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Post by beetlewing on Nov 7, 2014 7:48:43 GMT
The players enter a long room or corridor. Along the walls are 8-10 statues, spaced 10' from each other. Each statue is looking across the corridor at its twin, 10' away.
As the players walk down the corridor, between matching statues (breaking the line of sight on their twin), one of the two (random) comes to life and immediately attacks the nearest party member. At the beginning of each round the statue they are fighting "freezes" and their twin comes to life and attacks.
The only way to damage/defeat the statues is to attack them when they are "frozen". When one twin is destroyed, so is the other.
It's a simple solution, but the players may have trouble figuring it out, especially if they activate more than one pair of statues right away.
Thoughts?
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Post by Erasmas on Nov 7, 2014 15:52:40 GMT
I love this idea! I have a small dungeon that I designed that has a hallway lined with statues that face each other. They likewise come to life, but it occurs when the party trips one of two pressure plate traps (one controls each side of the hallway). I have run it several times and it has affectionately been dubbed "The Dungeon of Death" by my players... because of that encounter. Inevitably, during the battle, somebody trigger the second trap... which activates the second batch of statues.
But I really like the puzzle aspect that you put into your version. It keeps it from being quite as deadly and makes them have to think their way out of it!
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Post by adamantinedragon on Nov 7, 2014 15:59:00 GMT
I'm not usually a fan of complex and deliberately frustrating traps, but this one is pretty intriguing. I would probably make it so that the "active" twin just had a very high DR but wasn't invulnerable, while the "frozen" twin lacked the DR and could be beat down pretty fast.
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Post by beetlewing on Nov 7, 2014 17:42:56 GMT
The twist is that (I think) most players would naturally attack the immediate threat, the active twin. I got the idea while messing with roman chess pieces I recently found at a flea market... here's a photo giving a visual of the room setup: (They'll all be painted the same stone color) After seeing it set up, I think I'd increase the room size a bit. As shown, it'd be nearly impossible NOT to activate the next set of statues. Question: do you think statues could activate more statues by stepping between them? ...or they only activate if something living breaks the line of sight?
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Post by adamantinedragon on Nov 7, 2014 17:54:32 GMT
In the leadup to the final boss confrontation in my last campaign I had a "Hall of Statues" but not with the "twin" idea. The statues each had a different activation mechanism and were extremely difficult to kill (High damage reduction, lots of hit points) but could be "turned off" if the key could be found to turn them off.
I almost over-thought the encounter and it was the closest to a TPK we had had in a long time. The party insisted on slugging it out with the statues. The final result was that they severely depleted their spells and supplies before the final encounter and were not able to save all the world in the final battle.
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Post by tauster on Nov 7, 2014 18:20:04 GMT
I love both the 'twin' idea and that the frozen ones are easier to destroy. Reminds me a bit of Dr. Who's Weeping Angels, but with a nice twist... Great idea!
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Post by rane on Nov 7, 2014 18:51:05 GMT
i would say keep the breaking of line of sight, as it can also give the PC's an alternate way to traverse the corridor without triggering the trap - such as crawling or rolling through it (As they would be too low to the ground to break the line of sight on the tall statue)
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Post by beetlewing on Nov 7, 2014 19:03:22 GMT
i would say keep the breaking of line of sight, as it can also give the PC's an alternate way to traverse the corridor without triggering the trap - such as crawling or rolling through it (As they would be too low to the ground to break the line of sight on the tall statue) By "line of sight" I didn't necessarily mean a thin beam going eyeball to eyeball... but I see what you mean by allowing them to duck under. Maybe I should put the taller statues up front, so as you go deeper into the room it's harder not to activate them. It might also add suspense, as the first pairs of statues wouldn't do anything as the players walk through, but once the third pair is activated, they "accidentally" activate the taller second pair by moving to flank the characters... then those activate the even taller first pair.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Nov 9, 2014 20:20:09 GMT
rousseau, those chest pieces are like 3 times higher then regular medium sized miniatures. so they are much bigger already.
the rest sounds good though.
i'd not give them a chance at winning...
alarm zone at the end of the hall, if they enter it, all doors slam shut and everything activates. or i like the idea of one set activating th eothers and so on. so they have a time limit before the room is too crowded for them to win.
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javenspell
Paint Manipulator
Is this your Character sheet Larry?
Posts: 166
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Post by javenspell on Mar 18, 2016 14:39:57 GMT
I really like this one...very creative!
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Post by DnDPaladin on Mar 19, 2016 22:16:09 GMT
i'm in the same boat as adamentine dragon at this point... combat puzzles oftens tends to not go well as the players basically always throw everything at the monsters and only really start thinking when they are out of options. i mean it slike superman, why would he think about a situation when force alone as always shown him that it could work out. he will run out of strenght and fight way before stopping to think. same with any characters.
exemple: a DM once did this to us... a creature activated we hear the lightning buzz from the room we have seen earlier. and from another room we have yet to see up front. but the monster comes from a third room which just openned in the wall. so the onster is fighting us, we're ignoring the buzzing for now. we slug it out with the boss for like 3 turns until we notice that it receives zero damage from our attacks and we're already down a few hit points. so as a paladin, step out and start using magic thinking its immune to physical damage. and so the other casters do as well. we're down like half of our aspells and half our hit points fighting this thing with the DM face palming at us and what was supposed to be an easy puzzle from his stand point. but it seems we're not figuring it out and we're about have no more options. so we decide to push it off the bridge onto the floor 2 floors down. this should give us time to thik it through. the DM again Face palm and we bullrush the monster. at this point we're all angry at the DM and the DM is angry at us cause this is just a guardian of a boss fight. in the end after seeing the monster survive the 60 feet foot fall. with zero damage and him climbing his way back up. we decide to go tot he lightning buzzing room. and the other room splitting me the paladin and the barbarian goliath in order for them to ahve any people who bash strong enough to destroy objects. and so we destroy both ORBS powered by lightning just in time to see the monster entering the room and then suddently stopping and falling into pieces.
simple and effective puzzle, we even have had like walls and writing to warn us of it. we all liked it, but at this point we're left with like half our lives, next to no spells left and that means me and the barbarian have to do the heavy lifting for the final boss. trying to soak up the damage th most we can. in the end the final boss was much less of a hassle then the guardian himself. this is where the DM figured out that a combat puzzle is rarely a good thing unless its the final of something.
this was the last time i had seen a combat puzzle. as i was a player. and i really liked puzzles. but this showed me that even the simplest of puzzle can be a very taxing experience for the players.
other exemple... my players enters the room. seemed like a vault with two fountains in it. the door shuts down after the first two enters. the other two refused to enter. the two fountains opens up portals down below water and some frog like creature comes out. they have time to figure out the thing right, after all they ahve two wheels with figures thats clearly the mechanism. and so they get there while the barbarian just kills frogs after frogs. but killing the frogs leaves out a cloud of green toxic gas behind. its literall for me to say that i killed both the guys there. they were literally gas'ed to death. then once the thing was done for. the other finally sucessfully openned the doro fromt he outside. but as they openned the door. the whole content of the room spilled outside onto them... 15 minutes of stacking frogs inside the room when 5 appears every 6 seconds. thats much. fireball on top of himself, the mage just triggered like hundreds of cloud gas ina second. needless to say the other two died horrible death as well while the trap was continuing to fill the world with frogs.
TPK out of a simple trap that could have easily be solved by players simply paying attention to drawings ont he walls. writting ont he vault door. and even a note from a dead adventurer they had found. but guess what hapenned ? the players took the note, read it, considered it madmen writtings. frogs really ? and they simply ignored anything on the walls considering them as just drawings from mad mens talking about frog gods. the two that didn't enter couldn't read the words on the door vault but took it as a warning not to enter. and so they did, the other two said... bah mad mens, we can deal with whatever lies beyond. and thus ended the party of adventurer in a temple that led to a world of frogs. basically ending the adventure before it even started.
moral of the story... if you think its an easy trap to figure out, its probably still way to hard for players to pick it up !
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Post by onethatwas on Mar 29, 2016 20:56:45 GMT
Very cool idea. However, as has been pointed out, this could easily lead to a TPK unless you engineer a way to overcome it that is stupid obvious.
Another problem: In the odd event that they only activate the first two statues, they will quickly realize that to destroy the remaining statues they just need to do it while they sleep. So they avoid the rest of the encounter by just crushing the statues.
...while not a bad thing necessarily, it does throw a wet rag on the work you put into this idea.
...perhaps in an earlier room they find a statue facing an obscure location (directly facing a twin placed in the statue hall), and are faced with a riddle of sorts (if you can implement the rhyme for the words 'sleep' and 'weep' and also reference angels, you might get some kudos from your players). The statue is "defective" insomuch as shifting in and out of a frozen state (they do not need to know it is deffective), and the players may realize they can only destroy it in the frozen state.
Then, when they find this hall, and see the statue that is destroyed (because they destroyed the Twin in the other room) they might have it figured out.
...might be too obvious though. Then again...players are notorious for being dense with puzzles.
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Post by margaret on Mar 29, 2016 23:24:24 GMT
One of the reasons players have trouble even with combat puzzles that seem simple to the DM is that they are rather busy at the moment - trying to stay alive. Extensive complex reasoning pretty much goes out the door under those conditions, unless the players are allowed a pause in the combat to focus on solutions. I would be interested to hear if the OP actually ran this scenario and, if so, how it played out.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Mar 31, 2016 4:14:47 GMT
Margaret, by personnal experience as a DM and a player. i can tell you, its not because of stress or anything. its mainly due tot he fact that combat is combat. and combat often involves fighting. and thus people will fight and by fight i mean throw all their weapons at it or throw their spells at it.
out of the whole experience i have ever gotten was that... why would i lose time trying to find a way around it when i can just destroy it ? and the problem is that this oftens ends up too true.
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