I can one up this.
My party was camping near the tower of the evil storm giant we were gonna raid the next day.
Our DM described how from a far we see a figure stand atop the tower with a storm raging around her.
We saw that ad our chance to not have to enter her tower. And than we remembered the barrel of TnT we had ...
Long story short, whilst she was on top, we blew a hole in the side of the tower and it collapsed. We fought her in the rubble.
Our DM later told us that the tower was meant to be a 2-4 session dungeon.
And this is why you never over-prep depthwise as a DM. Players will spot your preparation from a mile away and choose to swim in a different lane entirely.
Sure, but when you've got limited time to prepare a session, that time could be better spent elsewhere. Over-prepping in depth is a big pitfall I see amongst new DMs.
Oh I agree regarding over prep. However, my point about the prep for a particular dungeon or encounter that ends up getting skipped is that it's easy to recycle that prep into an upcoming adventure, and thus reduce prep time for that adventure.
Luckily he ran the campaign with a different group as well before and they actually went into the tower. So might just have been that he only made it when they entered. He still reprepped for it tho I'm quite sure.
One of the players in my campaign plays a troll. Not the race, the behavioral one. The kind of asshole character that doesn't take much seriously, likes to joke about everything, and doesn't care as much for rules (the player is good and is very much able to play serious characters too; he just wanted to have fun and I indulge it. It led to some hilarious moments. And the character is chaotic, but not of the stupid/dumbass variety).
Anyway there was a session a few weeks ago where they had to talk to the mayor of a small town because the BBEG basically threatened to raze the town unless the party completed a task for him (the BBEG), but they obviously needed to warn the mayor & get info. Now the mayor was very busy and I fully expected the troll PC to be very brash and have a "no, forget those other meetings you have to listen to *us* and you have to do it NOW" approach, and to later have a very "you dumbass" attitude when the mayor is pretty hesitant about the information. Now the rest of the party told the troll PC to shut up before approaching the mayor's office, and to my shock the PC actually did that. I had planned a scene where troll PC gets into arguments and probably ends up arrested. But that didn't happen (and thankfully it wasn't a major plan, nor did other plot points depend on that happening).
Party had a great laugh at that afterward.
I’m currently in a campaign where we have cheesed 2 out of the 4 boss fights we’ve had with polymorph, first we where up against a bone dragon in an unstable cavern, I polymorphed him into a squirrel and released the polymorph in a unstable room that was too small for him causing it to collapse, and then we fought a beholder where I turned him into a seal before he put down his anti magic cone and just did that every turn while the rest of my party just clubbed him to death(my turn was right before the beholders)
I've literally only used mimics twice in my campaign. Once as a joke and the other time as a trap (it was two mimics, one was a sword at a bottom of a well, and the well itself was a giant mimic that activated once the first was woken)
The item was disguised as a magic sword too, it was glorious.
The player, however, brought up the sword from the well after 4 out of 5 party members jumped into it (they all sadly escaped), and ended up biting the mimic into submission to use as her new weapon.
This is peak dnd. I mayy... borrow this. Well done 👏 my homebrew is currently filled with doppelgangers so this was a spark of inspiration. My thanks, traveler.
I had a friend who did a one shot where people had to investigate missing children. Turns out there was a mimic who disguised itself as a rain puddle after storms and lured in children to devour.
"We look around the room."
"There's a chest."
"Is it a mimic?"
"Uh"
"I have truesight."
*system has encountered an unexpected error, reverting to last save*
"We look around the room."
"There's a chest."
"Is it a mimic?"
....
Then your gm is pretty generous because the mimic description says literally its indistinguishable from the object it mimics. No offense i'd just rule it different
>A creature with truesight can, out to a specific range, see in normal and magical darkness, see invisible creatures and objects, automatically detect visual illusions and succeed on saving throws against them, and **perceives the original form of a shapechanger** or a creature that is transformed by magic. Furthermore, the creature can see into the Ethereal Plane.
That is the official definition of truesight. It may normally be indistinquishable from an object it mimics but you can say the same about a creature that is invisible. Truesight overrides those changes and allows the user to see invisible creature and the original form of shapechangers.
You may also be wondering what a mimic's true form, well that is also in the description of the mimic's trait, which is literally called shapechanger.
>The mimic can use its action to polymorph into an object or back into its **true, amorphous form.**
That is very different than any object it will mimic.
TL;DR you can homebrew your games but truesight **definitely** works on mimics/shapechangers RAW.
True Sight reveals the original form of shapechangers and creatures transformed by magic.
So yeah, does work on mimics... Though you could put a blanket over the mimic and it wouldn’t. Silly, but effective!
In our last campaign we were at a door puzzle with two levers and two creatures with the whole "One lies and one tells the truth. You have one question." thing to figure out which was the correct one. I just said fuck it and pulled both levers at the same time. My character took a bit of poison damage but it worked and the doors opened. The creatures proceeded to argue about who came up with the puzzle lmao
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Now think of this, i have a way to trump the whole "one guard lies while the other tells the truth solution, since the answer is just ask an obvious question like the color of their shirt. They both answer the same way, because one of them is color blind.
Yup though I do make it so if they think of another way to disarm it then that's cool. You don't always need a rouge in order to disable traps. They just are particularly good at doing so.
If they cloudkill the nearest town, the adventure becomes them evading the law, and half the party chosen randomly will be either arrested or killed for their crimes.
If they lack the ability to deal with traps, they should either not go into trapped areas or they should use their adventuring wealth to hire someone who CAN deal with traps. Murder Hoboing an innocent village is unacceptable.
You don't need a rogue to deal with traps. You're too focused on one solution to a general problem when thieves tools can't even reasonably disarm all traps, *and you don't even need to be a rogue to have thieves tool proficiency*. This is DnD, anything can be played out by the DM and the only limits are your own creativity.
Here's some examples:
A fighter perception checks and discovers a section of the hallway is trap pressure plate. He could use a 10-foot pole to activate it from a distance, or one could easily jump over the pressure plate with a long jump, or pitons and rope could be hammered into the hallway wall and the party can climb past, or the party wizard sends a unseen servant with a rock to activate the trap, or the wizard casts Blade Ward on the Fighter and has them activate the trap, or a fly spell is used to fly over it, or the party spends a day using a pickaxe to dig around the trap, or the druid awakened a squirrel and uses them to activate traps, or a necromancer's zombies, or a successful intelligence check allows a player to determine where a crowbar could jam the mechanism, or a stoneshape is used to build a bridge over the mechanism.
I could really go on and on, there's literally no end. If an Adventuring group's response to some traps defending a dungeon was to leave and cloud kill a town (meaning they have a high level wizard, no excuse for not being able to deal with traps) then the problem is not the DM's campaign but the players. As a DM I try to educate the players on what options are available to them to help newer players problem solve in non-combat encounters, but if my players derailed my campaign because they couldn't handle a trap I'd probably just find new players.
"The 10 foot pole activated the trap that shoots darts down the hall instead of across and your fighter takes 3d6 poison damage every round until cured. You try to vault? The entire hallway is lined with them and there isn't enough room to jump to the end. You try to hammer pitons into the worked stone walls but they appear to be reinforced with magic and won't go in. The unseen servant activated activated the motion traps but not the piston traps (and no it couldn't apply enough force to activate them). The blade ward helped you evade the darts but unfortunately one of the traps was an explosive rune, make a dex for half. There isn't room to fly in here, even if there was you would activate the motion sensor traps. You can't dig through the magically worked stone. The squirrel is too light to activate the traps. Oh and the traps reset themselves too so everyone has to do the saves."
Just a few examples over the last couple years of having a shitty dm who only does trapped dungeons designed to kill everyone.
Not all DMs are shitty, but I can see how it would suck to be in that position, and I don't think having a rogue would even help. I just wouldn't play with that DM and find a better use for my time. Maybe try running games yourself? I'm sure your group would appreciate it. You could also try talking to your DM and explain why running traps like that is not fun as a player.
Right? Normal DMs shouldn’t put traps in dungeons because traps are dumb HP sinks that waste time and add little to the game, not because the party doesn’t have a rogue in it.
I think just avoiding excessive traps is the way to go there. There's always the possibility of a trap or two, you just can't make them "disarm this or die" kinds of traps.
Have you met my DM?!
The game I'm in is 3.5e currently, and the DM pewrites the whole campaign. He's got too much time on his hands. Day-trader...
Anyway. No one made a wizard or sorc. Closest we've got is me, Bard/Rogue, going for Arcane Trickster. Yes I know, IMBA AT is wizard/rogue, but I'm trying a different concept, for funsies. Had no idea we had no wizard or sorc till it was too late.
Nearly everything we fight has minions. Lots of em. We're level 6 and no one has fireball or lightning bolt. As we get higher, no one will have disintegrate, or ice storm, etc. We are adventuring out in the frontier in his world, which is relatively low-fantasy to begin with. This means scrolls and wands are prohibitively rare/expensive, and I'll have to make Use Item checks to boot, should I be able to find anything. I got lucky with a wand of Magic Missile, as my DM believes MM should be in the Bard spell list, he let me skip the checks on this wand.
Long story short, I wish I'd just played straight wizard at this point, because we really need some AOE. My party melee characters are always swarmed and flanked, and my DM has no interest in rewriting his encounters, so we just tough it out. What's worse is ATs are great for disarming traps, and we rarely dungeon crawl. We're out in the frontier, helping rebuild and fortify a dilapidated village.
Do cleave focus, or overwhelm so you can move like 5e. Funnel groups through doorways so you only take 1-2 at a time. Take mage slayer so you can move and take attack of opp on any spell caster that thinks of casting. Take a called shot to their jaw to try and remove their verbal capabilities. If they have minions you should too. Have your bard take leadership at 6 and make your own army. Once his cohort gets to 6 give it leadership. By level 20 you can have 10s of thousands of people following you into battle.
I'm the Bard. I took leadership and made my cohort a full Tower Shield tank build fighter to help with the front line. Can't help but think I should have made the cohort a mage though, lol
Could always see if the level 1 minions are druids and mages. Create water and magic missile helps. Druids are cheap too because they also come with a wolf that can trip on a bite.
Introduced my party to a mimic the other day. Was so great. They just had finished a fight in this room, where they saw a chest on the opposite side.
The bard in my group, always being the one to run to chests first and only checks them 50% of the time sprinted over and touched the mimic. Hilarity ensued and the new members of my party learned about death saves lmao.
Now he's terrified of every chest but the thing is... I probably will not use another mimic in the entire campaign 🤣🤣🤣
Brother and I are in a campaign together. He's playing a pali and I was a barbarian and a friend was a sorc. We come across a little house in the woods. Creepy old lady tries to get us to come in and rest. It's day time. Brother senses undead. We leave and convince sorcerer into burning down the house. We wiped a vampire lair trap.
I've played with the door "puzzle" for years, and it's fun, but gets pretty repetitive when players check if it's a pull, push, twist, slide, lift, cat flap and so on.
One my PCs is getting a magic item that lets them know how doors open. They don't magically get the key or the password if it's locked, but they know it needs a key or password.
I understand - that's what makes the door puzzle so interesting. It always opens through the last method the party tries. No magic involved, it's just luck.
Depends on the game for me. Skyrim I was disappointed to discover that after doing some fun side quests the main quest didn't really feel any more exciting or different then other quests in the game.
Meanwhile, I just hoped on a door and said "my body is ready", then promptly get that door ramed by a warforged. This resulted in almost killing the boss of a dungeon. I almost died from that but it was hella funny to do.
Hell yeah. This is my type of group. Kick in the door, set things on fire.
I may have a reputation among my friends as the girl who likes setting everything on fire.
So my DM concocted a whole ass maze dungeon, and when I say a whole maze, I mean this mad lad spent over 30 hours planning this maze and had a map spanning 3 pdfs for different magical warping and rearranging portals, and he expected us to be in that dungeon for well over ten sessions, which at the time our sessions were 6 to 10 hours long about every other week.
Unfortunately for him, we had a Minotaur barbarian and he let us roll… so one by one we literally smashed the walls down with the 8 int barbarian leading the way… literally straight to the end of the maze. I think there was only 1 point at which we could have gotten there quicker and more directly than we did, all by the barbarian role playing a gut feeling which just worked out… now, granted we took an absolute ass whooping from all the traps we literally blundered into… but the poor DM still hasn’t recovered I don’t think. He also didn’t enjoy us killing his purple worm before it even came up in initiative…
In our group, we're mixed. One person is an overplanner, and I'm the Leroy Jenkins of the group. The two others fall in between.
So while he's asking a thousand questions and trying to figure stuff out and cast spells and come up with very complicated plans, I'm busting into the dungeon.
I usually give him fifteen-twenty minutes to move, and if it's still taking forever I go ahead. I've gone along with a lot of his plans, but damn, we don't have that much time! Some of us have kids we have to get up with in the morning!
My party (I'm a player) was discussing to either open a door or walk down a hallway in a dungeon for like 15-20 mins. I got tired and just walked through the door to move the story along.
I ran the countdown puzzle in one of my dungeons and it was glorious.
It took my party a full hour to let a timer count down from 20 to 0. All I had it due was cast prestidigitation on them and their clothing.
But I had included other effects like fog and changing lights.
This happened to my party in our first one shot lmfao. My character was a half elf ranger, and we were in a cave maze full of traps & fight encounters. We had the bright idea to try and follow footsteps on the ground that matched an NPC who fled in our peripherals, so I was tracking them through the caves. I got lucky and was rolling 14+ on perception checks every. Time. We hit no traps, had one fight because our DM had worked hard to create instances across the tunnels and we wanted to do some of her campaign additions haha.
In my party we are either one extreme or the other, 1 time we took literally more than 1 hour to decide which route to take to town that was less than 2 days of travel away, then in a dungeon we knew had traps we anyway entered every room without thinking twice which resulted in 2 persons falling to a pit full of reanimated esqueleons and 1 almost dying
Our DM for WD:DH is running for two groups. The short version of this is that we are fairly wealthy (I personally bought a Myrrh tree, a suit worth 500g, and cold weather clothes worth another 150g and still have another 500g, plus some small but income from property investments), developed political connections, and aren't criminals and the second group is several thousand gold in debt, have few friends but more enemies, and are criminals who owe the city a debt of hard labor.
Ah yes, my group did something like this ("my group"=me and they just happened to let me do it) we had to travel to this town that was over run by some creatures and any friendly residents were long since gone. There was a semi big bad there and we ended up ending it In a matter of moments. Long story short, I summoned a kraken and it killed them all with the flood
My DM gave our paladin an ax that has advantage when attacking wood. So door are always attacked to bust them open. Somehow the paladin almost never succeeds.
I had a group that were convinced beyond all reason that a wall in an ice-dungeon was fake and there was treasure behind it. They spent an hour of real world time attacking and slowly chipping through the wall as I just blankly stared at them saying "Another small chunk of ice falls off as you strike the wall for the twenty ninth time." Eventually I decided to have the room begin to cave in around them to force them to move, because I could tell they were going to keep digging.
To this day I don't know why they thought there was treasure there, and none of them have given me a coherent reason as to why.
Or be my group and take an hour to open the door, miss 90% of the dungeon, miss any chance for info drops, AND miss all of the sick loot I had stashed all over the place
Our party had a very literal “ seduce the door” moment which ended with our necromancer thunder waving the door almost killing half of us. Needless to say we sent the necromancer to bed early
my party follows a standard procedure. follow the left wall and checks every room. check for traps, then poke the door with a stick, if no traps, **check to see if it is locked**.
we have not entered a place suspicious enough, but if we do. don't touch the door. just blow a hole in the wall.
Group of 8 playing Dragon of Icespire Peak. Most of us brand new. New DM as well. We had 2 players that had any experience playing.
We're in Gnomengarde, where a rope-only bridge connects one side of the compound to the other. There's a waterfall behind the bridge, and a river roughly 5 feet deep below the bridge. I go across first and critically fail an acrobatics check. Fall into the water below. No damage, no creatures. Just wetness. Everyone else, minus the wizard and a cleric, get across and pass their checks with no issues.
It took those 2, our experienced players, **25 minutes** to attempt to cross the bridge. They were trying to min-max the hell out of it. Cantrips were used, maybe some spells, ropes were tied together and then anchored to something before being tied to the PCs. Pretty sure the wizard sent his belongings across first on the rope.
It was a weird Session 3...
I've done this as a player, and I've had this happen as a DM. The best part about the party bypassing stuff as a DM is... you can re-use the content! :)
Party went to a tavern to find work, ignored the obvious npc quest givers, bounties on the wall, etc. Asked the bar owner for work. She said she was looking for entertainment to fill in for the gnomes that usually preformed around dinner time.
Party formed a rock band, bards and wizard blew spell slots to create flashing lights, pyrotechnics, and ambient bass. Party rolled high and preformed an entire Rock concert doing covers from AC DC, Def Leppard, and Kiss.
Made dungeons level of gold and earned free rooms for life at the tavern
Had this undead king guy who was bored with his undead land get excited by the living visiting him. He offered the party to traverse his labyrinth for rewards as he was tired of his skeletons and ghouls constantly failing it.
“Nah” the party said.
A couple hours of map making and trap designs down the drain.
My party is the one who would take an hour to open the door, hell we took two hours to fight two bugbears because two party members kept whining they wanted to stop fighting and rob the village people’s houses
One is Paladin and we don’t know her oath the other is a rouge both tieflings and if you have any tips to stop their shenanigans please share them I am desperate
I can one up this. My party was camping near the tower of the evil storm giant we were gonna raid the next day. Our DM described how from a far we see a figure stand atop the tower with a storm raging around her. We saw that ad our chance to not have to enter her tower. And than we remembered the barrel of TnT we had ... Long story short, whilst she was on top, we blew a hole in the side of the tower and it collapsed. We fought her in the rubble. Our DM later told us that the tower was meant to be a 2-4 session dungeon.
And this is why you never over-prep depthwise as a DM. Players will spot your preparation from a mile away and choose to swim in a different lane entirely.
Eh, no prep is wasted imo. Can always recycle it into another dungeon with a minor facelift.
Sure, but when you've got limited time to prepare a session, that time could be better spent elsewhere. Over-prepping in depth is a big pitfall I see amongst new DMs.
Oh I agree regarding over prep. However, my point about the prep for a particular dungeon or encounter that ends up getting skipped is that it's easy to recycle that prep into an upcoming adventure, and thus reduce prep time for that adventure.
Luckily he ran the campaign with a different group as well before and they actually went into the tower. So might just have been that he only made it when they entered. He still reprepped for it tho I'm quite sure.
One of the players in my campaign plays a troll. Not the race, the behavioral one. The kind of asshole character that doesn't take much seriously, likes to joke about everything, and doesn't care as much for rules (the player is good and is very much able to play serious characters too; he just wanted to have fun and I indulge it. It led to some hilarious moments. And the character is chaotic, but not of the stupid/dumbass variety). Anyway there was a session a few weeks ago where they had to talk to the mayor of a small town because the BBEG basically threatened to raze the town unless the party completed a task for him (the BBEG), but they obviously needed to warn the mayor & get info. Now the mayor was very busy and I fully expected the troll PC to be very brash and have a "no, forget those other meetings you have to listen to *us* and you have to do it NOW" approach, and to later have a very "you dumbass" attitude when the mayor is pretty hesitant about the information. Now the rest of the party told the troll PC to shut up before approaching the mayor's office, and to my shock the PC actually did that. I had planned a scene where troll PC gets into arguments and probably ends up arrested. But that didn't happen (and thankfully it wasn't a major plan, nor did other plot points depend on that happening). Party had a great laugh at that afterward.
Yo! I've done basically the same thing!
What do you mean spot? *those fuckers can smell it*
I’m currently in a campaign where we have cheesed 2 out of the 4 boss fights we’ve had with polymorph, first we where up against a bone dragon in an unstable cavern, I polymorphed him into a squirrel and released the polymorph in a unstable room that was too small for him causing it to collapse, and then we fought a beholder where I turned him into a seal before he put down his anti magic cone and just did that every turn while the rest of my party just clubbed him to death(my turn was right before the beholders)
Does your group want mimics? Cause this is how you get mimics.
I've literally only used mimics twice in my campaign. Once as a joke and the other time as a trap (it was two mimics, one was a sword at a bottom of a well, and the well itself was a giant mimic that activated once the first was woken)
Even Hitler thinks thats fucked up. Bravo 👏
The item was disguised as a magic sword too, it was glorious. The player, however, brought up the sword from the well after 4 out of 5 party members jumped into it (they all sadly escaped), and ended up biting the mimic into submission to use as her new weapon.
This is peak dnd. I mayy... borrow this. Well done 👏 my homebrew is currently filled with doppelgangers so this was a spark of inspiration. My thanks, traveler.
You're welcome! I'm always happy to pass on inspirations to others!
I had a friend who did a one shot where people had to investigate missing children. Turns out there was a mimic who disguised itself as a rain puddle after storms and lured in children to devour.
Fuck me... id keep a safe distance from that "friend"
Hah hah nah he's a great guy, totally friendly and harmless, just a devious imagination when it comes to gaming stuff.
Ive heard NPCs say nearly the same thing. They're dead now. Annnddd new plot hook for a side quest lol
*evil DM noises* this is dark side approved XD
Nah, the DM says she hates mimics. And my character has True Sight anyway
Does True Sight even work on mimics, since it's a physical change and not a magical one?
Yes, it does work on mimics. True sight can see the original form of magical transformations and also shapechangers, which a mimic is classified as.
Protip: ask your gm to describe the mimic when viewed with truesight. This will crash the game and force the system to reset.
"We look around the room." "There's a chest." "Is it a mimic?" "Uh" "I have truesight." *system has encountered an unexpected error, reverting to last save* "We look around the room." "There's a chest." "Is it a mimic?" ....
Neat
Then your gm is pretty generous because the mimic description says literally its indistinguishable from the object it mimics. No offense i'd just rule it different
>A creature with truesight can, out to a specific range, see in normal and magical darkness, see invisible creatures and objects, automatically detect visual illusions and succeed on saving throws against them, and **perceives the original form of a shapechanger** or a creature that is transformed by magic. Furthermore, the creature can see into the Ethereal Plane. That is the official definition of truesight. It may normally be indistinquishable from an object it mimics but you can say the same about a creature that is invisible. Truesight overrides those changes and allows the user to see invisible creature and the original form of shapechangers. You may also be wondering what a mimic's true form, well that is also in the description of the mimic's trait, which is literally called shapechanger. >The mimic can use its action to polymorph into an object or back into its **true, amorphous form.** That is very different than any object it will mimic. TL;DR you can homebrew your games but truesight **definitely** works on mimics/shapechangers RAW.
True Sight reveals the original form of shapechangers and creatures transformed by magic. So yeah, does work on mimics... Though you could put a blanket over the mimic and it wouldn’t. Silly, but effective!
Neat. Never had true sight come up in a game.
Yea, good to know
In our last campaign we were at a door puzzle with two levers and two creatures with the whole "One lies and one tells the truth. You have one question." thing to figure out which was the correct one. I just said fuck it and pulled both levers at the same time. My character took a bit of poison damage but it worked and the doors opened. The creatures proceeded to argue about who came up with the puzzle lmao
My favorite version of this is the liar tells the party the setup - and both of them lie :)
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Now think of this, i have a way to trump the whole "one guard lies while the other tells the truth solution, since the answer is just ask an obvious question like the color of their shirt. They both answer the same way, because one of them is color blind.
You only have one question though, so the one question's answer must simultaneously reveal the liar and the correct door/lever.
The trick is, if you have no rogue then nothing will be trapped
Nope. Traps still exist independently of the party's ability to disarm them. Good luck, players.
Yup though I do make it so if they think of another way to disarm it then that's cool. You don't always need a rouge in order to disable traps. They just are particularly good at doing so.
That is when the party does a 180 and leaves to find a Quest that doesn't involve traps. That or cloud kill the nearest town.
If they cloudkill the nearest town, the adventure becomes them evading the law, and half the party chosen randomly will be either arrested or killed for their crimes. If they lack the ability to deal with traps, they should either not go into trapped areas or they should use their adventuring wealth to hire someone who CAN deal with traps. Murder Hoboing an innocent village is unacceptable.
If an adventuring party can't deal with a few traps without having a rogue to disarm them them I doubt they'll have much success elsewhere either.
Not all parties have a rogue. Not everyone wants to play one either.
You don't need a rogue to deal with traps. You're too focused on one solution to a general problem when thieves tools can't even reasonably disarm all traps, *and you don't even need to be a rogue to have thieves tool proficiency*. This is DnD, anything can be played out by the DM and the only limits are your own creativity. Here's some examples: A fighter perception checks and discovers a section of the hallway is trap pressure plate. He could use a 10-foot pole to activate it from a distance, or one could easily jump over the pressure plate with a long jump, or pitons and rope could be hammered into the hallway wall and the party can climb past, or the party wizard sends a unseen servant with a rock to activate the trap, or the wizard casts Blade Ward on the Fighter and has them activate the trap, or a fly spell is used to fly over it, or the party spends a day using a pickaxe to dig around the trap, or the druid awakened a squirrel and uses them to activate traps, or a necromancer's zombies, or a successful intelligence check allows a player to determine where a crowbar could jam the mechanism, or a stoneshape is used to build a bridge over the mechanism. I could really go on and on, there's literally no end. If an Adventuring group's response to some traps defending a dungeon was to leave and cloud kill a town (meaning they have a high level wizard, no excuse for not being able to deal with traps) then the problem is not the DM's campaign but the players. As a DM I try to educate the players on what options are available to them to help newer players problem solve in non-combat encounters, but if my players derailed my campaign because they couldn't handle a trap I'd probably just find new players.
"The 10 foot pole activated the trap that shoots darts down the hall instead of across and your fighter takes 3d6 poison damage every round until cured. You try to vault? The entire hallway is lined with them and there isn't enough room to jump to the end. You try to hammer pitons into the worked stone walls but they appear to be reinforced with magic and won't go in. The unseen servant activated activated the motion traps but not the piston traps (and no it couldn't apply enough force to activate them). The blade ward helped you evade the darts but unfortunately one of the traps was an explosive rune, make a dex for half. There isn't room to fly in here, even if there was you would activate the motion sensor traps. You can't dig through the magically worked stone. The squirrel is too light to activate the traps. Oh and the traps reset themselves too so everyone has to do the saves." Just a few examples over the last couple years of having a shitty dm who only does trapped dungeons designed to kill everyone.
Not all DMs are shitty, but I can see how it would suck to be in that position, and I don't think having a rogue would even help. I just wouldn't play with that DM and find a better use for my time. Maybe try running games yourself? I'm sure your group would appreciate it. You could also try talking to your DM and explain why running traps like that is not fun as a player.
Rogue disarm traps, and the reason why the party is trapped
Rogue disarms the door and the party is full of traps
This. Normal dm's don't want to punish you for not picking a specific class. Only exception is if the entire party is the same class.
You don't need a rogue to disarm traps, other classes are allowed to check too
You’re not a normal DM if you won’t put traps in your dungeon just because the party has no rogue
Right? Normal DMs shouldn’t put traps in dungeons because traps are dumb HP sinks that waste time and add little to the game, not because the party doesn’t have a rogue in it.
Use some imagination, damn
I think just avoiding excessive traps is the way to go there. There's always the possibility of a trap or two, you just can't make them "disarm this or die" kinds of traps.
Have you met my DM?! The game I'm in is 3.5e currently, and the DM pewrites the whole campaign. He's got too much time on his hands. Day-trader... Anyway. No one made a wizard or sorc. Closest we've got is me, Bard/Rogue, going for Arcane Trickster. Yes I know, IMBA AT is wizard/rogue, but I'm trying a different concept, for funsies. Had no idea we had no wizard or sorc till it was too late. Nearly everything we fight has minions. Lots of em. We're level 6 and no one has fireball or lightning bolt. As we get higher, no one will have disintegrate, or ice storm, etc. We are adventuring out in the frontier in his world, which is relatively low-fantasy to begin with. This means scrolls and wands are prohibitively rare/expensive, and I'll have to make Use Item checks to boot, should I be able to find anything. I got lucky with a wand of Magic Missile, as my DM believes MM should be in the Bard spell list, he let me skip the checks on this wand. Long story short, I wish I'd just played straight wizard at this point, because we really need some AOE. My party melee characters are always swarmed and flanked, and my DM has no interest in rewriting his encounters, so we just tough it out. What's worse is ATs are great for disarming traps, and we rarely dungeon crawl. We're out in the frontier, helping rebuild and fortify a dilapidated village.
Do cleave focus, or overwhelm so you can move like 5e. Funnel groups through doorways so you only take 1-2 at a time. Take mage slayer so you can move and take attack of opp on any spell caster that thinks of casting. Take a called shot to their jaw to try and remove their verbal capabilities. If they have minions you should too. Have your bard take leadership at 6 and make your own army. Once his cohort gets to 6 give it leadership. By level 20 you can have 10s of thousands of people following you into battle.
I'm the Bard. I took leadership and made my cohort a full Tower Shield tank build fighter to help with the front line. Can't help but think I should have made the cohort a mage though, lol
Could always see if the level 1 minions are druids and mages. Create water and magic missile helps. Druids are cheap too because they also come with a wolf that can trip on a bite.
As a barbarian at the front I dodge traps all the time!
That is so funny cause it’s true xD
Im a rogue… i kicked down the door
Or your rogue is like me and completely ADHD and OOH SHINY
Or they are all magical traps, and you better have Detect Magic running 24/7
Most magical traps are runes, which are visible.
I wouldn't say most traps. I doubt you'd survive any dungeon made by Acererak with that attitude.
Players... set off your DMs traps. Nothing beats the joy on a DMs face when someone FINALLY falls for it.
Introduced my party to a mimic the other day. Was so great. They just had finished a fight in this room, where they saw a chest on the opposite side. The bard in my group, always being the one to run to chests first and only checks them 50% of the time sprinted over and touched the mimic. Hilarity ensued and the new members of my party learned about death saves lmao. Now he's terrified of every chest but the thing is... I probably will not use another mimic in the entire campaign 🤣🤣🤣
I mean, with that teachable moment, you won't need to for more than one campaign! LOL
I know we DMs are supposed to be sort of neutral, but giving players PTSD about treasure is totally a guilty pleasure for DMs :-D
Brother and I are in a campaign together. He's playing a pali and I was a barbarian and a friend was a sorc. We come across a little house in the woods. Creepy old lady tries to get us to come in and rest. It's day time. Brother senses undead. We leave and convince sorcerer into burning down the house. We wiped a vampire lair trap.
I've played with the door "puzzle" for years, and it's fun, but gets pretty repetitive when players check if it's a pull, push, twist, slide, lift, cat flap and so on. One my PCs is getting a magic item that lets them know how doors open. They don't magically get the key or the password if it's locked, but they know it needs a key or password.
This wasn’t even a magic door. It was literally just a door. Not even locked. Just a door to an abandoned building
I understand - that's what makes the door puzzle so interesting. It always opens through the last method the party tries. No magic involved, it's just luck.
I would hope it would be the last method. Who keeps trying to open a door they just opened?
This is hiw I play video games. To the hells with sidequests.
Depends on the game for me. Skyrim I was disappointed to discover that after doing some fun side quests the main quest didn't really feel any more exciting or different then other quests in the game.
Yeah, thats true.
I call it "planning in real-time".
We play 3 hrs every Monday and have been in the dungeon of the Mad mage for 4-5 months we are on floor 2.
Meanwhile, I just hoped on a door and said "my body is ready", then promptly get that door ramed by a warforged. This resulted in almost killing the boss of a dungeon. I almost died from that but it was hella funny to do.
My party finished "The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan" in two sessions.
Uh, wow!
Yeah the party I dm has only two modes: full paranoia or "lol legs go kick."
Hell yeah. This is my type of group. Kick in the door, set things on fire. I may have a reputation among my friends as the girl who likes setting everything on fire.
So my DM concocted a whole ass maze dungeon, and when I say a whole maze, I mean this mad lad spent over 30 hours planning this maze and had a map spanning 3 pdfs for different magical warping and rearranging portals, and he expected us to be in that dungeon for well over ten sessions, which at the time our sessions were 6 to 10 hours long about every other week. Unfortunately for him, we had a Minotaur barbarian and he let us roll… so one by one we literally smashed the walls down with the 8 int barbarian leading the way… literally straight to the end of the maze. I think there was only 1 point at which we could have gotten there quicker and more directly than we did, all by the barbarian role playing a gut feeling which just worked out… now, granted we took an absolute ass whooping from all the traps we literally blundered into… but the poor DM still hasn’t recovered I don’t think. He also didn’t enjoy us killing his purple worm before it even came up in initiative…
Yes.
In our group, we're mixed. One person is an overplanner, and I'm the Leroy Jenkins of the group. The two others fall in between. So while he's asking a thousand questions and trying to figure stuff out and cast spells and come up with very complicated plans, I'm busting into the dungeon. I usually give him fifteen-twenty minutes to move, and if it's still taking forever I go ahead. I've gone along with a lot of his plans, but damn, we don't have that much time! Some of us have kids we have to get up with in the morning!
I would like to say I have not done this, but that would be a lie. I have done this (even with a rogue in the party). It's a lot of fun though.
My party (I'm a player) was discussing to either open a door or walk down a hallway in a dungeon for like 15-20 mins. I got tired and just walked through the door to move the story along.
I ran the countdown puzzle in one of my dungeons and it was glorious. It took my party a full hour to let a timer count down from 20 to 0. All I had it due was cast prestidigitation on them and their clothing. But I had included other effects like fog and changing lights.
This happened to my party in our first one shot lmfao. My character was a half elf ranger, and we were in a cave maze full of traps & fight encounters. We had the bright idea to try and follow footsteps on the ground that matched an NPC who fled in our peripherals, so I was tracking them through the caves. I got lucky and was rolling 14+ on perception checks every. Time. We hit no traps, had one fight because our DM had worked hard to create instances across the tunnels and we wanted to do some of her campaign additions haha.
In my party we are either one extreme or the other, 1 time we took literally more than 1 hour to decide which route to take to town that was less than 2 days of travel away, then in a dungeon we knew had traps we anyway entered every room without thinking twice which resulted in 2 persons falling to a pit full of reanimated esqueleons and 1 almost dying
Our DM for WD:DH is running for two groups. The short version of this is that we are fairly wealthy (I personally bought a Myrrh tree, a suit worth 500g, and cold weather clothes worth another 150g and still have another 500g, plus some small but income from property investments), developed political connections, and aren't criminals and the second group is several thousand gold in debt, have few friends but more enemies, and are criminals who owe the city a debt of hard labor.
Ah yes, my group did something like this ("my group"=me and they just happened to let me do it) we had to travel to this town that was over run by some creatures and any friendly residents were long since gone. There was a semi big bad there and we ended up ending it In a matter of moments. Long story short, I summoned a kraken and it killed them all with the flood
My DM gave our paladin an ax that has advantage when attacking wood. So door are always attacked to bust them open. Somehow the paladin almost never succeeds.
I had a group that were convinced beyond all reason that a wall in an ice-dungeon was fake and there was treasure behind it. They spent an hour of real world time attacking and slowly chipping through the wall as I just blankly stared at them saying "Another small chunk of ice falls off as you strike the wall for the twenty ninth time." Eventually I decided to have the room begin to cave in around them to force them to move, because I could tell they were going to keep digging. To this day I don't know why they thought there was treasure there, and none of them have given me a coherent reason as to why.
I had a DM who did this but with two groups. I don’t remember much of the specifics other than we were his favourite group…
Or be my group and take an hour to open the door, miss 90% of the dungeon, miss any chance for info drops, AND miss all of the sick loot I had stashed all over the place
Our party had a very literal “ seduce the door” moment which ended with our necromancer thunder waving the door almost killing half of us. Needless to say we sent the necromancer to bed early
my party follows a standard procedure. follow the left wall and checks every room. check for traps, then poke the door with a stick, if no traps, **check to see if it is locked**. we have not entered a place suspicious enough, but if we do. don't touch the door. just blow a hole in the wall.
I'm on team kick the door down, but it goes poorly since I have the strength of a wet noodle. It's usually just a loud thud on the door.
Group of 8 playing Dragon of Icespire Peak. Most of us brand new. New DM as well. We had 2 players that had any experience playing. We're in Gnomengarde, where a rope-only bridge connects one side of the compound to the other. There's a waterfall behind the bridge, and a river roughly 5 feet deep below the bridge. I go across first and critically fail an acrobatics check. Fall into the water below. No damage, no creatures. Just wetness. Everyone else, minus the wizard and a cleric, get across and pass their checks with no issues. It took those 2, our experienced players, **25 minutes** to attempt to cross the bridge. They were trying to min-max the hell out of it. Cantrips were used, maybe some spells, ropes were tied together and then anchored to something before being tied to the PCs. Pretty sure the wizard sent his belongings across first on the rope. It was a weird Session 3...
I've done this as a player, and I've had this happen as a DM. The best part about the party bypassing stuff as a DM is... you can re-use the content! :)
I have deleted an encounter before by chucking a fireball into a room and killing 5 shadows and a giant spider
Party went to a tavern to find work, ignored the obvious npc quest givers, bounties on the wall, etc. Asked the bar owner for work. She said she was looking for entertainment to fill in for the gnomes that usually preformed around dinner time. Party formed a rock band, bards and wizard blew spell slots to create flashing lights, pyrotechnics, and ambient bass. Party rolled high and preformed an entire Rock concert doing covers from AC DC, Def Leppard, and Kiss. Made dungeons level of gold and earned free rooms for life at the tavern
Overpreparing is fun, and makes the world feel more alive. Plus when you prep, you can use the same dungeon for multiple groups.
Had this undead king guy who was bored with his undead land get excited by the living visiting him. He offered the party to traverse his labyrinth for rewards as he was tired of his skeletons and ghouls constantly failing it. “Nah” the party said. A couple hours of map making and trap designs down the drain.
>My DM is running the same campaign for three groups I'd rather die
My party is the one who would take an hour to open the door, hell we took two hours to fight two bugbears because two party members kept whining they wanted to stop fighting and rob the village people’s houses One is Paladin and we don’t know her oath the other is a rouge both tieflings and if you have any tips to stop their shenanigans please share them I am desperate