Comments on: Tie Their Hands and Steal Their Swords!

By: Bradicus

Bradicus — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:36:11 +0000

I liked this post, as I do stuff like this all the time – you certainly don’t need large hordes of monsters to challenge even a well equipped and powerful party. I believe it truly ok for the GM to move the Player (Pieces) and take things away. If it is your world, even a stock world (Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk) I think the GM has the right to do whatever he wants to make it interesting, as long as he does it in a manner that is reasonably respectful to the party. This could include removing class powers/abilities temporarily, boosting/empowering well known “weaker” monsters, i.e. a high level kobold or something, or even nerfing rolls that would wipe the party out completely.

By: Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Friday Five: 2009-09-25

Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Friday Five: 2009-09-25 — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:52:42 +0000

[...] Tie Their Hands and Steal Their Swords! Are your PCs walking through everything you throw at them? Having a hard time challenging them without reducing yourself to throwing in the Tarrasque, his big brother and ancient mother at them? Take some of their items from them! Have their vital gear stolen or reduced to nothingness, and wrap an adventure around the process of them returning themselves to former glory. More details can be found in the post over at Dungeon Mastering. [...]

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:43:51 +0000

@JohnL: You are an evil, evil man. I love it!

By: JohnL

JohnL — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:05:10 +0000

“…and steal their swords” I ran a dungeon with a lot of lethal traps. The creator of this labyrinth of death was kind enough to leave a ritual of raise dead hidden at each trap location The only thing was that the ritual component had to be residium. After a few bad trap encounters the party was forced to use a ritual scroll and shell out the residium. They didn’t have that much residium, so they had to start sacrificing magic itmes to the disenchant item ritual. To get 500 gp in residium you have to disenchant 2500 gp worth of magic item. See where this is going. They soon realized that they didn’t have any mundane back up weapons with them and it wasn’t long before they were weighing the value of their dwindling magic supply versus the value of the character that needed raising. By the time they left the dungeon they were using make shift weapons (that’s why there are rules for those) and running away from as many combats as they could. At the end they hated me but loved the session and still talk about it whenever the subject of equipment comes up.

By: rook103

rook103 — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:19:24 +0000

I have used most of these tactics at various times. I am fortunate to have had a great group of roleplayers for PCs. They took each of the challenges in stride and complained about them later. My favorite is reversing choke points in combat. Plate armor is great so long as you can slide through the caved in doorway and make it into combat. Also, using bends and column make for interesting ambushes and limitations for ranged/line of sight attacks.
In addition, just because Town X hired your party to save the Mayor/capture the bandits/slay the zombies doesn’t mean you’ve endeared yourself to the local sheriff/town watch/or town guard. While you may be a hero to the people of Town X, the local law may feel you are a little to big for your britches and require the whole party to surrender their hardware while inside the gates.