Rules, Rulings, and Notes for DF Session 208

Here are some additional notes for Session 208.

– I’ve noticed that my players sometimes get stuck in a dead end, right next to a way out, like a character with poor pathfinding in an old video game. Part of it must be my descriptions, which aren’t eliciting in their heads the things I see in mine.

Equally, people do get fixated on what they perceive to be in front of them. In a game with secret doors, traps, mazes, weird little things to discover, and danger at all turns, that happens more.

Sometimes it’s just outsmarting yourself. They deliberately snuck around the back of the cloud fortress, only to find it doesn’t apparantly have a back door, and then assumed the way in was through the only thing they saw sticking out. Lots of what they did made perfect sense. It’s just that I’d thought they’d have checked for doors all over before deciding what they found must be a door. Once entering the dome didn’t work, looking around seemed like a better first step than digging through the cloud and searching for secret doors with See Secrets.

It’s always clearer from my side of the screen, I guess . . . but group do get fixated.

– The PCs were very cautious with their cloaks – they want to use them as emergency backup devices, and mainly rely on Walk on Air so they can walk and fight midair. Sadly for them, the environment is quite hostile to that, and much friendlier to wings. It’s amusing they have mythic artifacts designed for exactly their circumstances and think, “These will make a nice backup.” It’s akin to Thor keeping mjolnir as a backup weapon because he doesn’t want to risk dropping it. Or maybe like the X-Men having Storm keep them aloft on winds instead of using the Blackbird because they can’t freely fight from within it. It’s amusing. It makes logical sense, with a certain kind of logic, but it cuts the value of the mythical artifacts, doesn’t it? The solution always seems to be, spam out some free-to-maintain spells and back it up with spellstones and then with whatever is designed to do exactly the job that needs doing.

– The trap took a lot of time, but I don’t think people were annoyed by it. It was painful, and really beat up their resources, but still . . . I think it’s because the puzzle had lots of things to try and costs for trying them. It didn’t feel like the answer was, “Nothing happens.” That “Nothing happens” describes a few places in Felltower, including some merely mistaken for puzzles.