In an online game I used to play, we were infiltrating deep in necromancer territory and encountered a rune on the floor that would summon an incredibly strong undead specter when a player touched it. One of the players wondered if there was a cooldown between summons, and decided to test this by pressing the rune several times in quick succession.
One total party kill later, I can confidently state that there was not in fact a cooldown, and that three nightshades will kill your entire group faster than you can run away.
See, that’s just idiocy. Sure, test the device to see if it suddenly gives you spiffy new armor, but ya’ll are freaking adventurers, ready to cut and kill and slay anything in your path! SET UP A TRAP FIRST! Put a hot tub of holy water where the first spawn location was! Scatter circles of salt in eighteen strategic locations around the room! Write the verses of ancient positive energy across the walls! Summon the ancient daedra of yore, hallowed be their sigilic runes, and let fly the chaos of the universe into the demesnes of horror where cometh light’s foe, wherein the bane of life finds new fears etched prebirth into the slaverings of its blasphemous mental cavity!
See, he could have gone about things the smart way, but this was way funnier and made for a better story. It was also 100% in-character for him to do something like that - the guild he was a part of was commonly mocked in-universe for thinking with their swords rather than their brains.
Plus I was able to hold it over his head for years afterwards. I was a cleric and he didn’t even wait for me to do the bare minimum preparations that might have let us survive before summoning them.
In an online game I used to play, we were infiltrating deep in necromancer territory and encountered a rune on the floor that would summon an incredibly strong undead specter when a player touched it. One of the players wondered if there was a cooldown between summons, and decided to test this by pressing the rune several times in quick succession.
One total party kill later, I can confidently state that there was not in fact a cooldown, and that three nightshades will kill your entire group faster than you can run away.
I still get flak from my players about the time they rang a church bell and were surprised the baddies heard it and all came inside and killed them.
I know it’s not the same, but what did they expect?
See, that’s just idiocy. Sure, test the device to see if it suddenly gives you spiffy new armor, but ya’ll are freaking adventurers, ready to cut and kill and slay anything in your path! SET UP A TRAP FIRST! Put a hot tub of holy water where the first spawn location was! Scatter circles of salt in eighteen strategic locations around the room! Write the verses of ancient positive energy across the walls! Summon the ancient daedra of yore, hallowed be their sigilic runes, and let fly the chaos of the universe into the demesnes of horror where cometh light’s foe, wherein the bane of life finds new fears etched prebirth into the slaverings of its blasphemous mental cavity!
The mentality that separates an “Oops, we screwed up” PC group versus an “Oops, I screwed up” DM.
The goofy party will stumble around slapping every button in the fun-house, just to see what happens.
The pro-gamer move party will key in on “Unlimited Resource” and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine.
A good GM would realize they can have the theoretically “Unlimited Resource” run out between 5-10 uses
See, he could have gone about things the smart way, but this was way funnier and made for a better story. It was also 100% in-character for him to do something like that - the guild he was a part of was commonly mocked in-universe for thinking with their swords rather than their brains.
Plus I was able to hold it over his head for years afterwards. I was a cleric and he didn’t even wait for me to do the bare minimum preparations that might have let us survive before summoning them.
Take that rune, put it in a portable hole, build a clockwork or magical button-pressing machine, unleash chaos and destruction on demand.
That trap’s gotta be worth a million gold pieces.