One of my players, Dalton, has started his own AD&D first edition campaign, and it's been going pretty well from what I hear. He has a group of teen-agers playing 1st edition AD&D several times per week. I think it's cool that he has been able to drag his fellow teens away from video games, texting and whatever else it is kids these days are doing and get them enthused about playing some D&D at all, much less a version that was published when I was younger than they are now. He got almost all of his D&D experience as a player at my table, so I feel a little proud of him too.
Now, from time to time he asks me for a bit of old school DMing advice and I usually have no problem handing it out, but the other day he asked me for some old school DM tricks, the kind of things that turn players from newbies into veterans; paranoid, experienced, veteran dungeon-crawlers. Now, I got to thinking about this and came up with some memories of the most vile, evil tricks and traps that DMs ever sprang on me as a player; not the Killer-DM type stuff, but the stuff that teaches valuable lessons about playing D&D, particularly in a dungeon environment, the stuff that teaches caution and teamwork and keeps the party on it's toes.
So, I advised a few simple things like putting the occasional pit trap in a hall way, or trapping the lock on a chest/desk/whatever with the old spring-loaded poisoned needle. I mentioned that the opening sequence of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was a pretty good primer on traps in dungeons in general. I told him it probably couldn't hurt to read through, or run his players through, some of the old TSR B series modules. I thought about the lessons I had learned as an adventurer in dungeons and the stuff DMs had done to my characters. There's a reason the 10' pole is on the equipment list and the Iron Spikes and pretty much every item that isn't a weapon; they have a use, otherwise they would not be there.
So, my first longtime DM Tim used to regularly trap the treasure and a favorite thing to do with piles of gold pieces was to cover them with Yellow Mold. I passed that little gem along. I mentioned that, in dungeons, a certain percentage of rooms should have unguarded treasure, this is mostly to lure you into a false sense of security for when treasure appears to be unguarded. Sometimes treasure will be guarded by a trap, mention when they open the door that there is a treasure chest sitting, perhaps enticingly open, on the other side of the room; allow time for each player to say what they intend to do, but not too much time, usually the greediest will rush forward to see what treasure is in the chest. Pit trap for everyone that ran into the room.
There are actually quite a few variations on this theme, you can also punish the really paranoid one that hangs back with, say, a scything blade triggered by those that rushed into the room stepping on a pressure plate or tripping a wire or something. Lance called while Dalton was at my house and we were talking and he offered up as his "Evil DM Trick", same premise as mine, apparently unguarded treasure on the other side of the room. This time the DM just assumes the first person to respond saying they are going in to check it out, before anyone else gets to say anything about checking for traps or all going in together or anything, enters the room; as soon as that happens a portcullis descends trapping the PC in the room and a secret door opens into the room allowing an undead, Golem or automaton of some sort entry into the room with the lone PC. The rest of the party can then see the lone PC fight against this creature, but only assist, at best, minimally; they mostly just get to watch him die. Admittedly, this skirts the edge of killer DM territory, but it does teach a lesson about leaping before looking.
I have actually already given Dalton some of the best advice I could in the form of the Old School Primer and links to various blog posts written by other OSR bloggers, I also gave him a couple of old AD&D books.
See now, as a DM, I moved my campaigns largely away from dungeon exploration a long time ago, so I don't have a ready repertoire of "Evil DM Tricks" like this, just stuff I remember from the old days. I am re-learning all the old dungeon based DM stuff myself, like tracking time and resource management and encumbrance; but mostly dungeon design and the tricks and traps and stuff that go with it. I have gotten kind of lazy with things like wandering monsters, I usually only roll for them in a dungeon when the players have bogged down and lost focus, I find nothing refocuses a party's attention like a random encounter. I hate drawing dungeon maps, I think they always look like crap and I always think that even a random dungeon would probably be better than what I could come up with; I am going to have to bite the bullet though and actually create an honest to goodness dungeon. I have done it before, I have even done it pretty well before, although I think my best efforts are derivative of EGG's work.
Anyone got a favorite "Evil DM Trick" to share?
Preview for tomorrow- I have been reading Moldvay Basic and have a few things to say.
I was running a homebrew dungeon crawl a few years ago that had one small (10x10) chamber that had one entrance (a rusty, narrow portcullis-type door). In the center of the chamber stood a marble pedestal upon which rested a golden idol. The player characters could see the idol clear as day, but the old portcullis would barely budge. They managed to get it raised just high enough for a slim body to crawl under it - sans armor, of course. So the elf shucked her armor, and shimmied under it. She was halfway under it when the green slime started to drip from the ceiling... >:D It was a joy to watch the players freak as they tried to extricate that poor elf as quickly as possible. LOL IIRC, they managed to get her out before any slime hit her - but she took a bunch of damage from being roughly dragged under the rusty, spiky bottom of the portcullis. Good times...
ReplyDeletehow hard is it to shoot an arrow through the bars of a portcullis?
ReplyDeleteI use animated statues a lot, but sometimes just ordinary ones, keeps them guessing. Seemingly random traps in corridors, and things on the ceiling have made my players all the more cautious. I've been subjected to explosive runes on books (when my wizard had a tendency to read any book he came across); big red buttons begging to be pressed and generally teleporting the presser somewhere else; flooding and crushing room traps, and rooms with undead buried beneath the floor.
ReplyDeleteI tried using a statue at the end of a long corridor that looked like it might be an advancing monster once, but Will (who was playing in the adventure and had also spent all night staying up with me designing the dungeon) quickly told the party, "Don't worry, its only a statue..." /facepalm
DeleteTo be fair, I was dog tired at the time. Maybe I shouldn't have been playing in that adventure either, now that I think about it. That was a cool trick though, it had a magic mouth that uttered some sort of threatening phrase; it was a classic trick designed to waste party resources. When we were teenagers we had a lot more stamina for all weekend gaming than we do now, eh? I can't remember the last time I put in an 8 hour game session, much less three 16's over a weekend. You and I used to do that all the time.
Delete@Dacj501 If you assume that the doorway is standard sized, then usually, at best you are going to get one archer assisting, usually at a penalty to hit (restricted field of fire through the bars, into melee). Arrows usually don't do great damage against constructs or undead either. Spells might be better, but we're dealing with a low level party here. The object lesson of occasional death is to teach them the lessons of old school D&D, death is possible and that you as a player need to pay attention and be careful. None of those pansy automatic spot checks or anything to save your ass in AD&D.
ReplyDelete