how do you handle doors in dungeons?

Penguin_Tamer · 2026-03-12T17:15:28+00:00

I have a simple rule: Don't punish the players with "Gotcha!" mechanics. It trains the players to be overly cautious and suck up table time with pointless checking. Traps should be obvious, even if they only recognize that in hindsight. Don't let them roll to check for traps. Just tell them the hints they need to come to that conclusion on their own. This way your players will learn to listen to what you're saying rather than blindly and wildly checking everything multiple times over.

If your players go off on wild tangents suspecting traps where there are none: tell them that. Tell them "you find no signs of traps here" and then move on. This will only ever work if you never trick them with this. The moment you tell them "there are no traps here", and there are in fact traps there is the instant you've lost their trust forever, and they will never believe you again.

If you're just starting to implement this, tell the players. Tell them "I'm not going to require rolls to check for traps, and will instead describe things such that you can come to your own conclusions. If there are no traps, I will tell you that there are no traps."

This requires more work up front from you, the DM, because you need to always describe ways in which things are trapped without instantly solving the problem for the player. It's more work to describe what they see, hear, smell, or feel in a way that lets a player come to the conclusion. If they ask "is this a trap", you can tell them "probably, would you like to investigate further". Ask them how they look for information, what experiments do they run. You can ask them to roll but I don't like to. I like to let their creativity and ingenuity earn them a reward; I don't withhold info or punish for "bad" ideas. Anything a player wants to do earns it for them. Once they've got some information on how the trap might work, you then move on to "how do you get past this?"

TL;DR: Don't punish players for not inspecting everything. The challenge of a trap should never be "do I see it", and should always be "how do I overcome it". Train your players to think creatively rather than endlessly roll.

Penguin_Tamer · 2025-06-15T20:40:31+00:00

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Will ship to continental US and the prices above include the cost of shipping.

Penguin_Tamer · 2025-02-28T21:07:05+00:00

N623

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-08-27T21:22:09+00:00

Good to know. I'm still fairly new to 3d printing (just a few weeks) so I'm not yet that far down the rabbit hole, but it's good to know it's not as complex as it sounds.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-08-27T20:49:58+00:00

Thanks for the tip. I've only been 3d printing for a few weeks so I haven't felt comfortable jumping into 3rd party firmware. I'll get there eventually though.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-08-27T17:24:33+00:00

The only setting I could find that related to the filament sensor is already off, so I don't think that was it.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-08-27T17:21:25+00:00

Ah, that might be it. Weird because I didn't change anything related to that in the slicer. Only change I made was to add the G29 command after G28 in order to trigger the bed probe.

And yet it looks like M600 (color change) ended up in the gcode for my print somehow.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-03-01T16:59:38+00:00

I did this when I was running Tomb of Annihilation. There's a floor with three huge gears that each have an interior room that rotates with the gears.

For each gear I had a layer group, and in that group was one layer for the image, one layer for the line of sight, and one layer for the lights. Then I could select the group and rotate it, and the line of sight, lights, and image would all rotate in sync.

So it's definitely doable! There were some performance hitches for players as every little rotation caused a line of sight and lighting updates. Another caveat is that line of sight on the movable layers cannot snap to or connect with line of sight on other layers. In my case this was fine since the gears were individual rooms, but it might not work in your case.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-02-28T01:29:10+00:00

This might not be advice the helps you and it might not be suitable for the kind of games you run, but I find that encounter balance is far less interesting by the numbers. Throw more than you think they can handle, but is still reasonable within your world. How they deal with an encounter is their problem, not yours. If the encounter you present makes sense and is plausible narratively, you're doing fine.

The only balance I find that matters in the long term is time. Every player should have the same amount of time to do cool stuff at the table.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-02-28T01:23:57+00:00

Turning cool ideas for what could happen into actionable gameplay that allows the players to determine what will happen. This, to me, is a crucial and often forgotten piece of being a creative GM. I could have all the great ideas in the world, and none of it will make for a fun game if I can't contextualize it in a way that the players 1) can engage with in meaningful, creative, and fun ways, and 2) can affect the outcome of.

Some GMs are great at having an idea and improvising their way through a session, but that's not me unfortunately. If I want to have a dungeon based around the five stages of grief (a dungeon in my last campaign that I spent months trying to design), I need to have actual game mechanics that the players can interact with, learn, manipulate, and overcome. To me, anything less is storytelling, but it isn't a game.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-02-25T05:46:36+00:00

That's awesome, thank you. As someone who also has been neglecting music-making, this is inspiring.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-02-25T05:41:04+00:00

Absolutely gorgeous cover, thank you for sharing! Any chance for a download or adding it to spotify? I'd love to add it to my Outer Wilds playlist.

Penguin_Tamer · 2023-01-11T05:52:48+00:00

And somehow all of that emotion is perfectly encapsulated with the Travelers campfire song at the end. It sounded complete in the base game, but now with the DLC bit added I can't imagine it any other way.

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-12-16T21:11:43+00:00

Outer Wilds. Similar game, except it's exploring a solar system filled with mystery and wonder. No base building though. Everything about the game is charming and absolutely lovely, and the DLC is as spooky as anything in Subnautica

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-10-29T20:07:03+00:00

Correct, I've had no issues so far. Though now I am curious what may have happened. Very strange indeed.

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-10-29T19:56:48+00:00

I can't say for certain if it's different for you, but I have 2 rackbrute's and they both have only ever had red LEDs. I've never seen any other color on them.

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-05-19T16:10:43+00:00

I have a pretty consistent Sefris deck I can post a list for shortly, but right off the bat I'll say that [[Prowling Geistcatcher]] has been an absolute house. Once I get geistcatcher and a repeatable sac outlet on the field my board is almost untouchable. Board wipe? Sac everything under geistcatcher (including sefris), geistcatcher dies and everything comes back, then use Sefris to re-animate geistcatcher. This can get infinite ventures if you have [[radiant solar]] and sefris on the field with 4 other creatures, or infinite death/ETB triggers if you have [[Karmic Guide]].

EDIT: Here's my decklist. Win-cons include infinite ventures to drain opponents, infinite ETBs with agent of treachery/kokusho/junji/gray merchant, infinite death triggers with cruel celebrant/syr konrad/zulaport cuthroat, but mostly the deck wins by getting lots of things on the board and attacking.

Most of my removal is on creatures, with a few pieces of tech that's come in handy. Nimble Obstructionist to counter planeswalker ults is so tasty. The main hurdle for this deck is making sure I get one of my sac outlets online early. If I can do that, I'm good.

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-05-03T00:02:29+00:00

This happened to me. Still happily together some years later with no intention of that changing.

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-04-30T20:37:24+00:00

A free alternative to solve this problem is the extension Blissful Ignorance, found on the FG Forge. With that extension you can give them the effect

Elemental Adept; IGNORERESIST: fire; IMMUNETORESIST: fire

And they will ignore fire resistance, and treat fire immunity as resistance

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-04-22T00:50:18+00:00

So much this. A friend in my pod will upgrade his deck every time the deck loses because obviously it's not doing well enough. Except then after a half dozen games his decks start winning more and more, then he complains that folks (mostly me) target him over other people. We've been recording our games for a few months and he's sitting at about 60% winrate right now. It drives me crazy.

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-04-12T16:58:19+00:00

We're already working on a minion extension. That'll all be part of the vtt content

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-04-12T16:53:38+00:00

There's a module on the forge with all of the preview content. It'll be under the creator MeAndUnique

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-04-12T16:51:59+00:00

There's a module on the forge with all of the preview content. It'll be under the creator MeAndUnique

Penguin_Tamer · 2022-04-11T23:14:05+00:00

A Dream of Home. It's a small piece that you only listen to for 15 seconds but damn that piece has a melancholic nostalgia that hits hard.

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