Creativity and bypassing challenges

[Lago PARANOIA]

Namely, to what extent do you think that this should happen?

Say you're playing Samson after he's been blinded and brought out in the middle of the Philistine banquet. You're still pretty strong, but you're facing some pretty stiff penalties on account of being blind and being in jail forever. The DM does intend to give your character a fair shake at being free--after all, you've killed a thousand of those suckers with the jawbone of an ass in the pass.

So instead of going through the adventure the DM thought was going to happen, the player announces that he's going to push the pillars over and collapse the building on the people he hates.

As the DM, what should you do? Should you just declare that he kills everyone in the building and he rolls up a new character? Should you only partially collapse the temple and it makes the rest of the escape easier? Should you only partially collapse the temple but make the combat proceed exactly as it would've gone even if he didn't destroy the temple? Should you just tell him outright that he's not allowed to do that?

It works the other end, too. Say you planned an encounter for the players to sneak into the castle and steal the MacGuffin. There are a couple of combat encounters for when they mess up, ala Metal Gear Solid and even a boss fight at the end.

So instead of sneaking in, the players plan to run things like Monty Python's Holy Grail, busting through the front gate and slaughtering everyone in their way. They obviously draw a lot more attention doing this than they would have just trying to sneak in, but the thing is that they're badass and well-coordinated enough to kill everyone in the castle and just take the MacGuffin from the severed hands of the King.
Or perhaps they're not badass enough.

What then?

[Psychic Robot]

Samson: I'd say, "You want to collapse the pillars? The entire temple is going to fall on you if you do that."

Not-sneaking: The players get hit with several encounters at once. It hurts a lot. If they're going to go charging in, the enemies are going to go charging, too. If the players are strong enough to kill the enemies, then good for them. If they aren't strong enough, they get beat on, captured, and a new adventure starts.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Samson: I'd say, "You want to collapse the pillars? The entire temple is going to fall on you if you do that."

Not-sneaking: The players get hit with several encounters at once. It hurts a lot. If they're going to go charging in, the enemies are going to go charging, too. If the players are strong enough to kill the enemies, then good for them. If they aren't strong enough, they get beat on, captured, and a new adventure starts.

Samson: "I don't care. My character has enough hp to survive a temple collapse and dig out the rubble. The hordes of mooks don't."

Not-Sneaking: "Hmm. We pollute the water with an untraceable, deadly poison, then."

[Talisman]

I like to reward players for creativity and lateral thinking, but not to the extent of ditching my adventure. I'm not a railroader, but dammit, the GM is supposed to he having fun as well!

In the Samson example, I would have the fight proceed but make it easier than it otherwise would have been - the player pulled off something unexpected and interesting, and they should be rewarded for that. Only in the most extreme of cases would I totally scrap the adventure for something like this.

Of course, doing something odd has a chance to bite you in the ass as well. Samson would have to make some rolls to see if he could successfully bust up the pillars and avoid being clobbered by falling debris.

In the "rush the castle" example, I pretty much agree with P_R: charging in like a motorcycle gang will be treated as a full-scale assault, and you'll have to fight through the best defense the guards can muster. If you pull it off, good for you.

If you go the untraceable poison route, that's a whole separate issue and more akin to Samson: first you have to find the poison, then sneak it into the water supply, then wait for it to take effect. More rolls; more chances for entertaining stuff to happen. Assuming this goes off successfully, I would reduce the power of the opposition - but you don't get to poison everyone in the castle; people would notice in time for some to be healed. As with Samson wrecking the place, a successful poisoning grants you a moderate benefit, but does not totally destroy the adventure I had planned.

It's basically the ever-popular floating +2 modifier on a grand scale.

[RandomCasualty2]

Samson: "I don't care. My character has enough hp to survive a temple collapse and dig out the rubble. The hordes of mooks don't."

Well ok, but first two pillars aren't going to collapse an entire structure. It may collapse part of it (namely the part that you're in), but it's not going to destroy the entire thing, maybe just a room or two. So Samson kills whatever mooks happen to be in the same room and maybe some adjoining rooms, and then the second wave of mooks arrives when he's injured from the falling rocks.

Not-Sneaking: "Hmm. We pollute the water with an untraceable, deadly poison, then."

If the PCs are good aligned, the reason that it may kill many innocent servants is reason enough not to do it.

Well this leads to questions like "where are you getting all that poison?" and second "how are you administering it to the water supply?" The water supply to a stronghold is going to be guarded, just in case of an attempt exactly like this one. The water supply may also be something like a river (possibly an underground river) which is constantly flowing and very difficult to poison for long.

Not to mention that a poison attempt may kill some people, but isn't guaranteed to get everyone unless you're talking about a poison with a delay long enough for everyone in the castle to drink and die. Not to mention, it would be extremely expensive if you wanted poison that kills anyone other than mooks and other low level crap. And chances are, if the PCs have enough resources to dump on poison like this, then their enemies are either prepared for this kind of attack or have some kind of other countermeasure.

As far as rushing the gates instead of sneaking in, I'd just run the battle straight up, and let the dice fall where they may. I'd make sure to state to the PCs how they think it will be a very difficult fight going in there. If they choose to ignore the warning, then so be it.

[Fuchs]

I rarely if ever plan out my adventures too detailedly just in case the players bring up a curveball, so I usually limit my preparations to defining who wants what with what ressources, and see what happens. I don't like to script/railroad stuff.

Some players prefer it when his characters get told what to do though, by dicine visions, or orders from superours, so I have a bit more ways to steer my players than others.

[ckafrica]

I like to reward players for creativity and lateral thinking, but not to the extent of ditching my adventure. I'm not a railroader, but dammit, the GM is supposed to he having fun as well!

I'd say generally true but you can't always do it.

We were playing some badly written Dark Heresy module (well they all were actually) where it was painfully obvious to us players who was the bad guy by scene. The DM did try to make us follow the train tracks and wait to kill him at the end but he eventually conceded that it was painfully obvious and let us blow his head off 3 scenes early. He shouldn't have been DMing in the first place though (not his forte)

[Shoggoth]

I generally reward the player, but like Talisman said, treat it more like the floating +2 modifier than a whole game breaker, at least in AA games. In games where turn by turn success isn't measured, it's easier to just roll with it.

Some people really get off on this stuff though, and they can get really offended when you don't let them get away with it.

A buddy of mine loves to find the clever solution, it's one of his big payoffs. An example:

He's in a DnD game with another friend of mine GMing. They end up in a fight with a Shambling Mound. My friend throws a tanglefoot bag into the Shambling Mound and says to the GM:

"A Shambling Mound is a big pile of twigs and vines, right? And a tanglefoot bag is just a bag of glue, right? So when I put glue into the pile of twigs and vines, it can't move anymore, so it can't fight us, so we beat it. Right?"

The GM let him do it. I don't think I would have, and he'd have been pissed off about it. Even if it was Slowed, or something else like it, he'd feel ripped off because his cool idea didn't work, even though "it should".

[ckafrica]

Maybe a solution to the "players fucking up an encounter by trying something smart" is let them do it but make it difficult in its own way. Make it an equally exciting challenge rather than just allowing it to blam work.

Your shambling mound guy can try it but he's got to thrust the tanglefoot bag inside requiring a grapple (or something like that that is more involved than a simple touch attack).

[CatharzGodfoot]

He's in a DnD game with another friend of mine GMing. They end up in a fight with a Shambling Mound. My friend throws a tanglefoot bag into the Shambling Mound and says to the GM:

"A Shambling Mound is a big pile of twigs and vines, right? And a tanglefoot bag is just a bag of glue, right? So when I put glue into the pile of twigs and vines, it can't move anymore, so it can't fight us, so we beat it. Right?"

The GM let him do it. I don't think I would have, and he'd have been pissed off about it. Even if it was Slowed, or something else like it, he'd feel ripped off because his cool idea didn't work, even though "it should".

That's not clever in-game thinking. That's clever metagame thinking, where you know that there is a good chance that your DM will allow an effect to do exactly what it normally does but to a greater extent and automagically end an encounter if you ask nicely.


In a D&D game, the DM described a critical hit with a shortspear as being 'driven into the dragon's eye'. So we had a player who immediately said 'The spear weighs less than 5 lbs, so I'll cast mage hand and jam it into the dragon's brain, killing it.
I honestly have no idea if that was a reasonable thing for the DM to allow.

[Roy]

Ok, he can manipulate the less than 5 pound spear with 5 pounds of force. Guess what? Not fucking enough for penetration. It doesn't work.

[Heath Robinson]

Roy, D&D doesn't obey Newton's laws. Newton's laws say that if the spear is more than 5 lbs you can still accelerate it, just more slowly. Mage hand doesn't do anything to things heavier than 5 lbs. Discussing force in this context is pointless and the rules say precisely nothing about what happens. The situation has leaked outside the ruleset and it is totally down to your GM what works and what doesn't. There's a reason we have them.

Part of the way 4e deals with bad GMs is by attempting to prevent things leaking out the system. That's why it doesn't give you anything but attack powers. That's why it's boring beyond belief.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of reasons you could call foul on the brain-spear. In-game reasons, like 'sorry man, 0th-level spells don't work that way.' Out-of-game reasons, like 'it's just flavor text, don't get carried away.'

Fuck though, if it's cool, I say run with it. That's clearly a player who's engaged and thinking creatively, and there's no reason to punish them for it. I'd go with something like: 'Way to think outside the box, man. That isn't covered by the rules, so don't quote me on this effect later.' Then I'd have it function like some sort of level-appropriate effect, rather than giving him the full 'brain pierced, dies immediately' thing, because irl critters keep going with objects in their brains all the time.

[Bigode]

Fuck though, if it's cool, I say run with it. That's clearly a player who's engaged and thinking creatively, and there's no reason to punish them for it. I'd go with something like: 'Way to think outside the box, man. That isn't covered by the rules, so don't quote me on this effect later.' Then I'd have it function like some sort of level-appropriate effect, rather than giving him the full 'brain pierced, dies immediately' thing, because irl critters keep going with objects in their brains all the time.

Problem specific to the example: "level-appropriate" with a cantrip's basically a joke - the best's a trivially low DC for dazing someone (effect actually good, but easy to resist). General problem: allow an effect to occur once but not twice? WTF?

[Heath Robinson]

First time it's a cool stunt. Second time it's a boring schtick.

[Bigode]

Verisimilitude, consistency, tactics: who cares? As for "they'll repeat that every time and the game'll go to hell": not if you weren't stupid enough to fiat it into overpoweredness in the first place - then there'll be situationally better alternatives.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Problem specific to the example: "level-appropriate" with a cantrip's basically a joke - the best's a trivially low DC for dazing someone (effect actually good, but easy to resist).

Well, I meant character-level appropriate, the equivalent of the highest-level spell such a character could cast.

General problem: allow an effect to occur once but not twice? WTF?

Well, I might let it happen twice before I decided it had gotten old, in a Chekhov set-up/payoff sort of way.

Yes, it's not wholly consistent. I'm okay with that if that's the tone at the table. Part of it is communicating to the players that the only reason they're getting away with such a thing is the rule of cool.

[Heath Robinson]

My point was, I believe, that this situation is totally outside of real world physics and the game rules so the GM can do whatever they want and there's nobody to say "you're wrong".

I believe angel was saying something about a smaller impact than total death and not holding him to the decision as a GM because the situation is complex and additional thought not letting it bear out. Essentially reserving the right to bullshit out of it happening again. Bullshit like "the dragon you killed had an incident with an adventurer when he was young, really tragic, and it left a hole in his skull."

The reason you'd want to bullshit out of repeating the same thing again is because it's a crowning moment of awesome in one situation and boring in another. That's a metafictional reason and any number of in-universe reasons can be dragged out to support the decision.

Good players will say "yeah, I get it" and try to do something else that is as cool this time.