Why do they do it?!

[Traab]

Every wizard/lord/lich/whatever who has some awesome macguffin they have to protect at all costs always does the same thing. They build a big structure, like a castle, or a maze around it, then place it in the middle (effectively speaking) WHY?! Unless it is something you need regular access to, the smartest way to make sure it never gets found is to place it in a room, then surround it with 50 feet of stone or whatever on all sides, THEN build a maze, which is nothing but a decoy to distract the heroes from finding the real deal.

They wander an endlessly looping labyrinth that has no treasure room until the big bad can get around to wiping them out or they starve to death. There should NEVER be a path that leads to the super incredible item of mega awesomesauceness. Why give the heroes a chance at all, no matter how small? Unless they know exactly where in the maze it is buried and brought some heavy duty excavating equipment with them, and have a week or two to kill, they arent going to get it.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Because it makes a good story. If the villain makes defeating her utterly impossible, then how are the heroes supposed to win?

Of course, if we're talking the smart thing to do as a villain, the best thing to do is build the castle/dungeon/maze or whatever, then throw the macguffin to the bottom of the ocean. Or better yet, launch it into space heading as fast as you can manage into the intergalactic void.

[Sir_Thaddeus]

Sure, a halfway competent villain can give the heroes a 0% chance of victory, but if they did, there'd be no story. In the context of a roleplaying game, the reason the villains do something like that is purely a DM tool to get the players into an environment where the stereotypical dungeon crawl can take place. Villain intelligence must sometimes take the backstage to the Rule of Cool.

[Traab]

Ok, this is true, there cant be no chance, but, as an example of doing it right. A story I read had a team of knights plus one spellcaster making their way through a maze. They had wandered for quite some time, fighting random groups of troops and using any prisoners they caught as mobile trap springers when they realized they had been duped. All this time they had been following the blood trail of a soldier they had injured only to realize that by now he would have bled to death and NOT still be walking in a straight line down the hall. Anyways, they proceed to destroy a supporting collum and bring down the ceiling firguring if they cant go through the maze, they will climb out and go OVER it. They climb up the ruins only to discover that all this time the real path to their goal was above the maze, the maze itself was just an endlessly looping mess that went nowhere, and even better, the bad guys could change the walls from above at will as they were all on pivots. So they couldnt even mark their path effectively.

That was actually badass. The bad guy had this big dangerous trap laden maze, full of squads of troops and deadly pits, spikes, wall smashing traps and whatever and the whole time it was a fake. There was a secret passage early on that lead up a flight of stairs and let the people who were supposed to be there bypass the whole thing. Thats the kind of setup I would like to see more often. It can still be figured out, but at least it isnt as simple as, "Figure out the way through the maze, get the prize, and leave"

[Vultawk]

Overconfidence.

Why place the MacGuffin in an unenterable room with 100' thick steel walls, or send it to the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space when your deathmaze is absolutely impenetrable and those fools have no chance of getting past even the simplest of the challenges you have laid before them?

It's really the biggest failing of any major villain in most fiction, which is why the Evil Overlord's list pretty much repeats the mantra "don't think you're invincible" every third item.

[TheCountAlucard]

Sometimes you've gotta be able to check on the Macguffin. Maybe it needs maintenance to keep the trapped entity inside. Or maybe it's a book that writes in itself, and you have a vested interest in both knowing how it turns out, and keeping others from reading it (for instance, perhaps it details your life as it happens).

Or maybe you want the right people to be able to get at it in an emergency, but not just anybody.

[Grinner]

Accessibility, like others have said. If I need to drill through 50 feet of stone every time I want to check in on it and then reseal it, that method will become time-consuming and expensive, fast.

And, in the case of Lord Voldemort, you must fight magic with magic. When your enemies can divine an object's precise location with a wave of a wand and a few words of gibberish, burying it at the bottom of the sea will be less effective than you might hope.

[Scow2]

There is no amount of obscurity that can completely fool a comprehensive, dedicated divination taskforce. It WILL be found, and when it is, it better have good defenses.

[GoddessSune]

Every wizard/lord/lich/whatever who has some awesome macguffin they have to protect at all costs always does the same thing. They build a big structure, like a castle, or a maze around it, then place it in the middle (effectively speaking) WHY?! Unless it is something you need regular access to, the smartest way to make sure it never gets found is to place it in a room, then surround it with 50 feet of stone or whatever on all sides, THEN build a maze, which is nothing but a decoy to distract the heroes from finding the real deal.

It is all part of fiction. You can't make the bad guys ''too awesome'' or the heroes will not stand a chance. That is why.

The bigger reason: It is easy. If you want to tell a story, you need to keep it very, very, very simple. The first reason is that few people in your audience like or can even understand or follow complex stories. The second is, of course, time. A movie/TV show only has so many minutes, a book so many pages and a RPG game session so many hours. And the third is that is is easy for the storyteller.

Everything in fiction is bound by the above three: Keep it simple, keep it short and keep it easy. Just look at anything in fiction and how it all ''works out''.

[Doomboy911]

Because it makes a good story. If the villain makes defeating her utterly impossible, then how are the heroes supposed to win?

Of course, if we're talking the smart thing to do as a villain, the best thing to do is build the castle/dungeon/maze or whatever, then throw the macguffin to the bottom of the ocean. Or better yet, launch it into space heading as fast as you can manage into the intergalactic void.

yeah but who wants to play spelljammer?



Ooh just got a hilarious idea. They start exploring this giant maze when all of the sudden the ranger says he smells mice. Giant mouse comes around the corner. They reach the end of the maze and find a block of cheese the size of them.

[Geordnet]

Nothing is ever impenetrable. If you provide no way to reach the MacGuffin, then the pesky adventurers will just carve their own -one conspicuously lacking in alarms and deathtraps.

Ooh just got a hilarious idea. They start exploring this giant maze when all of the sudden the ranger says he smells mice. Giant mouse comes around the corner. They reach the end of the maze and find a block of cheese the size of them.

Even better: after going through a maze chasing after gold, they discover the whole dungeon was just a psychological experiment by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy mice.

[valadil]

Every wizard/lord/lich/whatever who has some awesome macguffin they have to protect at all costs always does the same thing. They build a big structure, like a castle, or a maze around it, then place it in the middle (effectively speaking) WHY?! Unless it is something you need regular access to, the smartest way to make sure it never gets found is to place it in a room, then surround it with 50 feet of stone or whatever on all sides, THEN build a maze, which is nothing but a decoy to distract the heroes from finding the real deal.

In a world with teleport, stone to mud, and extraplanar travel, how much protection does 50 feet of stone really buy you?

[Razanir]

In a world with teleport, stone to mud, and extraplanar travel, how much protection does 50 feet of stone really buy you?

Not much. Even with demonic contingencies to prevent people from teleporting, you can still be foiled by an army of dwarves with pickaxes

[Grinner]

Not much. Even with demonic contingencies to prevent people from teleporting, you can still be foiled by an army of dwarves with pickaxes

Or, more embarrassingly, kobolds.

[Geordnet]

In a world with teleport, stone to mud, and extraplanar travel, how much protection does 50 feet of stone really buy you?

50 feet of deathtrap and monster sounds pretty appealing by comparison, doesn't it?

(And seriously, you can use decoys either way, so why wouldn't you put your MacGuffin in an actual dungeon?)

[Slipperychicken]

ACKS explains it with the idea that dungeons are used by mage-lords to attract monsters, whose parts are needed in magic items, and adventurers harvest the monster-parts through dungeon-crawling.

[Razanir]

Although we all know the single safest place for a phylactery. You make a dungeon to store a map that leads to a dungeon that stores a decoy. Meanwhile, the actual phylactery is in a safe deposit box in the phylactery depository, a bank run by liches where their phylacteries are protected their collective magical strength, instead of what they could individually ward with.

[Asmodai]

You'd trust other liches with your phylactery?

[valadil]

You'd trust other liches with your phylactery?

Only unknowingly. I might swap my phylactery for another lich's, letting him thinking he's protecting his own. I kinda like the images of all the liches of the world closing guarding phylacteries that don't actually belong to them.

[awa]

the problem with ideas like drop it in the ocean or hurl it into space is things live in the ocean and space. You made it harder for people looking for it to find it but you have dramatically increased the chance of it getting destroyed by dumb luck.

the problem with switching phylacteries is that it assumes that lich b is better at protecting a phylactery then you but you have already proved that lich b is lousy at protecting a phylactery becuase you have switched it.

[Razanir]

You'd trust other liches with your phylactery?

The First Interplanar Bank of Lichdom:
For 100 gp/year, hours of service protecting the bank, and help adding creative new means of protection, you can store your phylactery safely in an undisclosed location hidden in Sigil.

[navar100]

You're right. BBEG always wins. Players always lose. DM wins. Yay.

[Slipperychicken]

You'd trust other liches with your phylactery?

Of course

Spoiler

Show

[Geordnet]

Although we all know the single safest place for a phylactery. You make a dungeon to store a map that leads to a dungeon that stores a decoy. Meanwhile, the actual phylactery is in a safe deposit box in the phylactery depository, a bank run by liches where their phylacteries are protected their collective magical strength, instead of what they could individually ward with.

Then, of course, the adventurers ignore the decoy dungeons and pull off a daring raid on the depository.

No, seriously, this is the fatal flaw in the "best way to keep something safe". It assumes that the adventurers play by the rules you present to them, possessing no independent initiative or creativity at all.

Even less realistically, it assumes that your secret is kept safe. If it were possible to do this, you could bury whatever-it-is two feet underground in some random spot in the woods and it would be just as safe as in your solid adamantine cube. But if it isn't, nothing will stop someone determined enough from taking it.

That is all it really comes down to: keeping it secret. Lack of knowledge is the one and only thing that can keep the thieves away. Even the best lock can be picked if one knows its inner workings.

[Kane0]

I'd just bury the McGuffin in the backyard myself, then build/buy a massive castle to live in.

Edit: If you totally forget about something can it be retrieved from your mind?

[TuggyNE]

That is all it really comes down to: keeping it secret. Lack of knowledge is the one and only thing that can keep the thieves away. Even the best lock can be picked if one knows its inner workings.

Hmm. This is a fairly common attitude among professionals working in physical security, or at least it was; unfortunately, it's not really adequate, because of how absurdly difficult it is to maintain actual secrets. Computer security has had to wrestle with that more rigorously, and developed the idea that all parts of the security system, save only a very few private keys/passwords, should be assumed to be fully known to any potential attacker. Since this is not infrequently the case anyway, this attitude ensures that the system can cope with actual attacks.

One of the useful insights of physical security, however, is that safeguards do not need to stop attackers by themselves; they only need to buy enough time for guards to arrive to drive them off. This is why safes, locks, vaults, and so on are primarily rated by how long it takes a skilled attacker to penetrate them: half an hour, say, or two hours. As long as you have reliable alarms and a fairly well-understood security system that takes a certain length of time to get through, you just need to have someone on call to teleport in and gank the intruders.

Put more succinctly, an obstacle isn't an obstacle unless there's covering fire.

[Tvtyrant]

yeah but who wants to play spelljammer?

I want to play Spelljammer...

[Kornaki]

I'm kind of on board with the phylactery repository. Get some devils involved to make sure the letter of the contract (phylacteries will never be used maliciously against their owner, etc.) is upheld, have good corporate structure to make sure rogue liches can't take advantage of the system, it seems like it could be fairly robust. Throw in some epic spells that incinerates anyone who tries to betray the customers and you've got yourself something good.

Admit it, a sweet epic level campaign would be to infiltrate the bank in an attempt to destroy 200 phylacteries (or blackmail 200 liches, or even better the phylactery bank into keeping quiet about how their security was breached so easily)

[Lord Vukodlak]

People often talk about the evil overlord list but the biggest problem with that list is to be an evil overlord requires a megalomaniac personality which makes adhering to those rules rather difficult

Admit it, a sweet epic level campaign would be to infiltrate the bank in an attempt to destroy 200 phylacteries (or blackmail 200 liches, or even better the phylactery bank into keeping quiet about how their security was breached so easily)

In a campaign I'm running a race of extra dimensional spell-casters called the Hash'ilk'Khan are the main antagonist.

In there home plane is a place called the Well of Souls its location is secret and heavily shielded from divination (and the plane having a geography similar to Draenor) In essence it was once a material plane but the world was torn into shards some hundreds of miles across and scattered over large distances.

It is there where the Hash'ilk'Khan Leader(also a lich) stores the library of phylacteries for his underlings who've undergone the transformation into Lichdom. To keep its location secret the well reconstitutes the Liches near the location of there death instead of near the phylactery.(its also where he imprisons the spirits of upstarts who oppose him) Those imprisoned souls are then used to empower powerful undead engines of destruction called Dread Warriors, which have high HD, high spell resistance, high energy resistance and a high DR that can't be overcome and some limited magic to let them get around some battlefield control spells.

The party has been given a spell designed to tag a the spirit of a Hash'ilk'Khan Lich and track the direction its spirit goes when slain and rejuvenated once its been physically destroyed. After they've killed enough of these liches they'll be able to locate the "Well of Souls" and lead the armies of the alliance against it. Which in turn will force the Hash'ilk'Khan's leader to reveal its location which results in a very huge background battle to the PC's fighting the big bad and is elites.

[Mastikator]

Sure, a halfway competent villain can give the heroes a 0% chance of victory, but if they did, there'd be no story. In the context of a roleplaying game, the reason the villains do something like that is purely a DM tool to get the players into an environment where the stereotypical dungeon crawl can take place. Villain intelligence must sometimes take the backstage to the Rule of Cool.

That's a cheap and unnecessary trick, if you want them to go dungeon crawling just tell them there's treasure.
Or better yet, have them mysteriously wake up in the bottom of the dungeon with no memory of how they got there and they have to dungeon crawl out of the dungeon instead of into.

-

Hmm. This is a fairly common attitude among professionals working in physical security, or at least it was; unfortunately, it's not really adequate, because of how absurdly difficult it is to maintain actual secrets.

Just spread false, contradictory/misleading rumors about the secret before the truth gets out, since there's no evidence people won't know what to believe.