@ACuriousMind Thank you. :)

For my group at the time, many of them were very familiar with the manuals and moderately familiar with the lore, and I'd noticed that there was actually a kind of fatigue going on because --for a game about exploring new places-- they weren't actually "discovering" or being surprised by their explorations.

They loved having a whole new world where none of their assumptions above core mechanics necessarily applied.

ugh I never could fix the oneshot I built to not depend on guessing the essential solution

Maybe it'll help talking it over. What's the oneshot and what's the problem with it?

mostly exploration based oneshot set in a town buried by lava; to open the last room and save the girl you've got to disrupt the statis spell; since it's across the only unopenable door in the entire map the scroll found early on will work

the scroll isn't special made; it's a knock scroll

So, from a design perspective the first question I'd ask myself is: Why is this the only possible solution?

because I failed to come up with any more that make sense in the world

although tecnically that isn't true they could come back in six weeks with a skilled ward breaker who could cast dispel magic at a high level

but that's no fun at all

Yeah it looks like progress is limited by a bottleneck, and it's a severe one because the players might miss the key (i.e,. the knock scroll) or use it elsewhere. So either (1) allow other optional solutions, or (2) provide some clue that the key is meant for the door (such as showing them the locked door first, then the scroll).

ah; at least there's no elsewhere they could use the key

Why is there only one scroll? Why can't there be other scrolls or other methods of opening the door?

no reason I couldn't add more scrolls; anybody got any other ides how to disrupt the hastily cast permanent statis?

What is a permanent statis? Why is it there in the first place?

so you find a live person rather than a skeleton with the bones picked clean

Why can't there be an Authorized Access Talisman that lets them pass through without destroying the shield? Why can't they treat the spell like a being and talk their way past it with persuasive arguments or tricking it into thinking they have authorized access? Or use their magical knowledge to ad-hoc a targeted dispel ritual that achieves a higher-level effect at the cost of time, resources, and/or extremely unique customization?

why could you reason with wall of force? That's not what it is, but it feels like the same question. I didn't come up with any ideas of how a dispel ritual might exist because that's definitely into "guess what I'm thinking of" territory.

Set up a jerry-rigged eldritch grounding line to siphon the spell's power out safely and make it collapse.

Interesting.

@Joshua It's a spell, it's formed of intent and personal power. Why can't we imagine that a spell of desperation, with intense desire poured into it and then given a very long time to develop, might become aware?

At least two previous editions had actual monster manual creatures that were spells which gained autonomous identities.

@Joshua That's what environmental clues are for. Maybe one of the people who made the statis scribbled some notes about it. e.g. "We added voice controls to the spell, and it is protected by a riddle to ensure only we can access it. In case you forget, here is a clue to the riddle..."

Also--this isn't always a matter of "the players guess what the GM is thinking," it can be a matter of "the GM is open to whatever solution the players come up with."

I've got better. The caster's ghost is two rooms away.

I frequently give my players problems to which I have no solution, and they tell me how they're going to solve it.

Same, I've found that players' solutions are often more clever than what I had intended.

lol; we had this bomb puzzle we just couldn't solve because it was after 9 and I was out of energy. The next morning I had this idea to borrow a greatshield and cleave the bomb with careful wildshaping

@MikeQ I'd just have the shield heckle the players with character-revealing commentary whenever they get near.

If I'm gonna make it a character, I'm gonna give it screentime.

Also, if I design a puzzle with a specific solution, and the players can't solve it or don't figure anything out after too much time, then I'll assume that the puzzle was badly formulated, and it's probably best to accept their next guess by default, just to keep the game moving. It sounds silly, but it's much better than stalling the game or forcing them to reach the intended solution.

I'd give the shield a simple goal that alone it can only accomplish by staying steadfast and stubborn, but which the party can re-frame such that their help, if they can get its trust, gives it other options.

Granted: the shield's only goal is keep that girl alive.

Which it's been doing for 2000 years

Then it's cranky and tired and stuck in its ways, but if the party can get it to listen at all, and trust them, it'd be open to the idea that letting her out to experience life is preferable to an eternity of just being alive.

lol gonna be one-sided conversation though; shield could not have spoken with girl

Assuming this is a D&D-ish game, maybe consider 3 broad categories of approach: (1) use magic to bypass it, or (2) convince or trick it to release its prisoner, or (3) defeat it using combat.

@MikeQ ooh, I'd've loved to design the combat stats for a stasis ball in 4e or Fate.

You're going to defeat a stasis field by combat? How does that even work?

In 4e, I'd give it reactionary deflection abilities, projection attacks that slow and damage, and a chance for melee attacks to connect to its mind and inflict the psychic damage of sharing its two millennia of boredom and despair.

Maybe there's an amount of HP/damage it needs before it can be bypassed, and it has some automated magical defenses that kick in if attacked.

It's a living spell, that's a great chance to get creative!

Hmm if the players could drain the water off the ethereal plane they could get the caster's ghost to bring the stasis ward down, but I'd love to see lvl 1 players so much as figure out the water's there let alone drain it off

I mean, doesn't it feel cheap to have Agmemnon just tell them the solution?

ok that's funny

I'm pretty sure you'd enjoy trying to solve the trapdoor puzzle.

What's the premise of the trapdoor puzzle?

"There's a trapdoor somewhere in the room. To find it, believe it does not exist."

It sounds to me like you're stuck in a mode of requiring solutions that only operate on textual mechanics-to-mechanics (spell unmade by counterspell), when there's a lot of space for improvised use of mechanics (spell unmade by trickery skill) and character (spell unmade by sympathetic conversation) as solutions too.

yeah; I would probably not bother if the magic wasn't rules magic though

I can't remember, did 5e retain the skill challenge structure from 4e? It was a good compromise by giving textual structure to improvised mechanical applications.

No, not that I know of. Maybe it's buried somewhere in the 5e Dungeon Masters Guide.

And if 4e's rigid mechanical structure can make explicit room for that, 5e's "blame the GM if you don't like our game" attitude can sure be wedged open for it.

of course, to find a trapdoor you could just do it the old fashoned way of beating on the floor until something sounds different

Well that challenges section really doesn't like the complete lack of time pressure

Hm?

There's no particularly good reason you can't take a long rest right outside the door and refill all your spell slots and try again if you muff it the first time.

One of those don't bother rolling scenarios.

That's not a challenge issue, that's an issue baked into most versions of D&D as written and probably best fixed by applying the "fail forward" philosophy.

That is, failure doesn't mean "nothing happens."

Failure instead changes the kinds of challenges being faced, and often escalates them.

I wonder if I should just delete the puzzle and have the stasis field come down on a hard shove of the door.

Sure, it's two thousand years old, it's reasonable to assume it's become friable over time.

I guess the question is, where's the tension in the adventure? What's the focus, where's the time spent, and what kind of decisions are important?

but I have to admit that Stacy the Stasis Field was funny

If it's a solve-the-pre-made-puzzle kind of adventure that's very different from a help-the-time-lost-refugee kind of adventure. One of them is gonna spend more time with the stasis field, and the other is using the stasis field to justify its premise and can wave the field away as soon as it's outlived its usefulness.

I built the thing to tell a story by discovering evidence

then I stuck the help-the-refugee in because I thought it was boring; and it became a little more than half the material

Never let your fiction be overwhelmed by the tools you're using to tell it. In this case, it sounds like you're letting the rules of magic make dismantling a spell effect overshadow the procedural discovery fiction you're using the spell effect to justify.

probably nobody will ever care to play it anyway

So throw 'em out. Make it a custom spell that doesn't follow the rules, claim it has a contingency that it'll collapse as soon as the stasis field detects people who will help the occupant.

I started building it when the pandemic was upon us

Or do a reversal and make it a Tomb of the Cyberman scenario: the occupant is a mind flayer who went into stasis and only wants to come out if the best brains are available, so collapsing the stasis field is a test of wits.

TPK here we come; it's a oneshot built for the normal lvl 1 for oneshots

No problem. The mind flayer went into the stasis field because it was very weak, an appropriate boss battle for level 1s.

my estimate is quite a few possible parties will have difficulty with the skeleton in the crallway

Combat is very swingy at 1st level in D&D 5e, I'm not sure any boss battle is appropriate for 1st level characters.

Boo.

can't tell which this is Boo to.

...I still want to make that Tomb of the Cyberman dungeon where every door is a logic gate.

@BESW wow... so if door1 and door2 xor door3 not door4... ?

@Adeptus The basic idea is that doors output 1 or 0 depending on if they're open or closed. Sometimes that output changes the state of something in a room, but it also locks or unlocks other doors.

So as you go deeper into the tomb, you have to be leaving doors open or closed, locked or unlocked, behind you in order to unlock the next entrance.

Until at the very center of the tomb, in order to open the tomb itself you've gotta lock yourself out of the shortest way back out. Cue monster coming out of the tomb and chasing you the loooong way 'round back to the exit.

Evenin' all

yawp

Anyone happen to have a ruler, a pair of calipers, and a couple dice around?

(I mean, I guess most people here have dice)

If you do, could you tell me the approximate diameter of a d20?

Dad won’t let me have the calipers any more

It sounds as if there's a story behind that

The calipers are holding a kitchen chair together for the moment

I need the average diameter of a d20, just like the standard ones you get at game stores, for a project.

Incidentally, anyone else have that one die that you never let roll around, so it doesn’t lose any good rolls to a random bump while it’s in a bag?

@BardicWizard Mine look about 20-21 mm diameter, measured across opposite flat ends, although I'm measuring by eye so it's a rough estimate at best. According to dice.co.uk/outlines.htm the d20 should be 22 mm measured from opposite pointy ends.

@MikeQ Thanks — that’s fine, I just wanted confirmation cause I’ve had too many late nights this week (blame USA Olympic women’s gymnastics trials and the shawl I’m making and my goal of getting through all 29 encyclopedia brown books, including the cookbook, in under a week.)

Also, whoa, cool website!

@BardicWizard Omigosh the cookbook's an absolute slog, you can tell nobody had any interest in actually writing the stories that justify the recipes.

Which is a shame since most of the regular books have so much joy in them.

I also enjoyed his Secret Agents Four.

@BESW I quite liked the cookbook, actually. But then again the case of the missing watchgoose in that book still makes me cry

We own all 28 regular books and the cookbook, plus two repeats (Disgusting Sneakers and Carries On). I’ve been reading them and putting them in order since last Friday. I’m on the first of the scholastic ones, Encyclopedia Brown Cracks the Case

So I only have 3.7 left to go

I had the nickname “walking talking dictionary” in second grade, and I didn’t mind it because I thought maybe I could be Encyclopedia Brown

(The nickname was not by choice. Blame my nemesis)

Wow, I didn't have a nemesis until the 6th grade.

@hyper-neutrino offensive username, delete those messages for us?

Please don't flag Smokey's messages, because if the bot gets banned, it stops spam from being reported. If a particularly offensive message shows up and needs to be removed, please flag for a mod to manually delete it or ask a room owner to trash it.

That said, poof, messages gone.

10-4, thanks.

We've got people in this chat who can do that for us without flags.

@BESW yeah, forgot you were an RO

@BardicWizard I have that one die I make roll around all the time so that it can grow big and strong and make big rolls.

@ThomasMarkov Found an interesting spreadsheet of 5e MM math errors though I don't know how accurate it all is now, after errata, and taking into account various reasonable explanations for the "errors"

(I don't actually have such a die, but maybe I should)

DND Beyond's Sage Advice Compendium has permalinks to every individual question now.

Maybe its always been there and im dumb

@doppelgreener like a fidget die?

Fidget Cubes are not dissimilar

@Medix2 fascinating

@goodguy5 my fidget cube is so strong now

Shirt design for our meat heads

Oh hey, LIFTS: Ultimate Pump Edition! Always nice to see that getting some play.

@IllegalCatToss howdy

@IllegalCatToss in response to your closed query: dndbeyond.com/magic-items is a list of magic items. Suggest limiting to core D&D

If you're getting a choice, broom of flying is a good choice. Also, if you're a druid, with that and a feline friend, you can be a witch.

Staff of th Woodlands is good for a druid.

@NautArch it can carry 400lbs

It doesn't seem to have any other restrictions

Roll20 introduce new safety tools (Twitter link) in collaboration with Evil Hat Productions.

@NautArch I can't afford a carriage, but you'll look sweet upon the bar of a flying broom built for two.

Also, you'll have to bring some sort of artillery in the event of wyvern encounters. Those flying scorpions are very ill tempered.

@AncientSwordRage Broom handle belt buckles? No more worries about massive falling damage due to less than careful flying broom operating?

@GcL ¯\_(ツ)_/¯