good luck getting them close enough to even do anything and still runs into the need to start a fight with people whose entire thing is going out to gut Dragons and grind Liches to dust.

It's less a malicious and cunning scheme of some criminal genius and more some extremely hubris fueled act of prolonged self destruction where the person trying it spends all their time jumping up and down tempting fate to put them out of the universe's misery in the hopes of riches that they could have gotten more safely and sustainably not trying it. At best you could argue that whoever is doing it is just out to kill people but, in that case, why bother with the trick if they supposedly have all this stuff when they can just go out and kill and likely have a much better chance of picking targets that won't pay them back in a great sword, fifty arrows, and a baker's dozen of fireballs all delivered at speed to their face.

[Vahnavoi]

There are a lot of competitive games, roleplaying games included, that are pretty much just bartering and deception, with player elimination as a possible goal for some or all relevant parties. None of the hypotheticals so far get close to actual player dynamics in those kind of games, for several reasons:

1) game theoretically, to find equilibrium strategy, all relevant parties have to be considered. You can't do credible risk assessment considering just one party, or just two parties in a (massively) multiplayer setting.

2) just as well, to find equilibrium strategy, you need complete information and a full pay-off matrix. These are game-specific, so with no actual game on the table, the hypotheticals turn into spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum.

3) actual human players bring significant amount of metagame information to the table, so they regularly do not act exactly like simple game theory would predict. Why? Because they do not perceive themselves as being part of a simple, isolated thought experiment, they naturally see themselves as a longer series of connected thought experiments. Or in terms even a zombie would understand: "I could do this, but it would be mean and other players would not play with me anymore, so I won't", as alluded to in the above post.

4) playing with real humans, one has to consider other players are not, or just suck at playing, rationally self-interested individuals. So any risk assessment would look at real psychology and motives of those players, if at all possible, rather than make assumptions.

The corollary to the above is that preoccupation with intelligent or "smart" opposition regularly misses the obvious: that a lot of people are dangerous because they are stupid and will act in ways that will harm you because they are not sufficiently held back by harm caused to them.

[GloatingSwine]

The sign changes nothing about the situation. The job the person pulling this claims to have does nothing to change the situation. Either they have all this stuff and are arbitrarily choosing to risk their lives to murder and loot the people who go out to murder and loot professionally or they don't have any of this stuff and the complete lack of anything worth the adventurers' time means good luck getting them close enough to even do anything and still runs into the need to start a fight with people whose entire thing is going out to gut Dragons and grind Liches to dust.

And even if they can consistently kill off adventurers who come in looking for magic items chances are that they can't guarantee doing it quickly and quietly enough to repeat the trick more than once per town.

Conmen need to move around often enough to be far away by the time the con is revealed.

[Quertus]

Let me try again with a few more words.

Yes, D&D, like most RPGs, is a cooperative game - at least, between the PCs. Even if there's a "no PvP" rule, that still leaves the other 8 billion (or however many) humans / humaniods / whatever that are still treating this like a PvP server. So, why would a D&D character feel safe walking into a new town, handing a shopkeep they've never met tens of thousands of gold coins, taking off their armor, rings of protection, sword, handing them over, and saying "I need these upgraded."?

If you live in a big city where the Magic Item Shop is casually outfitting the 17th level party, why wouldn't a 9th level party consider the shopkeep to be a dire threat as surely as the 17th level party itself is? If the PCs travel, why wouldn't Assassins set up a fake Magic Item Shop to use the PCs' own funds to buy the gear to kill them while they're minus several of their key items "waiting for them to be upgraded"?

And it's not just the direct threat the shopkeep poses. Why wouldn't a rival nation set up Magic Item Shops in order to gather intel on the nation's adventurers, their levels, habits, gear? Why wouldn't the Thieve's Guild want a friendly shopkeep keeping them in the know of what power of adventurers are carrying around what amount of hard cash? After all, if the PCs just sold their loot for 100k+ gold, Sleight of Hand is just a static DC 20 to steal that gold regardless of the PCs' levels. And few PCs - especially ones that didn't gather any information about the Magic Item Shop - are wise enough to notice or manipulate the selection process whereby the Thieves determine whether or not the PCs are marks worth hitting.

Given that the person running the Magic Item Shop could be an astral-projecting epic level playground determinator of a noble who kills any commoners who insult or haggle with them, or the head of the Thieve's Guild in their uber-warded place of power, or an Assassin sent to kill the PCs, or a con artist looking for the best marks, why would PCs trust the shopkeep with their most important purchases without first doing any digging? Why wouldn't they want to gather at least as much intel on a potential shopkeep as they do on a potential dungeon?

Anyway, that was the seed that spawned this thread, where I'm looking to evaluate the most dangerous encounters, and the root causes of that danger.

Huh. Maybe at some point, I should try to do the same style of breakdown on "Magic Item Shop" that I did on "Water" and "Cluelessness".

Lastly, statistically, infinity gems individually only have the power of a high-end starting character, IIRC. And (although I've never done the math), I expect a lucky starting character could probably roll up the right powers at the right levels to be able to craft equivalents to the Infinity Gems. Or stronger items, actually, with enough cheese. So (since this isn't limited to D&D) a Marvel Magic Item Shop is a much more terrifying place than its D&D counterpart - even one run by a "starting character".

[GloatingSwine]

The problem with all these conceptually hostile item shops is how they keep up the ruse after doing it more than once?

Again, conmen need to move around so they're gone once the con is rumbled.

[Satinavian]

Given that the person running the Magic Item Shop could be an astral-projecting epic level playground determinator of a noble who kills any commoners who insult or haggle with them, or the head of the Thieve's Guild in their uber-warded place of power, or an Assassin sent to kill the PCs, or a con artist looking for the best marks, why would PCs trust the shopkeep with their most important purchases without first doing any digging? Why wouldn't they want to gather at least as much intel on a potential shopkeep as they do on a potential dungeon?
Why would any of that change when going a couple of levels lower and consider normal shops and regular citizens ? Do you expect that the typical commoner has to research the typical geneal goods store to not step into some murder scheme by the shop owner to rob him ?

If not, why should that be any different for higher levels ? Does having more power both as customer and shop-owner suddenly turn everyone into sociopaths ?

[Quertus]

The problem with all these conceptually hostile item shops is how they keep up the ruse after doing it more than once?

Again, conmen need to move around so they're gone once the con is rumbled.

Well, it depends on the con in question. For example, the Head of the Thieve's Guild could run a completely legitimate Magic Item Shop, and feed information to her underlings wrt adventurers who are carrying huge sums of cash and are ripe for picking (as in Pick Pockets), or about their travel plans so "bandits" can waylay them. And, done right, do so infrequently and indirectly enough that nobody (including their own thieves) ever connect the Magic Item Shop with any wrongdoing. So if the party isn't in Information War mode when dealing with the shopkeep, they may become a statistic. Less savvy shopkeeps may be less effective, and risk getting a reputation faster, all the way up to shops that are, indeed, designed for just a single big score.

Also, the nobleman shopkeep is completely within his rights to kill all the commoners he wants. So that one stays open indefinitely as well.

But, yeah, I absolutely agree, depending on the nature of the shop, dangerous shops... no, all shops are dangerous. Certain classes of hostile shops have very limited lifespans. Thus the importance of asking about the shop, how long it's been around, who vouches for it, etc. That's... kinda the point of asking those questions.


My answer is less about "what encounters should the PCs take seriously/plan for" and more about "what encounter do DMs need to be careful when planning?"

Assassins target the weak spot. Most of the normal rules and assumptions of combat don't apply. The barbarian isn't going to be their first target: the squishy wizard who can trivialize the fight with a Teleport or a Wall of Force is their first target.

That said, assassin fights can be super fun. It's a unique combat design, and the roleplaying value of "someone powerful hates us this much" almost feels like a compliment. You just have to be super careful with them, because when they go south they go SOUTH, and the fail-state is uniquely bad.

"Assassins" and "Sporting Challenge" are definitely a "skill issue" issue. Sure.

Because I'm more of a CaW player/GM, "the Assassins killed you" isn't uniquely bad, or even bad. It's more the end result of simultaneously getting so far on the bad side of individuals who play information wars and utilize Assassins, without yourself playing information wars to misdirect the Assassins into failing to utilize surprise effectively. For example, the party that spent 3 chapters scoping out the Magic Item Shop? Anytime they were encountering something that they expected might live (such as the Magic Item Shop shopkeep, the King, an inn, whatever) and might spread rumors about them, they changed up who was party leader, what roles each individual played, what their personalities were like, etc. It was a whole party of actors and con artists, treating the world as if it were as duplicitous as themselves, written as... satire I suppose. Arguably a better/easier information war plan for most parties to implement is to tell a consistent lie, and for the "Wizard" in your example to start raging, while the "Barbarian" the Assassins ignored starts casting one of those encounter-ending spells.


Victorious assassins feel like DM fiat. At the end of the day, if an assassin is on the power-level to be a threat to the heroes, they're going to be nearly-impossible to detect. There is no preparation the PCs can do, and no telegraphing that you can do as the DM, without ruining the core "oh ****" moment of a good assassination attempt. This goes back to "boring if they go last" above. So if that encounter turns fatal, especially TPK fatal, you're going to have some bitter feelings at the table about it. It's not great encounter design to drop a surprise combat with extremely swingy numbers on your players, so if it goes wrong it will go very wrong and people will rightfully blame you.

Nah, you're focused on the combat as the gameplay, and completely ignoring all the cool CaW gameplay of knowing that "a nobleman" (someone with the power and inclination to hire Assassins) is upset with the party, and the party taking defensive actions: sending decoys of themselves to a local inn, holing up on the Astral plane, getting back in the noble's good graces, etc. Or taking offensive actions, like preemptively killing the noble, breaking in and leaving a severed beholder head in their bed as a warning, bankrupting the noble, preemptively hitting the Assassin's guild or leaving a severed Beholder's head in their guild master's bed, etc.

"The Assassins kill you" is kinda the consequence, like when you insult the king, his guards killing you is the consequence. Or when you blunder into the Magic Item Shop, strip naked, hand over all your gold, and only then notice the wet paint that gets wetter as the Assassins stab you to death.

The fight, if it happens, might have good gameplay, but it's more the coup-de-grace at the end of the long information wars / hostile "politicking" gameplay. Or, rather, knowledgeable Assassins successfully catching the party on their off foot and targeting their weaknesses is the coup-de-grace at the end of failing the long information wars / hostile politicking gameplay.

[Ionathus]

"Assassins" and "Sporting Challenge" are definitely a "skill issue" issue. Sure.

Because I'm more of a CaW player/GM, "the Assassins killed you" isn't uniquely bad, or even bad. It's more the end result of simultaneously getting so far on the bad side of individuals who play information wars and utilize Assassins, without yourself playing information wars to misdirect the Assassins into failing to utilize surprise effectively. For example,

<snip long list of cool espionage tactics>

"The Assassins kill you" is kinda the consequence, like when you insult the king, his guards killing you is the consequence. Or when you blunder into the Magic Item Shop, strip naked, hand over all your gold, and only then notice the wet paint that gets wetter as the Assassins stab you to death.

The fight, if it happens, might have good gameplay, but it's more the coup-de-grace at the end of the long information wars / hostile "politicking" gameplay. Or, rather, knowledgeable Assassins successfully catching the party on their off foot and targeting their weaknesses is the coup-de-grace at the end of failing the long information wars / hostile politicking gameplay.

Everything you just described sounds like a fantastic and unique game experience that I'd love to sink my teeth into – and I couldn't disagree more. If that's the way your table likes to play then I'm glad you're enjoying it, but I'm not talking about a game where your PCs have to switch party roles and lie constantly to everyone they meet just to have a chance of survival. That's a level of social bookkeeping that all but the most hardcore diplomacy/espionage players would balk at.

Both of my examples come straight from the 5e Monster Manual, using the bog-standard "Assassin" statblock thrown into very traditional kick-down-the-door D&D games. If you see Assassins as the fail state for a long, complex, subtle information war, then yeah their elevated risk of TPK is more justified. But most DMs who use an Assassin in 5e aren't going to come at it from that angle -- they're going to see an Assassin in the MM and throw it against their players, only realizing too late that they punch wayyyy above their CR.

EDIT: Can you please explain what "CaW" is? I'm trying and failing to infer from context and Google isn't helping at all (unless you're talking about being a member of Californians Against Waste :smallcool:)

[GloatingSwine]

Well, it depends on the con in question. For example, the Head of the Thieve's Guild could run a completely legitimate Magic Item Shop, and feed information to her underlings wrt adventurers who are carrying huge sums of cash and are ripe for picking (as in Pick Pockets), or about their travel plans so "bandits" can waylay them.

That sounds like a lot of extra expense vs. bribing the counter staff to tip them off or setting a few sharp eyed beggars on the street outside to watch.


Also, the nobleman shopkeep is completely within his rights to kill all the commoners he wants. So that one stays open indefinitely as well.

I think you've misspelled "burns down mysteriously in the night" there. The nobleman might have the right to do things, but he's not going to do it without being noticed and talked about, and adventurers are going to hear about that in taverns and help themselves to a going out of business discount not walk in to shop...

[Quertus]

Given that the person running the Magic Item Shop could be an astral-projecting epic level playground determinator of a noble who kills any commoners who insult or haggle with them, or the head of the Thieve's Guild in their uber-warded place of power, or an Assassin sent to kill the PCs, or a con artist looking for the best marks, why would PCs trust the shopkeep with their most important purchases without first doing any digging? Why wouldn't they want to gather at least as much intel on a potential shopkeep as they do on a potential dungeon?


Why would any of that change when going a couple of levels lower and consider normal shops and regular citizens ?

Um...
an astral-projecting epic level playground determinator of a noble who kills any commoners who insult or haggle with them - Probability. Sure, it's possible that an epic level character could retire to become an innkeeper. But someone who can craft epic items has to be epic level. When dealing with an innkeeper, you could be dealing with a Commoner 1. When dealing with someone who crafts epic magic items, it's guaranteed that you're not. Also, nobility don't generally retire to commoner jobs, so that part of the danger keeps them out of most vocations.
the head of the Thieve's Guild in their uber-warded place of power - The head of the Thieve's Guild could pose as any shopkeep, sure. Two Three problems. 1) there's not as much money changing hands in the general store for them to get as much information on potential high-end marks. 2) They aren't handing over 100,000 gold in cash to some farmer selling turnips the way they are to some adventurers selling their haul. 3) Nobody bats an eye at the Wizard's Guild / Magic Item Shop having uber wards to be a "place of power"; not so when the General Store is so warded. Granted, this is a bit of an error on my part, as the wards actually matter more to the Assassins (below), but it's still handy for the head of the Thieve's Guild to have certain effects giving them bonuses, and what Rogue doesn't like having a good excuse to have lots of scrolls on hand?
an Assassin sent to kill the PCs - If the PCs are known to visit a Sea Shell Sanding Shop in every town the visit, then, sure, the Assassins could open a new Sea Shell Sanding Shop in town, I guess. But, if they're actually skilled at taking out Adventurers, they're more likely to be trained to run a more ubiquitous front company, like a Magic Item Shop. Also, the PCs are likely to drop more money (and their items) at a Magic Item Shop, meaning more profits for the Assassins than if an actual Magic Item Shop got those funds, making it more worth their while to actually set up a Magic Item Shop than a Sea Shell Sanding Shop.
a con artist looking for the best marks - Um, because the "best marks" aren't buying turnips, they're dropping 10k-100k gold? Because you don't normally drop off gold at the general store, and be told, "come back in 2 weeks", whereas that's standard practice for crafting custom Magic Items?


I'm not sure how you can even ask the question, it makes that little sense to me. What am I missing here?


Do you expect that the typical commoner has to research the typical geneal goods store to not step into some murder scheme by the shop owner to rob him ?

If not, why should that be any different for higher levels ? Does having more power both as customer and shop-owner suddenly turn everyone into sociopaths ?

People don't normally send Assassins after peasant farmers. Noblemen retiring to peasant jobs isn't exactly normal, either. So there's several threats off the table.

When the penalty for theft is, say, the loss of a hand, there can be some serious cost/benefit risk analysis involved in how a shopkeep acts. But when the last con earned enough to pay to Regenerate a dozen hands, it's pretty clearly worth the risk to fleece another group of clueless adventurers who didn't bother asking around town, and just walked in to the first store they saw with the words "magic item shop", handed over hundreds of thousands in gold and valuables, and were willing to give the con artist a multi-week head start in getting out of town.

Anyone could be with the Thieve's Guild. And there's probably more people in a General Store, let alone an Inn or Brothel. So I'll grant an adventurer's purse is probably safer from the proprietor of the Magic Item Shop being the head of the Thieve's Guild than that of the farmer or merchant who just made a (relatively) big score in their prospective area, or than anyone's purse is when they pass out in the Tavern, or strip in the Brothel. Still, this one was only listed as a potential problem for the case where the PCs just turned a huge score into 100k+ gold in cash - a rare but not completely unknown occurrence for a D&D party.

[Vahnavoi]

@Quertus: let's look at this from another angle:

Distrust is expensive. Because of this, it makes sense to open with trust and only withdraw trust once something actually happens.

Game theoretical proof for this would be simple Prisoner's Dilemma versus iterated Prisoner's Dilemma without known end. In the simple version, the equilibrium strategy is for both to defect. In the iterated version, this is no longer the case. Various strategies can be posed, and one of the better simple ones is tit-for-that starting with co-operation.

In human terms, the entire strategy can be summarized with two well known phrases: "Do to others what you would like done to yourself" followed by "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth".

So, what keeps rational people from being deceptive in the short term is the prospect of long term pain in retaliation. Base deceptive strategies are hence sub-optimal and parasitic of more trusting strategies (see: evolutionary game theory).

I recall some more complex strategy recently being found better than tit-for-tat with co-operation, but I don't remember what it is. You might want to look through Google Scholar for Prisoner's Dilemma to see if there's anything there.

[Quertus]

EDIT: Can you please explain what "CaW" is? I'm trying and failing to infer from context and Google isn't helping at all (unless you're talking about being a member of Californians Against Waste :smallcool:)

CaW = Combat as War, as opposed to "Combat as Sport", or CaS. In short, in CaS, the assumption is that the GM is providing "sporting" encounters; CaW, OTOH, can function like "reality" / like a pure sandbox - you may be 1st level, but if there's an Ancient Red Dragon in that cave, there's an Ancient Red Dragon in that cave. CaW players tend to want to make informed decisions; CaS players can survive just "kicking in the door".


Everything you just described sounds like a fantastic and unique game experience that I'd love to sink my teeth into – and I couldn't disagree more. If that's the way your table likes to play then I'm glad you're enjoying it, but I'm not talking about a game where your PCs have to switch party roles and lie constantly to everyone they meet just to have a chance of survival. That's a level of social bookkeeping that all but the most hardcore diplomacy/espionage players would balk at.

In order to have a chance of survival if you tick off people who would send Assassins against you, you have to do something: placate them, threaten them, bribe them, hide, play information wars, or successfully survive the TPK potential of Assassins. Kinda like, if you bathe in Lava, you've got to do something to have a chance to survive: immunity to fire, lots of HP, Regeneration that isn't stopped by fire damage, etc. In short, don't do something fatally stupid, and expect to survive unless you do something to mitigate that death. At my tables, the potential answers are much broader than just "survive the Assassination attempt". And the assassination attempt is not "designed to be survivable".


That sounds like a lot of extra expense vs. bribing the counter staff to tip them off or setting a few sharp eyed beggars on the street outside to watch.

Absolutely a much more common practice, I'm sure.


I think you've misspelled "burns down mysteriously in the night" there. The nobleman might have the right to do things, but he's not going to do it without being noticed and talked about, and adventurers are going to hear about that in taverns and help themselves to a going out of business discount not walk in to shop...

Hahaha, indeed. Give or take the epic level part.

However, the PCs won't hear about that if they just walk into town and straight into the building with the sign that reads "Magic Item Shop" over the door. Thus the importance of asking around first.

EDIT:
@Quertus: let's look at this from another angle:

Distrust is expensive. Because of this, it makes sense to open with trust and only withdraw trust once something actually happens.

Game theoretical proof for this would be simple Prisoner's Dilemma versus iterated Prisoner's Dilemma without known end. In the simple version, the equilibrium strategy is for both to defect. In the iterated version, this is no longer the case. Various strategies can be posed, and one of the better simple ones is tit-for-that starting with co-operation.

In human terms, the entire strategy can be summarized with two well known phrases: "Do to others what you would like done to yourself" followed by "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth".

So, what keeps rational people from being deceptive in the short term is the prospect of long term pain in retaliation. Base deceptive strategies are hence sub-optimal and parasitic of more trusting strategies (see: evolutionary game theory).

I recall some more complex strategy recently being found better than tit-for-tat with co-operation, but I don't remember what it is. You might want to look through Google Scholar for Prisoner's Dilemma to see if there's anything there.

Do I read this correctly when I read this to say that, "on a PvP server", you would be willing to walk into my Magic Item Shop and plunk down all that gold and treasure, simply because you trust that to be the most rational decision in this context?

[Ionathus]

CaW = Combat as War, as opposed to "Combat as Sport", or CaS. In short, in CaS, the assumption is that the GM is providing "sporting" encounters; CaW, OTOH, can function like "reality" / like a pure sandbox - you may be 1st level, but if there's an Ancient Red Dragon in that cave, there's an Ancient Red Dragon in that cave. CaW players tend to want to make informed decisions; CaS players can survive just "kicking in the door".

Thanks for the clarification - that makes sense to me!


In order to have a chance of survival if you tick off people who would send Assassins against you, you have to do something: placate them, threaten them, bribe them, hide, play information wars, or successfully survive the TPK potential of Assassins. Kinda like, if you bathe in Lava, you've got to do something to have a chance to survive: immunity to fire, lots of HP, Regeneration that isn't stopped by fire damage, etc. In short, don't do something fatally stupid, and expect to survive unless you do something to mitigate that death. At my tables, the potential answers are much broader than just "survive the Assassination attempt". And the assassination attempt is not "designed to be survivable".

That's just...not how most people play TTRPGs. Especially D&D.

Again, I get that your table likes this and you've developed a good system for it, but you're talking like your highly-nuanced political minefield is everyone's default assumption and it just isn't.

[King of Nowhere]

Let me try again with a few more words.

Yes, D&D, like most RPGs, is a cooperative game - at least, between the PCs. Even if there's a "no PvP" rule, that still leaves the other 8 billion (or however many) humans / humaniods / whatever that are still treating this like a PvP server. So, why would a D&D character feel safe walking into a new town, handing a shopkeep they've never met tens of thousands of gold coins, taking off their armor, rings of protection, sword, handing them over, and saying "I need these upgraded."?

If you live in a big city where the Magic Item Shop is casually outfitting the 17th level party, why wouldn't a 9th level party consider the shopkeep to be a dire threat as surely as the 17th level party itself is? If the PCs travel, why wouldn't Assassins set up a fake Magic Item Shop to use the PCs' own funds to buy the gear to kill them while they're minus several of their key items "waiting for them to be upgraded"?

And it's not just the direct threat the shopkeep poses. Why wouldn't a rival nation set up Magic Item Shops in order to gather intel on the nation's adventurers, their levels, habits, gear? Why wouldn't the Thieve's Guild want a friendly shopkeep keeping them in the know of what power of adventurers are carrying around what amount of hard cash? After all, if the PCs just sold their loot for 100k+ gold, Sleight of Hand is just a static DC 20 to steal that gold regardless of the PCs' levels. And few PCs - especially ones that didn't gather any information about the Magic Item Shop - are wise enough to notice or manipulate the selection process whereby the Thieves determine whether or not the PCs are marks worth hitting.

Given that the person running the Magic Item Shop could be an astral-projecting epic level playground determinator of a noble who kills any commoners who insult or haggle with them, or the head of the Thieve's Guild in their uber-warded place of power, or an Assassin sent to kill the PCs, or a con artist looking for the best marks, why would PCs trust the shopkeep with their most important purchases without first doing any digging? Why wouldn't they want to gather at least as much intel on a potential shopkeep as they do on a potential dungeon?

Anyway, that was the seed that spawned this thread, where I'm looking to evaluate the most dangerous encounters, and the root causes of that danger.

Huh. Maybe at some point, I should try to do the same style of breakdown on "Magic Item Shop" that I did on "Water" and "Cluelessness".

Lastly, statistically, infinity gems individually only have the power of a high-end starting character, IIRC. And (although I've never done the math), I expect a lucky starting character could probably roll up the right powers at the right levels to be able to craft equivalents to the Infinity Gems. Or stronger items, actually, with enough cheese. So (since this isn't limited to D&D) a Marvel Magic Item Shop is a much more terrifying place than its D&D counterpart - even one run by a "starting character".

scams are always a possible danger, and so are robberies and theft. people take precautions against them in real life, they would do it in a campaign world too.
but the how can be extremely different, just like in the real world there are many options for security. Can't give a univocal answer.

however, the most common answer is fidelity (not sure it's the right word?). you walk into a supermarket, you don't think they are going to sell you an empty box. Why? because they have a lot of customers, if they started cheating they'd have no customers. that's totally appliable to a fantasy setting; if there is some sort of official merchant, and he sells to dozens of adventurers, then he's got every interest to keep a good reputation.
the supermarket does not worry about you stealing for a different reason: preventing all theft would cost them more than it would save, so as long as theft is below a certain treshold, they don't worry. this is perhaps less appliable to a magicmart - maybe they could keep basic potions with low security, but the really expensive stuff can't be risked.
if the arm of the law is strong enough to enforce its will even on high level people, then a simple contract could suffice to guarantee trust. but in most d&d settings the guards can't do anything to anyone past level 10. but then, retaliation by the very adventuring party you're trying to scam could be enough incentive - ok, you may win the confrontation, but you'd rather not risk it. not when you can make a trade deal that makes everyone happy.
I can see in a blank slate scenario the dilemma "but how can we be sure you're not selling us a fake magic item without testing?" "but how can I be sure you won't be stealing the item if I give it for testing" could be potentially unsolvable, but the world is not a blank slate.

my campaign world, as I mentioned, solved this issue with the merchant union. they have a massive extraplanar stronghold. they keep the souls of the only people who successfully robbed them trapped in gems hanging from the chandelier. they can let you into their stronghold and not be afraid of being robbed, because they are too powerful for a single high level party to rob (on the other hand, they do have limits on how many people they let in at the same time).
at the same time, they are politically neutral and they have a sterling reputation as supremely reliable. and the reason is that while they are extremely powerful, their power is mostly economical - they can hire anyone and outfit them too. and said economic power comes exactly from being perceived as neutral and reliable. if they started cheating, if nothing else they'd lose future deals. Somebody else may set up a rival organization, and get all the trade. All for some petty theft? even your 20th level gear won't make more than a footnote in their total wealth, they are not going to risk their long term trade dominion for it.
And shall they consider a bigger theft - say, seizing all the money that was stored for safekeeping in their vault (since they also act as a bank) and keep it for themselves - well, that would mean pissing off not just a single adventuring party, but pretty much everyone in the whole world. the merchant union is powerful, but it cannot survive against the whole world.
So, the status quo fits everyone. the merchant union get to be filthy rich with minimal risk, and adventurers and kings get to have a reliable market for magic.

Also in my campaign world, every established major power, no matter how evil, tries to respect deals and treaties. for the same reason that nations try to respect treaties; if you do not respect your trade agreements, other nations will turn hostile to you. you can expect to be cut off from any major international trade, and you will have to be careful of invasions too.

Such is the balance of power. cheating can work in the short term, but it rarely is effective in the long run. betray and kill some low level party, and you will get a small gain - but everyone will be wary of you. try it with a higher level party, and it may work a few times, but you can't expect it to last forever. and if you make too many enemies and no allies, you can expect to be gang-piled.

[KorvinStarmast]

There are a lot of competitive games, roleplaying games included, that are pretty much just bartering and deception, with player elimination as a possible goal for some or all relevant parties. Diplomacy is a nice example of such a game.


1)You can't do credible risk assessment considering just one party, or just two parties in a (massively) multiplayer setting. For some reason, some of the old play by mail games came to mind. And EVE Online.


3) actual human players bring significant amount of metagame information to the table, so they regularly do not act exactly like simple game theory would predict. Why? Because they do not perceive themselves as being part of a simple, isolated thought experiment, they naturally see themselves as a longer series of connected thought experiments. Or in terms even a zombie would understand: "I could do this, but it would be mean and other players would not play with me anymore, so I won't", as alluded to in the above post. DBAD strikes again. :smallsmile:

EDIT: Can you please explain what "CaW" I am guessing it was Combat as War.

[Vahnavoi]

Do I read this correctly when I read this to say that, "on a PvP server", you would be willing to walk into my Magic Item Shop and plunk down all that gold and treasure, simply because you trust that to be the most rational decision in this context?

Yes, I'd be willing to plunk all that gold and treasure before any player that hasn't betrayed me before, provided the pay-off matrix is analogous to that of an iterated prisoner's dilemma without known end.

I would not give it to you, specifically, because based on metagame information, I do not trust you to act rationally in that scenario. :smalltongue:

[icefractal]

I have mixed feelings on the whole "information is power" / spy-vs-spy game where researching all foes (and allies!) while simultaneously trying to reveal as little as possible about yourself is the order of the day.

On the one hand, it can be an interesting strategy consideration, can lead to some cool moments, and there are lots of class features / feats / spells which are excellent for it and otherwise don't get much use. So there are a lot of attractive factors.

But on the other hand, if you follow that to its conclusions, IME you get a very defensive play-style which involves limited interaction with any NPCs (and probably by only some of the PCs), large amounts of real-time spent on precautions and info gathering (which, realistically, should result in "nothing special" more often than not), and very seldom getting to use any kind of dramatic entrance or other "character expressing" action that isn't subtlety/caution themed. Which is not what most players want, and not even what I usually want.

[Easy e]

The most dangerous encounters in my experience are facing off against peer opponents. By that, I mean other enemies that also have classes and class abilities like players do. I.e. fighting other adventurers, shadowrunners, or the equivalent of what the characters are in the world. Those guys fight dirty and use your own tools against you!

I tend to use a lot of peer-to-peer foes in highly political/intrigue dynamics, with monsters/aliens/generic foes being in the background if present at all.

[MonochromeTiger]

There are a lot of competitive games, roleplaying games included, that are pretty much just bartering and deception, with player elimination as a possible goal for some or all relevant parties.

You're right and I misspoke (mistyped?) and didn't phrase it properly. There are any number of RPGs where suspicion or antagonism between players is a normal part, even some RPGs where a "hostile DM" dynamic is encouraged. What I meant and failed to properly say was the concept of a "PVP server" where a large population of player characters all have incentive to actively war amongst themselves isn't present in tabletop RPGs where, for the most part, the game revolves around much smaller more persistent groups of players and relies on enough maintained good will for the games to continue.


Diplomacy is a nice example of such a game.

For some reason, some of the old play by mail games came to mind. And EVE Online.

EVE Online is kind of a good example of the casual sociopathy and consequence blind behavior needed for a plan like the magic item shop trap to make sense. Massive levels of personal and emotional detachment from events, an indirect conversion rate between success and actual potential for wealth; also helps that the game itself is so dull that those moments of drama are hyped up and used as the game's main way of drawing interest, most people playing aren't going to be anywhere near those multi-million dollar disaster/scam moments. But it also kind of runs into the same issue others have pointed out with the magic item shop trick.

If it works, and that's a big if that requires multiple levels of people just not noticing or looking the other way, sure you may get a big reward but also you become a known entity for it and no one will ever trust you again. That leaves getting what you want the first time and then walking away or accepting the resulting notoriety and having everyone with a sense of self preservation or a desire to make a name for themselves going after you.

Success of those plans all rely on others willingness to trust you. If you try the plan once, whether it works or not, that trust is shot to bits for anyone and everyone who so much as hears about it.


I am guessing it was Combat as War.

They mentioned "Combat as Sport" and "Combat as War" a few times so most likely.


Yes, I'd be willing to plunk all that gold and treasure before any player that hasn't betrayed me before, provided the pay-off matrix is analogous to that of an iterated prisoner's dilemma without known end.

I would not give it to you, specifically, because based on metagame information, I do not trust you to act rationally in that scenario. :smalltongue:

And here's the simple answer to it, albeit in a more drawn out way. Magic item shop just run as a magic item shop? Everybody wins, money and equipment change hands, no risk involved to either party and both sides are free to carry on a lucrative and successful business relationship as the adventurers get more money and the shop provides more gear. Magic item shop acts as a front for assassination and theft? Trust plummets, business suffers for other shops as word spreads, and now you've not only got adventurers on the look out for it you've also got every other purveyor of magical goods suddenly having a vested interest in finding and crushing whoever made their work less simple so they can be made an example of and trust can be restored.

[gbaji]

But, yeah, I absolutely agree, depending on the nature of the shop, dangerous shops... no, all shops are dangerous. Certain classes of hostile shops have very limited lifespans. Thus the importance of asking about the shop, how long it's been around, who vouches for it, etc. That's... kinda the point of asking those questions.

Eh. This feels very "GM trying to gotcha the players here though". Putting stuff in the game that "could be" dangerous "just because" seems silly. If we assume that our characters exist in a world that itself exists purely for the GM to threaten us with deadly things we have to survive, then yeah, that makes sense (but is a crappy setting IMO). If we assume that this setting has to survive for "normal people" as well? Falls apart rapidly.


Nah, you're focused on the combat as the gameplay, and completely ignoring all the cool CaW gameplay of knowing that "a nobleman" (someone with the power and inclination to hire Assassins) is upset with the party, and the party taking defensive actions: sending decoys of themselves to a local inn, holing up on the Astral plane, getting back in the noble's good graces, etc. Or taking offensive actions, like preemptively killing the noble, breaking in and leaving a severed beholder head in their bed as a warning, bankrupting the noble, preemptively hitting the Assassin's guild or leaving a severed Beholder's head in their guild master's bed, etc.

And this uber powerful opponent can't think of anything more clever than to buy a magic shop, fill it with stuff, and then hope the adventurers wander in?

Why not an Inn instead? Why not a random stretch of road? Why not scout them out astrally while they're sleeping somewhere? I mean, why a magic shop? If there's an evil bad guy with enough power/magic to kill members of the party anyway, and the resources to do this (knows the party will be arriving in X town long enough ahead of time to set up the shop/scam), um... seems like there are better ways to do this.


"The Assassins kill you" is kinda the consequence, like when you insult the king, his guards killing you is the consequence. Or when you blunder into the Magic Item Shop, strip naked, hand over all your gold, and only then notice the wet paint that gets wetter as the Assassins stab you to death.

Except I don't know of anyone who actually does this. Usually, folks walk into a magic shop, with their full gear on, and shop. They buy things. All without taking any of their own stuff off. They sell things, but only stuff they don't need (they got an upgraded item, so they're selling their old one). I don't know anyone who walks into a magic shop, removes all of their best gear, and hands it over to the guy behind the counter. And given that this method assumes this frankly bizarre behavior by the characters, is maybe why most people are scratching their heads over it.

Know where people take off their gear? When they are in bed, sleeping. Can't wear that armor while sleeping. That mighty crown of mastery or whatever, is really uncomfortable (and talk about bed-head!). How about getting people when they are taking a bath? I mean, if you have the resources and know where the party will be, there are lots more vulnerable times to get them. You know, if you're the GM and you're really really trying to do so.

Now yes, I totally get the local thieves guild having members staked out around such places, to pickpocket adventures going to and fro. But that's not the same as "OMG we're going to be killed by the guy working behind the counter!" scenario.


CaW = Combat as War, as opposed to "Combat as Sport", or CaS. In short, in CaS, the assumption is that the GM is providing "sporting" encounters; CaW, OTOH, can function like "reality" / like a pure sandbox - you may be 1st level, but if there's an Ancient Red Dragon in that cave, there's an Ancient Red Dragon in that cave. CaW players tend to want to make informed decisions; CaS players can survive just "kicking in the door".

Right. But if we're trying to have a game that "functions like reality", we can't have an Ancient Red Dragon in that cave, if the cave is a mile away from the local town, and there's no sign of said dragon ever having attacked anyone in the past. Otherwise, putting one inside a random cave the adventurers wander into is the exact opposite of "realistic". If the cave was so easy to randomly wander into, why are the adventurers the first people in a long time (long enough that the damage in the area from the last time said dragon woke up and rampaged has been erased and forgotten by everyone) to wander in?

Now sure. If that first level group finds itself wandering hundreds of miles away from anywhere settled by actual people, and then find themselves exploring through some ancient ruins, and then find an old sealed/warded entrance, and then get that open, and it turns out there's this super powerful dragon sleeping/in-stasis inside, then yeah, that works. But how'd they get that far out from civilization, in a world that has things like Ancient Red Dragons, without ever running into something else that would have eaten that first level party already?

In a "realistic" world, anything super powerful kinda either has to already be in the world, and active, and being super powerful (so everyone knows about it), *or* it's so far out of the normal areas anyone goes, and so hard to get to, that only highly powerful and very determined people will even find where it is in the first place. If it's not, then any random numskull should have wandered by and woken/released it already (return to case one above of "super powerful thing already active in the world" now).

The only way that kind of thing happens is if the GM playing an incredibly unrealistic "gotcha" game. Just to keep the players on their toes against ridiculous threats.


However, the PCs won't hear about that if they just walk into town and straight into the building with the sign that reads "Magic Item Shop" over the door. Thus the importance of asking around first.

And? Who set up the shop? Why did that person set up the shop? Is the PC party the only group this person is targetting? If not, then why haven't dozens of other people already been killed before now, so everyone knows about it (and maybe done something about it)? If they are, then how did the person setting up the shop know that this exact party would be walking into this exact town ahead of time so they could set this up in the first place?

There are just massive holes in this entire thing. It's not "CaW". It's "GM being absurd". Let me be clear. I totally get the high risk of an adventuring party pissing off a really powerful enemy, who can use lots of resources to "get them". But this seems like a lot of effort and overhead to do this. I mean, the entire ploy basically rests on the party just happening into town, and just happening upon the shop, before "just happening" across anyone who knows that the owner of the shop kills anyone who goes inside. That seems alarmingly unlikely to happen.

If I was playing an evil/powerful NPC setting up a trap for the PCs, I wouldn't bother with a magic shop. I'd have assassins in the freaking brothel, or the Inn, or tavern (poisoned food/drink is often an easy way to deal with troublesome parties), or, well just about any place where the party might just let their guard down. Better yet, I'd have some fake quest giver handing out a quest designed to lead them right into my trap, perhaps complete with "instructions" that will increase the odds of the party being less on guard. Heck: "The great whatsit is within a chamber with a negative magic zone. Any magic items worn when you enter will have the opposite effect, so once you cross the portal you must remove your magical protective gear or suffer great harm from the guardians within". Then you clearly mark the entrance to the negative magic zone in our fake whatsit chamber, and have your assassins waiting.

You know. If you actually wanted to target just *this* adventuring party, and make sure they were as unprotected as possible. Why provide any possibility that said trap could be discovered by putting it in a public place where just any random person might wander in and discover it?


Do I read this correctly when I read this to say that, "on a PvP server", you would be willing to walk into my Magic Item Shop and plunk down all that gold and treasure, simply because you trust that to be the most rational decision in this context?

A. If it was a PvP server, only NPCs would run shops anyway, because no player could trust another stranger/player not to gank them just for coming near to them.

B. If it was a PvP server, and you were advertising that you (a player) were offering to buy/sell/trade magic items, then yes, you can bet that anyone showing up would be loaded for bear and absolutely expecting you to try to gank them.

C. If it was a PvP server, the odds that I happen to be the very first person to show up to your magic shop is vanishingly small. You'd have already built a rep for doing this to people, and the moment you broadcast opening up your "shop", 50 people would broadcast "don't do it! Quertus is just going to try to gank you".

D. If it was a PvP server, such peer2peer shops would be set up in non-pvp zones/areas anyway. For exactly the reason that no-one would ever trust someone else to not kill them during any given transaction.


I guess my point is that if this is something that happens in the world we live in, there will be rules to govern it. The idea that the one and only time it ever happens in the history of the world is when these adventurers walk into this one shop, this one time, just so the GM can go "haha. Got you!", is silly. Sure. It "could" happen. But it's just silly. Anyone powerful enough to actually take out the party in that situation could take them out in any situation. So why bother with the shop? I'm just not seeing the point here. It's not like someone so paranoid that they cast anti-scrying/teleporting/sneaking stuff around them when they sleep, and have constant watches out when walking around, teleport into a pocket dimention to bathe, and are prepared at all times for anything to attack them out of the blue, would suddenly just drop all their defenses (that apparently are present everywhere else in the world they go), just because they walked into a "magic shop".

And it's frankly absurd that any GM would assume that and thus bother setting this up in the first place.

[Jay R]

Lots of players don't really believe in PC death, so nothing that kills PCs is the greatest threat.

But give them an ooze or rust monster that can dissolve their equipment, and they start to panic.

[Telok]

Lots of players don't really believe in PC death, so nothing that kills PCs is the greatest threat.

But give them an ooze or rust monster that can dissolve their equipment, and they start to panic.

"Yeah, Evil McBadguy killed me three times last month and being burned alive was no fun. But the butler snarked at me and turned my Boots of Speed pink! Kill the butler! Kill his family! Kill his whole village! Then raise them from the dead and kill them again!"

Yup. That's a D&D player all right.

[Satinavian]

I have mixed feelings on the whole "information is power" / spy-vs-spy game where researching all foes (and allies!) while simultaneously trying to reveal as little as possible about yourself is the order of the day.

On the one hand, it can be an interesting strategy consideration, can lead to some cool moments, and there are lots of class features / feats / spells which are excellent for it and otherwise don't get much use. So there are a lot of attractive factors.

But on the other hand, if you follow that to its conclusions, IME you get a very defensive play-style which involves limited interaction with any NPCs (and probably by only some of the PCs), large amounts of real-time spent on precautions and info gathering (which, realistically, should result in "nothing special" more often than not), and very seldom getting to use any kind of dramatic entrance or other "character expressing" action that isn't subtlety/caution themed. Which is not what most players want, and not even what I usually want.
It is basically just a mirrorshades shadowrun campaign. There are many people who find those quite fun.

The problem is that in SR you play criminals and regular do stuff that your community and the vast majority of NPCs don't approve of. And you tend to piss off the powerplayers of the setting constantly. This is why you hide what you do and who you really are.
But in a normal fantasy campaign, where your actions tend to be legal if not heroic ? There is usually no justification for such paranoia. Exceptions might exist but even those rarely span whole campaigns

[Kane0]

#3 death spirals
#2 the unknown
#1 hostile DM

[Reversefigure4]

That said, assassin fights can be super fun. It's a unique combat design, and the roleplaying value of "someone powerful hates us this much" almost feels like a compliment. You just have to be super careful with them, because when they go south they go SOUTH, and the fail-state is uniquely bad.

Assassin fights are always such a hard thing to hit that fun zone on. If the assassins are too realistic, there's often no encounter at all. It's simply "You don't wake up. Somebody slit your throat in the night." (Most adventuring parties simply don't survive the idea of somebody simply coming into their inn room at night and slitting their throats, nor can your average party make the impossibly difficult Perception-at-sleeping-penalties vs Stealthy-Guy skill checks).

Yet, if you don't do this, your assassins can look like useless putzes. After all, sawing through the supports on the bridge and then attacking the party as they fall is a lot more cinematic and fun... but also a lot more risky and potentially flawed as a plan. Who would pay for incompetent assassins? Why would they make a plan like this?

"By sheer narrative coincidence, a dog barks loudly, waking you just as the assassin reaches for your throat", and now you have a cinematic fight where our heroes stagger awake, grabbing fireplace pokers to defend themselves, while the assassins look like competent and dangerous foes. And if the players trust the GM, they recognise the fun parts and roll with it, instead of having every character they make from now on keep watches in the inn and refuse to ever give their character's name to an NPC again. Because that kind of paranoia kills games dead, so it's not desirable for the players OR the GM.


It's not like someone so paranoid that they cast anti-scrying/teleporting/sneaking stuff around them when they sleep, and have constant watches out when walking around, teleport into a pocket dimention to bathe, and are prepared at all times for anything to attack them out of the blue, would suddenly just drop all their defenses (that apparently are present everywhere else in the world they go), just because they walked into a "magic shop".

And it's frankly absurd that any GM would assume that and thus bother setting this up in the first place.

Yeah, this is what I've been wondering. 'Stab them in the bath' is vastly easier, requiring far less outlay and time, but obviously doesn't work again these hyper-paranoid Quertus-dimension CaW PCs who hide from all normal interactions with society and behave exactly as you've described... yet such PCs would never fall for such a trap in the first place.

Not only have I never had a point in a real game where I've had a player ask to do research on who built a shop and when, I've never had a player even want a basic descriptor on the shop enough to realise the paint is wet. Most people are quite content with abstracting away trading thousands of gold for an Amulet of Health as involving hunting down the item, waiting for it's creation, pay half now and half on delivery, and other basic sensible precautions... which are so boring we don't even bother to play them out on screen. "Cool, now you have the Amulet" takes 2 minutes of tabletime.

Alternatively in MurderShop land, each interaction might involve days of research into each shop, establishing it's bonafides and that the shopkeeper hasn't recently been replaced by a doppleganger. Yes, realistically that probably makes sense for 100,000gp transactions. Such things aren't a casual event. But the result of 98% of that research is going to be "there's nothing to see here, it's just a magic shop", each time. One would hope the GM would at least abstract it out to some sort of skill check, if only so it takes minutes of tabletime to play out all this research, instead of hours recording each question to detail the family tree of Bob The Shopkeeper?

[King of Nowhere]

Assassin fights are always such a hard thing to hit that fun zone on. If the assassins are too realistic, there's often no encounter at all. It's simply "You don't wake up. Somebody slit your throat in the night." (Most adventuring parties simply don't survive the idea of somebody simply coming into their inn room at night and slitting their throats, nor can your average party make the impossibly difficult Perception-at-sleeping-penalties vs Stealthy-Guy skill checks).

Yet, if you don't do this, your assassins can look like useless putzes. After all, sawing through the supports on the bridge and then attacking the party as they fall is a lot more cinematic and fun... but also a lot more risky and potentially flawed as a plan. Who would pay for incompetent assassins? Why would they make a plan like this?

"By sheer narrative coincidence, a dog barks loudly, waking you just as the assassin reaches for your throat", and now you have a cinematic fight where our heroes stagger awake, grabbing fireplace pokers to defend themselves, while the assassins look like competent and dangerous foes. And if the players trust the GM, they recognise the fun parts and roll with it, instead of having every character they make from now on keep watches in the inn and refuse to ever give their character's name to an NPC again. Because that kind of paranoia kills games dead, so it's not desirable for the players OR the GM.


in my assassin fights, an assassin a bit higher level than the party would try to spring a trap, sneak attack a party member with a poisoned weapon, try to score a kill and then flee, generally by magic means. it was more of a puzzle fight than anything else, where you'd have to find a way to stop the guy from getting away. at low level there was little danger for the party, and at higher level there was always a resurrection available.
as for slitting throats in the night, while very few players want to be as paranoid as quertus, having some kind of basic alarm/protection while sleeping is normal. after all, they know assassins are after them

[False God]

Assassin fights are always such a hard thing to hit that fun zone on. If the assassins are too realistic, there's often no encounter at all. It's simply "You don't wake up. Somebody slit your throat in the night." (Most adventuring parties simply don't survive the idea of somebody simply coming into their inn room at night and slitting their throats, nor can your average party make the impossibly difficult Perception-at-sleeping-penalties vs Stealthy-Guy skill checks).

Yet, if you don't do this, your assassins can look like useless putzes. After all, sawing through the supports on the bridge and then attacking the party as they fall is a lot more cinematic and fun... but also a lot more risky and potentially flawed as a plan. Who would pay for incompetent assassins? Why would they make a plan like this?

"By sheer narrative coincidence, a dog barks loudly, waking you just as the assassin reaches for your throat", and now you have a cinematic fight where our heroes stagger awake, grabbing fireplace pokers to defend themselves, while the assassins look like competent and dangerous foes. And if the players trust the GM, they recognise the fun parts and roll with it, instead of having every character they make from now on keep watches in the inn and refuse to ever give their character's name to an NPC again. Because that kind of paranoia kills games dead, so it's not desirable for the players OR the GM.

Yeah, I've been on all sides of this. There are certainly incompetent assassins in the world who have yet to meet their ends, and all manner of penny-pinching people who would hire them. But these events are more for comedic effect and to provide the party with an enemy they can reasonably engage, defeat and gain information from. So from a game/story perspective, these "assassins" are more McGuffins for the party.

I always give my players a "sleeping" check (I do a lot of stuff with dreams and visions) and a character with insomnia one night or as generally being a light sleeper can be an absolute boon to the party in preventing "good assassins" who will often simply not attack if they can't just slaughter everyone in their sleep.

Of course, there was that one night half the party was out like rocks and yes, actually the rangers dog was the only thing that saved half of them from "you don't wake up."

[Ionathus]

Assassin fights are always such a hard thing to hit that fun zone on. If the assassins are too realistic, there's often no encounter at all. It's simply "You don't wake up. Somebody slit your throat in the night." (Most adventuring parties simply don't survive the idea of somebody simply coming into their inn room at night and slitting their throats, nor can your average party make the impossibly difficult Perception-at-sleeping-penalties vs Stealthy-Guy skill checks).

Yet, if you don't do this, your assassins can look like useless putzes. After all, sawing through the supports on the bridge and then attacking the party as they fall is a lot more cinematic and fun... but also a lot more risky and potentially flawed as a plan. Who would pay for incompetent assassins? Why would they make a plan like this?

"By sheer narrative coincidence, a dog barks loudly, waking you just as the assassin reaches for your throat", and now you have a cinematic fight where our heroes stagger awake, grabbing fireplace pokers to defend themselves, while the assassins look like competent and dangerous foes. And if the players trust the GM, they recognise the fun parts and roll with it, instead of having every character they make from now on keep watches in the inn and refuse to ever give their character's name to an NPC again. Because that kind of paranoia kills games dead, so it's not desirable for the players OR the GM.

Exactly this. Again, Quertus's table seems to enjoy their hyper-paranoid game of shadows, but it's flat-out wrong to pretend like that's the norm or even heard of at most tables. Because that style of play is extremely restrictive and most people who play TTRPGs (sword-and-sorcery games in particular) just aren't interested in litigating every miniscule NPC interaction. At the level of "you used the wrong name once and now your throat's slit in the night", it takes such a high level of DM arbitration to determine whether each individual action was "prudent" or "reckless" that you're really just at the mercy of the DM's whims (always true, but cranked up to 11 here). I know some extremely tactical TTRPG players, and none of them would be game for a margin of error that razor-thin.

[gbaji]

Well. And to be perfectly honest. In just about any game I've ever run, if, as the GM, I decide that a powerful NPC really just wants to kill the party specifically? They'll pretty much always be able to do it.

It's quite game system (and setting) dependent, I suppose. But I generally prefer to run games where the PCs are "powerful" against most normal folks (up to a pretty high level actually), but there's levels of power above them. But in most games I run, there's a pretty massive swing in terms of "who is attacking whom". This allows for the plucky heroic PCs to be able to assault some bad guys base and win. Attackers always have a leg up against any static defense (you can take the time to investigate the target, find the weaknesses, and come up with a viable plan of attack). But the same works in reverse. If the PCs allow themselves to become known problems to a sufficiently powerful bad guy, they are basically toast. It's just a matter of whether the bad guy can find and target them before they can take out said bad guy.

But I usually frame those kinds of adventures with the party being an "outside element" that the bbeg didn't plan for, so they are able to muck up said plans. So the PCs actions tend to stay ahead of the information that the bad guys have about the party, allowing them to succeed. But yeah, if they are dumb enough to do just enough to rise to the level of "serious threat to my evil plans", but then just stop continuing to investigate/attack/advance and just hang out somewhere for the bbeg to target them? That's a good guarantee that at least the more visible folks will be targeted in return. And being on the other side of that same "person who has time to plan against a static target wins" dynamic is really really bad for the PCs.

It's just hard to rationalize the bad guys *not* just killing the PCs in that kind of situation (though sometimes there's a RP rationale for other actions). And there are so many ways to do it. No amount of precautions and defenses by the PCs is going to make much difference here. Avoiding getting on the radar of someone powerful enough to do this sort of attack in the first place is the only defense. As the famous saying goes: The best defense is a good offense. The PCs need to be taking it to the bad guys. If they sit back and end up on defense instead? Bad things will happen.

Eh. It's also a good technique as a GM to keep the PC actually on course in an adventure (without actual rails). Once they engage to a certain degree, they are pretty much committed to continue. That or maybe flee to some distant land or something.

[VonKaiserstein]

Most of the excellent suggestions in this thread so far have focused on the relative deadliness of individuals laying the trap within the theoretical corrupt magic shop or kingdom, or group of assassins hired to slay the players. I would instead propose that the most destructive of non-combat encounters are any that focus around exploiting the greed of the player characters. Let's go with your magic shop- always a bit suspect, and odd, and even weirder to find a well stocked one. What if the shop offers a payment plan, with some sort of curse laid upon the items in the event the payment is not promptly deposited in the bag of holding? What if the shop keeper offers to set the players up with the source of their items? A magic item importer and reseller, who keeps no storefront, and deals only with the most exclusive customers by appointment. And now the players are walking into a lich lair, or a group of Drow seeking powerful sacrifices for Lolth, or even an ancient beholder or green dragon, more interested in acquiring servants or influence than these paltry trinkets. Because of the ego stroking of exclusivity, and the strictly word of mouth reputation, the PCs will avoid the very obvious red flags and walk right into horrible, and quite easily avoidable, danger.

In simplest terms, it's the reason the Deck of Many Things is largely held as a slayer of campaigns. Sure, they could just not draw anything, and avoid dueling Death and being locked into an otherworldly prison- but they will ALWAYS draw. Just once. Just to see what it's like. Then another, to try to fix the awful thing that happened the first time.

If you bet on the players greed, then you will win.

[Pauly]

If you bet on the players greed, then you will win.

Player paranoia is also a killer. Not as big a killer as player greed, but one to be reckoned with.

[Resileaf]

The one assassin encounter I made was in a campaign where level 5-6 was the maximum someone could get (higher level would gestalt other class levels instead of leveling up). Her first choice to kill the players (there were three controlling two characters each) was to collapse a tower she knew they would visit after killing all its inhabitants and leaving an explosive rune trap at the top, which would act as a signal for her to trigger explosive charges to collapse the tower. So that there would be an encounter, one of the explosive charges didn't explode, so the tower was heavily damaged and was minutes from collapsing instead of collapsing instantly. Having planned for such an eventuality, she had dropped stuff all over the floors of the tower, making the ground difficult terrain to make escape harder.

She then climbed the tower to intercept the PCs, set on slowing them down over killing them where they stood so they wouldn't have time to escape, using a blink dagger (which would let her dimension door across the floors to set up ambushes) to keep a healthy distance from the players, shooting poisonned bolts at their spellcasters to weaken them and force the hardier characters to slow down to help them, using illusions to misdirect them, locking and blocking doors, and finally a darkness spell when they were almost out to fight directly before making her final escape when she was hurt. Half of the PCs were unable to escape and were trapped in the collapsing rubble. Two of those died before they could be dug out.

It was a very exciting battle for everyone involved and although it was most certainly unbalanced in the assassin's favor, it did not feel unfair for it.

[Lord Torath]

In simplest terms, it's the reason the Deck of Many Things is largely held as a slayer of campaigns. Sure, they could just not draw anything, and avoid dueling Death and being locked into an otherworldly prison- but they will ALWAYS draw. Just once. Just to see what it's like. Then another, to try to fix the awful thing that happened the first time.Or one of the PCs is a wild mage, and they end up 20th level with 5 castles, 3 henchmen, all stats at 18, two dozen assorted magic items and weapons, a handful of wishes, a couple million gp's worth of gems and jewelry, and a dozen or so "Get of out Jail Free" cards. And seven different treasure maps. :smallamused:

[gatorized]

Touché. I hadn’t considered any settings where that might be true. That said, I’m drawing a blank on any setting (not just system) where great skill at crafting inherently indicates an inability to fight (outside purely stereotyped “scientists”, but I don’t know any settings where it’s guaranteed that a scientist inherently cannot hit the broad side of your character sheet with their death ray), or even one where having the *ahem* experience to be a great crafter wouldn’t make one scared that they couldn’t also have the skill to be a combatant.

Can you give an example of a setting where, just by telling me someone is a skilled crafter, I’d expect the characters to relax wrt their threat potential? Where “Don’t worry that he’s got mechs, the Death Star, the infinity gauntlet, the Eye of Azathoth, a vorpal holy avenger, and a dozen other magic artifacts, because he’s the guy who created them.” is a reasonable statement that actually puts people at ease.


Being able to make a bunch of scary weapons doesn't mean you actually know how to use them.

The majority of people involved in the death star's construction have zero ability to make it fire.

My wizard can make magic two handed swords, but he can't lift one.

[gbaji]

We all know that the best swordsman is never the guy the master swordscrafter makes the sword for, but the master swordcrafter himself, right? Oh wait! That's almost never the case.

And I'm pretty sure we can assume that the folks working the machining line at Smith and Wesson are all expert shots.

And a random engineer who designed the targetting system for a missile system can actually use said system better than the folks trained on it.

Next you'll be saying that the top jockeys all breed and train the horses they ride.

It's also apparent that all the best forumla race drivers are the folks who work in the factories designing and building formula race cars, right?

The people who design/program video games are all the best at playing them.

The scientists who design and build advanced medical equipment are all the best doctors and surgeons too!


This is literally an assumption that is nearly 100% wrong in every single field that exists, like anywhere, or at any time. No. There is zero expecation that the person who merely designs and/or builds something is at all good at using that something effectively. I get that in a magic themed game setting maybe the idea of the artificer being also a skilled magician is somewhat valid. But only if that person was already a super powerful wizard first, who then decided to make items as a hobby on the side. Someone who is a podunk wizard, and decides to make minor magic items and sell them to folks to make a living is presumably not going to be terribly great at actually using magic to fight anyone.

I'm also a bit baffled at the "extreme" end point being assumed here. Let's leave "rare/unique artifacts" off the table as something that said random shop owner has in the shop, let alone that he created them himself. If we're assuming Vecna level power in the first place, then I kinda return right to the "why bother with the shop?" question.

[Pauly]

It's also apparent that all the best forumla race drivers are the folks who work in the factories designing and building formula race cars, right?
.

Jack Brabham has entered the conversation.

[King of Nowhere]

We all know that the best swordsman is never the guy the master swordscrafter makes the sword for, but the master swordcrafter himself, right? Oh wait! That's almost never the case.

And I'm pretty sure we can assume that the folks working the machining line at Smith and Wesson are all expert shots.

And a random engineer who designed the targetting system for a missile system can actually use said system better than the folks trained on it.

Next you'll be saying that the top jockeys all breed and train the horses they ride.

It's also apparent that all the best forumla race drivers are the folks who work in the factories designing and building formula race cars, right?

The people who design/program video games are all the best at playing them.

The scientists who design and build advanced medical equipment are all the best doctors and surgeons too!


This is literally an assumption that is nearly 100% wrong in every single field that exists, like anywhere, or at any time. No. There is zero expecation that the person who merely designs and/or builds something is at all good at using that something effectively. I get that in a magic themed game setting maybe the idea of the artificer being also a skilled magician is somewhat valid. But only if that person was already a super powerful wizard first, who then decided to make items as a hobby on the side. Someone who is a podunk wizard, and decides to make minor magic items and sell them to folks to make a living is presumably not going to be terribly great at actually using magic to fight anyone.

I'm also a bit baffled at the "extreme" end point being assumed here. Let's leave "rare/unique artifacts" off the table as something that said random shop owner has in the shop, let alone that he created them himself. If we're assuming Vecna level power in the first place, then I kinda return right to the "why bother with the shop?" question.

indeed. even in the case of high end items, I always assume that the casters making them are far less combat-ready than wizards actually trained for combat. they'd have bad dex and con, because they're not exercicing regularly. no combat-oriented feats. in an actual fight, they'd be likely to either panic and just throw the first high level spell that comes to mind, no matter how inappropriate to the target (like trying a dominate monster on a monk) or they'd just try to flee via teleport.
mind you, they are still high level casters, and therefore powerful and potentially dangerous; they certainly do not need to hire the 1st level party to clear the dire rats out of the basement. they are just nowhere near as dangerous as an equally high level caster that adventures and trains for combat on a regular basis.

[awa]

but but, if the wizard is not also the best swordsmen then it might suggest that giving magic items to the fighter might be a better use of his abilities then showing the sword scrubs how worthless they are, oh my immersion it has been maimed and disemboweled. How can a magic man every be inferior to a not magic man in an attribute or ability :smallsmile:.

[Olive_Sophia]

Practically any encounter at level 1. (In D&D that is) It gets swingy fast when everyone is pretty much throwing around unmodified dice.

Otherwise, a lot of times it comes down to scale. Encounters that are scaled up too far, either by mistake or due to the nature of the scenario. It's easy to see that it's dangerous when the DM throws a way over-CR monster at the party. But when the story demands that you defend a town or city during a siege, careless decisions about positioning can quickly leave the party outnumbered and outgunned, even if the encounter could have been well survivable otherwise. Nobody wants to eat 20 arrows a round.

[gatorized]

Without knowing anything about system, setting, power level, or genre assumptions, I would say that any situation that may result in players losing actions or turns will pretty much always be dangerous no matter how skilled the player or strong the character. No matter what your goals, if you don't have agency, you can't advance them.