To set the scene. The players are moving through an underground lair in the control of what, by the old Monster Manual, would be called killer frogs. The players know them as "froglings." They're a little stronger than the original, with 2 hit dice, and have proved troublesome in the past. Stumbling across a small kitchen, the players find it full of slaughtered froglings, apparently torn limb from limb. There's no explanation for what killed them. The only way out of the kitchen, apart from the way in, is a flight of stairs down, behind a large lattice-iron door, the metal of which has degraded over many centuries. However, recently, the door has been broken, so that it is clear it was forced open.
After digging out some of the booty from the kitchen, the party begins to get interested in the stairway. It is a 55-degree slope of crumbled steps; this sounds very steep but it isn't for the time period. After Engelhart, the cleric, makes an observation, I describe the stairs.
Engelhart: I have no special agility sage ability, I'm really just a clod with a crucifix. How hard would it be for me to descend, safely and silently?
DM: It is as difficult as a normal staircase, but the stones are out of place or ground away. There are signs of water damage. You can make your way down, but it would be a hell of a place to fight a combat (multiple rolls for slipping).
Why should I take the time to describe what the stairs would be in combat? There isn't a combat, right? Am I not deliberately jerking the players' chain, making them think twice about descending?
Yes, of course I am. I don't have the benefit of making them feel the stairs, or seeing them, in near darkness, with the broken stones. I have to put it into a context that players will appreciate. The stairs are fine as long as nothing bad happens. That's all I'm saying.
Now, note the final word from the cleric: "silently." Players are obsessed with silence. After years of dealing with different incarnations of rules surrounding the idea of creeping up on an enemy, I finally hit upon the idea behind my present stealth rules. They work pretty well, I have found ... and will usually favor a thief or an assassin eager to surprise an enemy. However, they are devilishly hard for players to grasp, for some reason ~ I think because they are also hard to bend to a player's will.
Basically, the principle is this: you want to approach an enemy. If you're a long, long way from that enemy, you're certain not to be noticed. On the line graph between a long, long way, and close enough to the enemy to put a sword between your enemy's ribs, you're going to be noticed. You don't know where that threshold will be. You're not meant to know. So you move up to a certain distance ... and you find you're not noticed. After that, every step forward that you take is a risk. There's nothing else for it. You have to either move that step forward, or retreat.
Since creating this system, where once I found players willing to bet their success on a surprise roll or an initiative roll, I now find players somewhat lacking in fortitude. If they can't be absolutely sure they'll be close enough to the enemy before they're discovered, they're very hesitant. Observe:
Pandred (the fighter): Alright, stairs it is. I'm willing to go on, but I've got no stealth, and I am not personally prepared to risk a lighter armored run. I know you mentioned using Sanctuary earlier Engelhart, and unless Embla or Lothar want to join your fearless foray I think it'd be a worthwhile idea.Engelhart: I ask for a lantern and shed away all weight other than hammer & shield. This still leaves me at 4 AP as the armour is just too damn heavy and not taking it doesn't look like a good tradeoff. Here’s the thing, I obviously don't want us to get into trouble, just to get a finer sense of where we're heading and some intel of how safe it might be to overnight in the storeroom, seeing as it is still rather near to the potential focus of danger.For all we may know, the beast may have been put down already, rather than left to rampage across the frogling compound. If all I find is closed doors, we can feel somewhat safer. Beside faith in the Lord, I'm gathering that such a brute must make more noise than I ever would. (If the party will give me missile cover from up above, I might be able to duck on their command?)
Initially, the cleric meant to remove his extra weight and not his armor; and that's fine. He knows what the stealth rules give as a penalty, so he's making his choices. Afterward, he reads the stealth rules I linked for him (as I have linked for the reader) and changes his mind:
Engelhart: It seems that should I lose the armour and shed all weapons there's virtually no chance of being discovered as long as I take measured steps and keep it cool down there. Since the plan wasn't to triumph through arms anyway, I'll go ahead and strip down to hauberk and chausses. Once AC ceases being a concern, might as well leave both shield and hammer behind, as well.
That's what I want from a game system. The risks can be managed IF the player is prepared to sacrifice some of his benefits in order to receive other benefits. That is how game play should function. Everything is a strategy.
At the moment, the cleric can't see how far the stairs go; no light source had been produced ... so this becomes the subject of discussion for a bit. I had not added "candlelight" to my stealth rules, so I did so, inserting it between dim moonlight and starshine, as far as giving away an individual. If that seems kind, remember that a candle can be hidden by one hand, or gutted so that it reveals very little flame. Anyway, I explain the rule change to the player and we move forward.
This is what I mean by saying that rules can be made in game; and once the rule is added, it becomes standard. Since the rule is being invented above board, any of the players can interject a comment or a criticism, and they often do; in this case, it isn't that important, so no one finds it a problem.
So I have a non-player hireling provide the cleric with a candle (playing by post means sometimes we find ways to circumvent issues that take seconds at a game table), and then I describe the rest of the stairway:
DM: The stairs curve after a drop of some twenty feet, or nearly two complete flights. About half the way down, Engelhart can see a large, dark patch on the wall, reaching from about two feet above the cleric's shoulder all the way down to the floor. Upon closer examination, this is plainly blood, and still slightly damp to the touch. There is quite a lot of it ... and signs of blood spill further down the stairs. It looks to the cleric like something fell against the wall here, rested, then continued to move down the stairs.And at that point, Engelhart can hear something large, about twenty or so feet away groan, shift, and begin to snore ...
This is important! The stealth rules must cut both ways. Just as the players might give themselves away by approaching too closely, whatever is at the bottom of the stairs must also roll dice to see if IT gives itself away.
Now, the players don't know what's down there, but as we're all DMs here, full disclosure. It's a big, dog-headed beast, about the size and shape of a hill giant. It is well over a thousand pounds and eight and a half feet tall. Take note: it is not shaped like a basketball player: it is shaped like a heavy-set man, but with the head of a terrifically fanged wolf. Earlier in the campaign, the players found a sculpture of such a beast and opined that there might be one in the lair, that they might discover. That was my intention, but I never expected the players would come to that conclusion, at least not until afterward.
I've been keeping the actual existence of this beast a secret in my mind for nearly a year, partly because the players retreated from the dungeon once before and partly because we took a seven-month hiatus. This is what a DM does, however. Secrets of all kinds must be rigorously held back from the players, for the day when they are finally revealed. The reveal itself is something that is earned. Players who won't take risks, who won't return and try again, don't deserve to ever, ever know what was hidden and not discovered. Just as I don't give treasure that wasn't fought for and risked for, information is a valuable commodity that deserves safekeeping.
Thinking that there might be a dog-beast, and actually finding it, is a dopamine rush; it is one of the best moments for a player to have and a DM must be conscious of it. Dopamine set-ups should be installed in the adventure; allowed to evolve naturally; and highlighted when they occur. Yes, you were bang on, I would say. There it is; you called it; and now you have to deal with it.
Unfortunately, when the players did see the thing, they had either forgotten the sculpture, or forgotten to mention it. The connection was made later, however ... and the connection is why the players have returned to this same dungeon a fourth time. That, however, is another story.
Upon hearing the snoring beast, the response was,
Engelhart: I choke down a prayer to the Lord. Ahm, how far away from the stair top is my near-naked self? I'm guessing ten feet as I'm still at the point where the bloodstain can be found? The *thing* is thus some 20-odd feet from me, with the bend still between us, correct? Can I get Sanctuary cast without waking it up?
Now, this surprised me. But before I get into that, I'll quickly explain the sanctuary spell in the context above.
The player had noticed an interesting method for using the spell sanctuary. By casting the spell, the character can move very slowly into an enemy lair, observe what there is to see and retreat again, with a guarantee of not being noticed. The caster can move only 10 feet per round and the spell only lasts 2 rounds, +2 rounds per level, so not that much can be seen before the character has to back away at the same rate, to ensure the spell does end with the caster exposed. Invisibility is a better spell overall, but sanctuary would let an enemy actually walk into the caster and fail to notice anything had happened; the same is true for anyone who might witness this.
What surprised me was that I had given away that whatever down there was sleeping, and yet the whole party did not automatically load up and go down together. As a DM, I don't really understand this need that players have (and it seems to be universal) for seeing things before attacking an enemy. I remember during my early years of play, we did this all the time! The point of reconnaissance isn't to "see" ~ it is to identify where the enemy is. I grew up on war movies where the enemy would be found inside a house, and the soldiers would smash their way in and kill everyone. Now everything has to be done with this kittenish sensibility ~ I suppose it has something to do with the surveillance culture, where little cameras can be poked around corners so that there's a better chance of hitting someone with the first bullet. I don't get it.
Yet it's not up to me, so I have to play along. It wastes a lot of game time, however, as players do everything they can to avoid a stand-up fight. This sequence is a case in point. The cleric sneaks down with the sanctuary spell, manages the stairs, reaches the bottom, then sees the dog beast sleeping, covered in a lot of blood (left over from the battle with the froglings), and blood all over the floor. They get this picture, which speaks for itself.
 |
| It's not the best picture of dog-beast; it shouldn't even be wearing clothes ~ but we do what we can. |
It is quite clear the beast is at less than full hit points. I even say,
DM: The humanoid has the ends of two spears (broken off) still stuck in its back. It's breathing is fairly labored; it has quite clearly been seriously wounded in whatever fight it had in the kitchen (for that is the logical conclusion).
Pretty anvilicious, I thought. "I'm wounded, come kill me." The cleric could easily signal the rest of the party to come down and then get it on.
Engelhart: I'm not sticking around. I retreat back up and inform the comrades while re-equipping my gear. This thing is too dangerous to leave in our proximity if we wish to rest down here. I put forward my vote that we dispatch it post haste while we have it in our hands. A surprise round from the party ought to be enough to dispatch it, or at least turn the fight decisively in our favour.Embla (the assassin): I concur with Engelhart.Engelhart: Alexis, in attacking a motionless opponent, what advantage can we expect to have?
Whereupon I send the player to have a look at my helpless defender rules.
Once again, we have a case of the character deciding to put their suit of armor back on ... and as things would turn out, that was probably for the best. The events in the cave were much to the party's credits, for reasons I will explain after.
This is not a bad time to suit up again. There's no actual time pressure on the party (that they know about), the redressing is up the stairs and presumably back from the doorway, in the kitchen, so silence isn't an issue. The walls and the beast's snoring would cover up any carefully managed sounds (and I do assume the player would redress as quietly as possible).
What I don't understand is this: the character removed his armor before he heard the beast snoring; and then he used his sanctuary spell to ensure he wasn't heard, because apparently the beast snoring wasn't reassuring enough; and additionally, didn't dress in armor again before going down the first time, for the same reason. YET, the second time, with nothing actually changed, why did the character feel that going down with armor now and without the spell, and with the rest of the party, wouldn't wake the beast up? That one puzzles me.
However, it didn't matter. The cleric read the helpless defender rule and came back informed:
Engelhart: And the answer came back surprising: assassinating this canine heap is a job for the assassin. I'll be close by, but really, seems like an open-and-knifed case.Lothar (the ranger): I am in favor of Embla attempting to dispatch the beast for us. For the record.Embla: Well, that seems a reasonable proposition. Let's. I grab my battleaxe, leaving my pack behind, and sneak far enough down the stairs that I can see the creature.
Pandred: I wait midway downstairs. Part of me thinks we should try and see if this fellow is sentient. The other part hopes it puts up a big devilish fight.
I do encourage the players to read the rules I create, but there's only so much I can do. Note how this particular rule doesn't feel "limiting" on the player's behaviour ... rather, it is considerably reassuring. Suddenly the players feel less needful to be as careful. They're still sending Embla the assassin on her own down the stairs, but the cleric goes at least as far as the bend near the bottom of the stairs, not worrying that walking in his clunky armor might spoil the assassin's chances of approaching in silence. The fighter has no problem coming halfway down the stairs.
Again: the cleric could have stayed where he was, earlier, and waved the assassin down. But not knowing the rules, not thinking about the assassin's special skills here, and that pesky need to put the armor on again, pretty much meant a lot of time spent in gaming with no actual alteration in the final analysis. I find this happens a lot in gaming. Much of it has to do with player uncertainty about their actual potential in a stand-up fight, some of it comes from fear ... but most of it comes from just not trusting the DM.
I suspect that most campaigns consist of endless jump scares, on the scale of video game mechanics, where the entire principle of tension is built on something being around every corner and everything always having perfect knowledge of where the shooter is and when the shooter is coming. Of course, it has to be that way, it's a video game. But table-top is flexible enough to have guards and monsters that don't "come awake" when floor pad xt7fxy-D0a is stepped on. Monsters should give themselves away a lot of the time; they should be precisely where the players expect them to be; there shouldn't be a special hidden bonus wizard waiting in every room, concealed in a cupboard and ready to pop out and fireball the party ... monsters don't expect to be invaded in their homes and are probably quite bored most of the time, scraping fungus from rocks to pass the time between meals, chatting it up loudly with their buddies and being, for the most part, "normal." There are other ways to produce tension ... most of the time, the best tension will just create itself, as it did in this case.
But if a player is going to be jumped a hundred times by every DM they play with, they're going to develop a complex. That's going to train them to jump, before there's any reason to jump, even if they're playing with a new DM. And it will take a new, less cheap-style DM potentially years to train that out of a player and develop a deeper level of trust, based on a world that isn't poised and waiting for a player character to walk by.
I'll sum up what happens next. Embla gets next to the beast without being detected and attempts to assassinate using my rules. I've used this method several times now and it seems to be proving itself. Embla is only 2nd level here and the beast has 9 total hit dice + levels, so it would technically be impossible for Embla to succeed. Nonetheless, Embla doesn't know that, so I have her go through the sequence: roll to hit, roll to see what level can be assassinated ... and she fails.
Still, she does 20-70% of the monster's hit points under the helpless defender's rule. The monster's total, maximum hit points are 80. The monster's current hit points are 40. Embla has a 50% chance of knocking the beast down to zero and a 1 in 3 chance of killing it anyway.
Now, consider. We're playing this game by blog; I can't witness the player's rolls, can't be sure at all that Embla really does roll, say, a 6 on a d6, so player fudging is super-easy. However, to her credit, the player running Embla rolls the die, gets a 1, and honestly abides by it.
Here I made a straight-up DM's error. In the following fight, I failed to account for the wound that was caused. I didn't deliberately ignore it ... but even in a set up where I have plenty of time, such as the online campaign, I simply forgot the rule. It happens. Very often, I count on players to correct me with these things ~ which is why I post all the rules in open-source, on the wiki. I like being corrected in this way. I don't mind being kept honest. I wrote the rule, I like the rule ... and in this case, I wish a player had corrected me, because what followed was almost a TPK for the party.
But when a rule is missed, as this one was, and nobody notices it, or says anything about it, I don't sweat it. D&D is a complex game. With so many rules, something is bound to be skipped. Sadly, I didn't forget to apply this self-same rule against the players in the same fight. That certainly looks malevolent ~ and it doesn't help with DM-Player trust. But realistically, this is the sort of thing that happens and I have definitely made similar mistakes in the other direction. The thing to do is to hand-wave it, learn from the mistake, and move on. In fact, I didn't realize I had made the error until I began looking over the events, in order to write this post. No one else has ever mentioned it.
Admittedly at the time, I was suffering from insomnia, which is mentioned several times in the thread; that probably had something to do with it. And everyone lived, so what the hell.
So, in response to Embla's muff, I answered,
DM: Embla, that's unfortunate. Your level tells against you, and it is a big creature; the assassination failed. But you cause 20% of its full hit points, which is enough to stun the beast. It is, however, now in the process of waking up; which means you can't try to assassinate again.If the party will tell me what it's doing, I'll set up a new map and position tomorrow when I'm able. Engelhart can reach 0903 with 2 AP. Pandred can reach it with 4 AP. Lothar, Fjall and Bergthora can get near to there by the end of the round; Fjall's crossbow is loaded, so AFTER the creature attacks, if Embla and Engelhart don't stun it, Fjall will be able to fire. Unless Embla wants to just run ... in which case I presume Engelhart will see that, and react, which Pandred will see, and be warned, etcetera.Embla: Alas. That's what I feared. I stand my ground, call out "Help!", and attack again. Heads up: I've shed some weight (losing the javelin) and now have 5AP.Pandred: HROAGH! I have and spend the 4AP to get downstairs.Englehart: It's bumrushing time. I move to 0903 and from there to 0702 or 0802 (whichever Embla isn't on).Lothar: I drop my bow at the sound of Embla's call and draw my sword, ready to spring into action.
So it is going to be a stand-up fight anyway. At least Embla's hit took it down a peg. And as things turned out, they certainly needed it.
It's a bloody crime that combat gained a reputation for being a tiresome, unpleasant slog. I know it came about because of 3e, compounded by 4e and not entirely solved with 5e. Those of us still playing the early game can see from the evidence, like that above, how goddamned exciting combat is, and with what gusto it is enjoyed by players.
The stealth and under-cover of darkness crap is done. The doubt and uncertainty is done. In Han Solo's words, "I prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around." I haven't ever had a party that didn't feel precisely that way ~ and let's be honest, that is one of the best gawddamned lines from Star Wars.
The sentiment, are we going to talk all day, or are we going to fight, ought to etched on a DM's brain ... because if the reader's game is dying from lack of interest, it is almost certainly because the most talkative player in the game is forcing all the other participants, including the DM, to engage in that player's personal masturbation enablement. Players can enjoy role-playing; it can be a moving, momentous sequence in a game setting. There are structurally and chemically huge benefits from creating the realism of non-player characters chatting up the players in a particular way, bringing the game forward into new ideas.
But take away the threat of winning, of pulling out maul, axe and sword and going at it head to head, with mayhem in your pocket, and the game will ultimately become a dry, desiccated hulk, where none of that beautiful rhetoric retains any fundamental meaning. People have to feel they're putting something BIG at risk, to feel alive ... and the easiest thing to reach for is some good, honest combat.
I intend to pick up this combat, as it played out, but I'm going to cut off this post here. This has been a good example of a build-up to combat; at a later time, I may highlight other, similar examples. We shall see.
