Saturday, January 16, 2010

How to Lose Players, Part I

Protection scrolls can be read by any character, so they are obviously written in a common language. So here's what you do.

Make an adventure with some sort of nasty critters. Undead, lycanthropes, demons, whatever. As long as there is a protection scroll for it. Set up a room or situation that the players can voluntarily enter, but that they don't have to, and telegraph the involvement of the particular. Set it up so it looks like suicide.

Then place the appropriate protection scroll earlier in the dungeon/adventure.

"Aha!" your players might say. "We could never handle that, but through our good fortune and smart playing, we found just the thing to let us overcome this obstacle!"

... and so they march in, "protected." Except they're not.

For the scroll is just some wording that sure looks like it activates a protection scroll, but it's just an ordinary, mundane scroll with a (Nystul's) Magic Aura cast on it.

TPK

(don't spoil the one clue that could save the PCs... I know a couple of my players read my blog and I want to use this in the adventure tomorrow... I'm not so much a prick to spring this on them "pure" but now they get to wonder about scrolls they might find... hahahaha...mwahahahah... ho ho ho!)

(Now come up with your asshole referee idea. Post it on your blog. Let's make this thing viral. Like herpes!)

12 comments:

  1. My players don't need my help for them to fuck up and die on their own.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Green slime beneath knee high water.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Drow Death Blossom: Party surrounds and attacks a Drow Wizard. Drow wizard is getting beat up, but that staff he's carrying is a Staff of Power. He breaks it to unleash massive arcane damage. The drow will most likely survive (Given a drow's innate 50% magic resistance and bonuses to saving throws if the resist fails)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Characters make enemies

    Characters then go back to the inn/tavern as if nothing has changed to eat there usual cheap meal of soup & bread, self-ladled from a cauldron. Broth looks a bit watery.

    Pity the landlord was persuaded to buy a few new bowls from a charming stranger that were BOWLS OF WATERY DEATH (1e DMG).

    ReplyDelete
  5. REVERSE PITTRAP- WHEN THE PLAYERS INVESTAGATE WHAT IS LOOK LIEK A PITTRAP THE WHOLE DUNGEON FALL OUT FROM UNDER THEM (IF THEY WERE IN THE PIT THEY WOULD BE SAFE!!! )

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sometimes it is astounding because the players don't seem to need any help in getting themselves killed off. A few years ago I was running an adventure in which a player wanted to 'join up' but the party was deep in a series of tunnels... so when the entered one of the rooms, I described them seeing a bag, bound with rope, that was vaguely body shaped, lying against the wall and moving. This was actually the NEW player character (I decided he had been captured and gagged and trussed up there, to be dealt with later). For some reason the players were certain that this was a trap and debated filling the bag with arrows from across the room. I was suppressing my laughter; the new player came this close to having his new PC killed before he could even get out of the sack and introduce himself to the party.
    Of course, you can't fuck with destiny. A few sessions later that same PC got decapitated by a group of hobgoblins.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A pit trap (disguised with illusions) with a prismatic wall near the bottom. The unfortunate PC falls in, passes through every layer of the wall - then hits the trampoline at the bottom that bounces him back up through it again.

    ReplyDelete
  8. You stole this from 'Out of the Aeons,' didn't you...

    ReplyDelete
  9. blade barrier + triggered reverse gravity. it happened once. ouchie

    ReplyDelete
  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Unstable bag of holding anything placed inside has a 50% chance of disappearing.

    ReplyDelete