How The Dice Work

Alright, so now you know what the dice feel like, how do they actually work? It couldn't be simpler. Characters are made of attributes which you will know by the die attached to them, such as Muscle d6 or Charisma d8. When you go to make a check you roll two of that kind of dice and use the best number rolled. This is the Strength of the action and it uses the following table to tell us how well it all went. Everything above 3 is a success of some sort....

• 19-20: Mind-Blowing
• 13-18: Amazing
• 11-12: Fantastic
• 9-10: Incredible
• 7-8: Great
• 5-6: Normal 
• 4: Little 
• 3: Average Fail
• 2: Terrible Fail
• 1: Critical Fail

If the action is a hard one you roll only one die. If an easy action you roll three dice. But what if it is a very easy action? For this we turn to the Dice Tree which appears in the margin of the character sheet. At base it looks a bit like this.

• 1d30
• 3d20
• 2d20
• 1d20
• 3d12
• 2d12
• 1d12
• 3d10
• 2d10
• 1d10
• 3d8
• 2d8
• 1d8
• 3d6
• 2d6
• 1d6
• 3d4
• 2d4
• 1d4
• 0d0

A hard modifier is actually a -1d. It moves you one step down the dice tree. An easy modifier is a +1d which moves you up the dice tree. If you have Muscle d6 you start with a 2d6. An easy action moves you up to 3d6. Another +1d would take you up to 1d8. With more modifiers you would climb the tree until finally reaching 1d30 at the top.

There are two successes above mind-blowing (21 to 28: Stellar, and 29 to 30: Colossal) but these happen so infrequently they are left to the GM to decide what they are. The rest of the successes are described by that action at hand. For example combat. When a character swings a sword that weapon does a set amount of damage which the success multiplies.

• 19-20: Mind-Blowing Damage x 10
• 13-18: Amazing Damage x 5
• 11-12: Fantastic Damage x 4
• 9-10: Incredible Damage x 3
• 7-8: Great Damage x 2
• 5-6: Normal Damage x 1
• 4: Little Damage x 0.5

A sword with a damage rating of 8 will do 4 hit points of damage with a little success, 8 with a normal, 16 with a great and so on. At Stellar or Colossal we would probably leave the matter of points behind and just cleave the beast in half. But up to that point it is all done in an OSR context where a sword normally does 1d8 damage and a creature will have anywhere from 5 to 40 hit points. If the damage done seems a bit high, well there are reasons for that, one of which is armor that reduces damage rather than making you harder to hit.

Where Did It Come From?

The Dice Tree is a relatively new addition to the game. Before it the system used nothing but d10's and you had a choice of 1d10, 2d10, or 3d10 with a kind of Advantage/Disadvantage system. Attributes were marked by modifiers which were added to the roll. Complications brought on penalties which subtracted from the roll. The final strength of the roll was then compared to a table which told us whether or not it succeeded or failed. It even had its own volvelle to help speed the action along. Providing you had the time to print it out carve it up, paste it down, laminate it, etc.

I got sick of working on the game and to get away from it decided to write a module for Crimson Dragon Slayer called Monkey Mountain. For this I really needed to dig into the CDS system and understand how it works. For all the dorky and half-baked things that CDS does, much of it is borderline genius, including its method of action resolution.

In CDS you roll multiple d6's depending on the complexity of the situation. Usually from 1d6 to 3d6 but with the possible option to take it all the way up to a god-mode roll of 7d6. A roll of 1 is the worst, 2 a normal fail, 3 a partial fail, 4 a partial success, 5 a normal success, and 6 a critical success. If you roll multiple criticals then so much the better because these give you "Dominance" bonuses that make you do more damage etc.

What I liked about it, is the swift immediacy of it all. With the CDS game you often have to appreciate it for what is not there as well as what is. Note that there is no adding modifiers to the roll. There is no trying to beat a certain number. There is no reading the roll and counting the number of successes based on how many dice beat a number. No. You simply roll the dice, find the greatest number rolled and immediately know how you did. You could replace the numbers with glyphs and the system would work just as well.

What I didn't like about it. Well, for one thing it uses nothing but six-siders which are the most boring dice around. Really good rolls do become a matter of counting successes and then having to consult the Dominance table which means slowing the game down. There is also some questionable probability afoot. With a 3d6, 4d6, or 5d6 it becomes incredibly easy to roll a 6, incredibly hard to roll a 1 or 2 and yet still quite hard to roll multiple 6's. Not a deal breaker by any means but you can only let the pool grow so large before it becomes too predictable.

One day while out walking the dog - which is where all of my best thoughts come from - I was pondering something like the same system but using different dice like the d10 or the d12 to try to skirt the Dominance table, and I just happened to think of tree climbing and how much I used to love it as a kid. The two thoughts collided with an image of a tree where different dice sat on different branches, zig-zagging to the top. I expanded on the notion, straightened it out and the Dice Tree was born. It was originally going to stop at d12 but I wanted all of the original dice to be there, as well as the d30 so I could finally have a use for the thirty sided die I bought back at Scrycon '83 but have yet to use in any game.

Why is it a Good Thing?

Immediacy. Like CDS, possibly even more so, it has that feel of rolling the dice and knowing how well you did just as soon as the dice stop rolling, not a few minutes later after time spent consulting various tables and rolling more dice.

Brevity. I hate clutter. When you come upon Swords & Clubs d10 that is all you need to know. There is no translating it into a bunch of different statistics, no wondering what the numbers mean. The d10 is your die and if nothing says otherwise you roll two of them to make your action.

Table-Feel. Which is a bit like Mouth-Feel when it comes to food. Maybe it's just me but nothing feels weaker than rolling a single die, so it's only fitting that the most dangerous roll - the one most apt to fail - is a single die roll. If you're rolling just a single die you know you are in trouble, but two or three dice at a time? Sure no problem!

Abject Terror. The same goes for the dice themselves. The four-sided die sounds weak. It tinkles on the tabletop, but as the dice grow bigger and heavier so does the sound of confidence in their clatter. A roll of 3d20 sounds like thunder on the table. In other games, modifiers mean something but they don't have a tangible presence. It's always the same roll of a 1d20 over and over. In the Red EFT when you go up against a creature its level of ability actually makes a sound. The GM can hide the die roll but there is no mistaking the difference between a 3d4, 1d8, 2d12, or - gods help you - a 3d20 or 1d30 when you hear it.

Probability. I'm not a big math person but I do know how to write a program that simulates a few thousand die rolls and plots the outcome on a curve. I did this for the system and the die tree works, just so long as the progression doesn't go beyond a roll of three dice. Despite the increased risk of failure it is still better to roll one die of a greater value than three dice of a lesser value. Not so with four or five dice of a lesser value.

The Dice! And it makes use of all of the polyhedrals. It even gives them some character, which is awesome.

Know Your Dice!

The other day someone unintentionally ticked me off by calling polyhedral dice a gimmick and not necessary, that a d6 is more than enough for any role playing game worth its salt.

About this I said nothing.

Because it's true.

There are many great games out there that get by using nothing but six-sided dice. Last night I was looking through my game collection and ventured upon TOON by Steve Jackson games from circa 85-86. I had totally forgotten it even used dice, let alone six-sided dice exclusively. It even uses them for creating tables ranging from 11 to 66 which is smart but not very memorable. TOON itself was a very memorable game but not for the dice. In fact, I hardly remember rolling dice while playing it whatsoever.

D&D on the other hand. When I first opened the B/X boxed set and a bag of powder blue polyhedrals fell out I was entranced. The strangely shaped dice told me that I was onto something different, a game reaching far beyond the simple matter of rolling a die and taking that many steps around a board. These dice were intense. They were magic. They made the game outstanding before it was even played.

And yet they were also something of a disappointment. The game ran on d20's, d6's and d8's. I don't think there is a single use for the d12 in all of B/X D&D, which might explain why all of the oldest dice in my possession are all twelve siders. It was like reading through the monsters and realizing that they were only there to give us something to kill. Even back then I expected something more.

So when it came around to designing the Red EFT I decided that I wanted polyhedrals to power it and I wanted them to be important to the game, something much more than a gimmick. I wanted the dice to be like Richard Dreyfuss's mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I want people to roll them and think this means something....

So today I'm not going to tell you how they work. I'm going to show you how they feel with one of my favorite passages from the players handbook called

KNOW YOUR DICE

Dice in the Red EFT are more than just small plastic random number generators. They are the standing stones of Stonehenge, the Moai of Easter Island, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Monoliths from 2001 a Space Odyssey. They are all of these wondrous and fascinating things except a whole lot smaller and easier to roll. Unlike other games the dice in the Red EFT mean something....

D4 – The Caltrop of Pathos. The most miserable despicable die you will ever roll is the foot-stabbing, hard-rolling, pathetic-sounding four-sider. It is shaped like a pyramid and that is the only cool thing about it. When making a roll with a d4 a little success is the best you can hope for and a critical fail is just a small flip away.

D6 – The Cube of the Every Day. Most of the universe runs on d6's. It is the normal die, the average die. It is a sandwich made from white-bread eaten in a compact car carrying suburban commuters to their lackluster jobs in beige office cubicles. When you roll a d6 the best you can hope for is a normal success and for most people that is good enough. Try not to yawn.

D8 – The Rhombus of Rock. The eight-sider punches a defiant chain-wrapped fist through the walls of the cube and bursts out the other side with a screaming heavy metal guitar riff. The eight-sider shouts, Yeah! In your face! And you must listen. When rolling the d8 you may achieve great success, but not too often.

D10 – The Diamond of Excellence. When this die is rolled We Are The Champions plays in the concert arenas of Valhalla. This is the die of the Olympians. To merely touch it is more than most mortals can hope for. When you roll a d10 the outcome of your actions can be incredible beyond belief.

D12 – The Avatar of Awesomeness. This die does not touch the Earth. If the d10 is the die of the Olympians, the d12 is the die of the Olympian who took home all the medals. Angels sing when this die hits the table. Its successes can be so fantastic they often find themselves landing in the record books.

D20 – The Die of the Covenant. This die is a super-massive black hole sitting at the center of a galaxy. It is the maker of worlds and the breaker of stars. When a d20 hits the table it might just melt your face off – so consider yourself warned – for there is no greater success than that which can come from rolling a d20, with the possible exception of....

D30 – The Big Banger. Use of the d30 during a game is the stuff of myth and legend. What is it made of? Dark Matter? Dark Energy? No one knows for sure, but old universes are obliterated and new universes arise like screaming phoenixes from the flaming ashes when a d30 rolls across your gaming table.

What's a Game Like?

[Another Red Eft excerpt, this one from the players handbook providing a general overview of a typical gaming session]

Your experiences may vary depending on who you game with but here is the jist of it. Characters are created outside of the game and occasionally discussed online. Time is always short so the more you can do away from the game table the better your experience will be. Characters are designed using something called an Advancement Sheet and played with using a Character Sheet. Only the Character Sheet is used during a game but it doesn't hurt to bring your advancement sheets along.

Usually the game master decides where and when the game will take place and circulates a one page start to the adventure called an Adventure Scenario. Once again, it is best to read the scenario over before the game begins.

The Game Begins. Everybody gathers around a table with the game master sitting at the head of it. The GM may refresh your memory of the scenario or the last game you played. A mojo roll is made to determine how many coins each player starts with.

And we dive right in.

The Red EFT specializes in what is known as Omniscient or third person role playing. You don't actually play your character so much as control it. You call the shots for your character. You speak on your character's behalf. No one will get mad at you if you become your character and start talking as if you are that character, but don't feel as if you have to do this the whole time. With omniscient gaming you are not roped into playing just one character. Depending on the size of your group you can run multiple characters simultaneously, swap characters with your friends, or even push one character out of the picture and bring in a new one to take its place.

During the game we mostly remain ourselves, we use our natural born names and talk of our characters in the third person as if they were in the room with us. If Zitto is one of your characters you might say something along the lines of, "Zitto hides behind the overturned table and casts an illusion on the wall, an illusion of him opening a door and running through it, hoping to get the castle guards to slam into it after him."

The Dice Are Rolled. Most of the time you tell the GM what your characters are doing and the GM will tell you how it all pans out. If the action seems a bit challenging, such as Zitto's spell cast, then the dice are rolled. Generally speaking you want to roll as high a number as you can. Rolling a 3 or less is failure and not a good thing. With Zitto's spell cast he rolls a 6 which is a normal success. The GM sees this and replies, "The guards are fooled by your illusion. The captain shouts Get 'Em! And they charge into the stone wall, bowling themselves over backwards in a loud raucous clatter of platemail. The first two guards have been knocked out cold and the rest are now stumbling to get up."

To this you might say, "Yeah! Zitto pumps his little piglet fist in the air and bolts down the hall."

And the Adventure Continues. It moves on like this until the game runs out of time. Typically a gaming session lasts one to three hours. If you have to leave before the game ends hand your character sheets off to other players for them to run so the group doesn't have to deal with the sudden disappearance of your characters.

When the game actually ends all character sheets go back to the GM who will hold onto them until the next time the group meets. This is done so the group can pick up where they last left off and not have to worry if one player or another cannot attend. Always hold onto your Advancement Sheets. Ultimately these tell us who belongs to whom. While the game is running – however – all characters and their sheets belong to the adventure itself until it is over.

Very rare is the adventure that only lasts one session. These are called One-Shots and can be a lot of fun, but most adventures will carry on over multiple gaming sessions before some kind of end is reached. When the same characters are used with multiple adventures this is called a Campaign and campaigns can last for years - if you're lucky.

Rewarding your Players

And to put my mouth where my money is at, Here's a bit from the Red Eft Game Master's Guide on rewarding your players....

Everyone loves a treasure hunt, but far too often treasure in an RPG is treated like treasure in a video game. Characters come upon a chest of gold coins, it rings with a bright bling noise as it is hoovered up by a sack of holding and then it becomes nothing more than a score at the top of the screen. Treasure becomes a number we think fondly of because we have been raised to think that way. Treasure rarely comes back into the game and when it does it often makes the game less interesting by making everything too easy. Powerful weapons and magical items can so dramatically unbalance a game that they can actually be a threat to your campaign. The notion of “Rewarding Your Players” is a dubious matter at best.

Frick'n Ingrates. First and foremost, your players should be happy just to be playing the game. It is not often so many people can take so much time out of their lives to come together and entertain each other by rolling dice and pretending to be elves. However, reprogramming your friends is not an option.

If your players get a gleam in their eye when you mention large rubies worth untold fortunes then you should ride that desire as best you can. This doesn't mean you should actually let them have it, but it is perfectly legal to dangle it in front of their noses like a carrot to get them to move.

You should certainly not let treasure disappear into a bag of holding only to re-emerge whenever the PC's need to buy a shank of mutton. You do not have to forbid easy magical storage devices, but do your players really know where all that wealth is going? How do they know they can trust such amazing once-in-a-lifetime wealth with a magical sack? It may be working now, but what happens when they open it up and nothing is there?

If the PC's choose to carry their booty around the old fashioned way, that chest full of gold coins is going to be heavy and hard to haul. When they drag it into a local village everyone is going to turn out to take a look and hopefully get a bit of it for themselves. Things can get quite ugly when the local thieves guild and/or tax agency gets wind of it. There is a very good reason why pirates bury their treasure and closely guard the maps leading back to it. Players should feel those forces and maybe even pushed to do the same.

To Kill Boredom, Kill Repetition. What is often meant by “Rewarding your Players” is actually “How do I keep my players from being bored?” If your players are becoming bored there is a reason for that and you need to find it and kill it before it ruins your game.

The most common cause of boredom is repetition. You can only fight a goblin horde so many times. Some repetition can be tolerated as the nature of the game, especially if the players themselves are the cause of the repetition. However it is always a good idea to try to get your creatures to react in such a way that avoids doing the same things over and over and over.

Action movies are good about this (at least the good ones are). Often an action movie is nothing but one fight scene after another but it is not too hard to see the director pulling strings to make sure the film does not seem like one fight scene after another. The same thing never happens twice in a row. If you just had a bare knuckle brawl then make sure anything else happens aside from yet another bare-knuckle brawl. If unavoidable then change the nature of the brawl itself – different creatures, different weapons, different settings – just so long as it is not the same thing as what you just did.

Another common repetition problem comes from making too many action checks for a single situation. No one wants to make twenty action checks for a single activity. It will wear the corners off your dice! If the PCs are chasing some villainous cretin through a volcanic cave, leaping from one unsteady pillar of rock to the next, have them make one agility check for the initial leap and if they succeed let it cover all the other leaps made until they come upon one which is obviously harder than the rest. Or, if they scored a little or normal success while the villain scored a great success let them try to improve their success in an effort to keep up with him.

We often think of an action as lasting only as long as one roll of the dice. You make the roll. It succeeds or fails. Then it is gone. Another way of looking at it is to picture an action as causing success that lasts until the game changes on it. If a character is in a library researching one thing or another a whole day could be spent among the shelves but just a single research check should suffice. There is no reason to do another check until perhaps the character leaves the library and goes to a different one.

Of course, some times the problem is simply too much dice rolling. Which is more fun? Walking into a library and making a willpower check, or walking into a library, talking to the librarian and being led down into the basement to a secret room where large dusty tomes are kept, chained to the walls and almost seeming to pulse and burble where they sit on shelves, shelves inscribed with strange arcane symbols....

Changing Levels. Another way to avoid boredom is to let your character's level up. This is often seen as a reward by other games. It makes the characters more powerful so they can then go on to encounter more powerful creatures, which doesn't make it much of a reward at all.

The true reward to be found in levelling up is that it changes the nature of the game. Heroic-level characters may cover the same terrain as Mortals and Demi-Gods but they will experience it in a vastly different ways.

The catch with leveling up is that once your characters increase in level they are not going to want to come back down. This leads to one of the biggest ironies in level-based role playing games. Some of the most challenging and enjoyable games are Mortal level games. By the time the PC's become Dieties they are often too powerful and overwrought to be of any interest to anyone.

Venture Elsewhere. Admittedly, sometimes it may be the game itself. You can have too much of a good thing. Maybe it is time to put the Red EFT aside and go try one of the thousands of other tabletop games out there. Just be sure to come back. You will be missed if you don't.

The Red EFT RPG

Pretty much the curse of my life can be found in the phrase "go big or go home." I don't intentionally follow this creedo. I just always seem to end up following this creedo. It leads me to disappear from sight for long periods of time and then reappear with something huge which the world promptly ignores because tl:dr.

It's just the nature of the beast.

The internet is a roaring stream of information where even the biggest attempts to make a splash disappear in an instant. The only way to make it reach anyone is to drizzle small amounts of paint in the water and hope someone notices the streak. Hence the blog and the twitter and the facebook and the google+, all of which I hate (except for google+ strangely, yeah google's big failure is the one thing they've made that I regularly enjoy) but that's just me. I don't change easily but I am learning.

The big thing I've been working on lately is an attempt to bring to an end this quixotic quest of almost 25 years to create the perfect all-purpose tabletop role playing game. That's right, by finally bringing a single game to market I'm bringing a very long chapter to a close. This game has gone through numerous name changes over the years. Let's see if I can remember them all....

Theater of the Absurd, The ToAd, Tales of Adventure, Model Reality Kit, Agama.

Yup, that's it.

It has also gone through astounding changes of mechanics and philosophy where each of those titles barely resemble the other. The latest and hopefully last incarnation of it is going to be The Red EFT RPG. If you could imagine the Ramones coming back from the dead to rewrite GURPS into something that anyone could play, that is what the Red Eft is. It's designed to be fast and loud and fun. Is it the perfect tabletop role playing game?

Not by a long shot.

But it is pretty good. I wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't. I think the mere presence of all the thousands of different RPG's out there proves the point that perfection will never be found. And that's fine. The big thing that has me writing this godawful early morning (it's 7 am where I'm at) is that if I'm working on the Red Eft then I'm not being social. Of course, these days if you're not being social then you're busy sinking rather than swimming. So, for this blog, at the very least. I will try to keep pumping something into it by posting interesting bits and pieces from the Red Eft books as I write them. It'll give us something to do as the clock ticks down. And I'm always interested in feedback. Who knows maybe you'll stop me from making yet another disastrous mistake.

Doh! Too late.

On The Value of Reality

"They quite literally make you harder to hit. But in most D&D and its derivative systems shields rarely offer more than a minor bonus to armor class. I understand this is done for the sake of balance and that realism isn't something that is of prime importance when it comes to fantasy RPGs - but this method always struck me as... well... wrong."

That comes from a blog post about shield use in D&D and Spahn is on the mark but it's not the shield bit that interests me. It's the comment "realism isn't something that is of prime importance when it comes to fantasy RPGs - but this method always struck me as... well... wrong."

The truth about reality in RPG's is that we cherry pick the reality we want. Having shields work the way they do in real life matters. Gangrene? Not so much. Yet for some reason people can't bring themselves to see this. They always gravitate to one side of the issue or the other and seem to believe that the worst thing anyone can do is sit on the fence between the two. You're either dirty and gritty and calculating the ballistics of every shot, or you're riding pink unicorns across rainbow bridges in puffy cloud land.

My thought on the matter is that your opinion does not matter.

Not to yourself or anyone else because we all have this reality replicator inside our heads called an imagination which is always open to suggestion yet quite defiant when it comes down to matters of control. You can tell it to see shields operating in the traditional inept D&D fashion and your imagination will groan like Kip from Futurama and comply, but it won't stop thinking what a big idiot you are for believing that armor is more important than a shield.

So while it is good to have a game that runs smoothly despite having as little processing power as can be afforded by pencils, paper and dice, it is also good to aspire towards an accurate representation of the Real. It's what your mind wants, and it will keep your imagination happy, even in spite of yourself.

John Wick and the Toon of Horrors

Must be a slow news month, everyone is talking about John Wick and his decree that the Tomb of Horrors is the worst adventure of all time.  Well? He's wrong, and his decree that Ravenloft is the best adventure of all time isn't right either.

It's all subjective. I remember playing both of them in Junior High and having loads of fun in the Tomb of Horrors and being bored to death by Ravenloft. Quite frankly I'm not a fan of Gary Gygax and when my friends and I played AD&D it was only because there was no better system which we all could agree upon. In a way, AD&D should be lauded for being as fraught with problems as it was. If AD&D had been perfect then so many people (myself included) would not have been inspired to go out and create much better games. We all would have just kept on playing AD&D.

The three things I remember most about Tomb of Horrors are people being teleported naked into various parts of the dungeon which was funny yet strange and probably best forgotten, somebody finding a hidden sapphire that they had absolutely no reason to know about which tipped me off to the fact that my players were reading the module behind my back (not happy about that but at least I didn't throw a hissy fit, Wick), and a TPK when what remained of the party finally encountered the Demi-Lich. Even with the forbidden knowledge of what a Forget spell might do to the demi-lich (as if anyone had a use for the Forget spell back in the AD&D days) they still got toasted. We used the sample characters out of the back of the module, so no one truly cared that we were basically paving the tomb with the bodies of deceased high level characters.

Oh yeah, and there was also a certain green devil mouth hiding a sphere of annihilation. Here's why it wasn't memorable....

Me (Junior Varsity DM Extraordinare): "At the end of the hall you encounter a large gaping green devil mouth with jaws spread wide, just wide enough for one of you to crawl inside."
Wizkid #1: "I shine my light spell into it."
Me: "Um. Nothing. The magical light is swallowed by the impenetrable darkness."
Wizkid #1: "Hmmm, could be a darkness spell. Could be drow hiding on the other side."
Wizkid #2: "I prod into it with my ten-foot pole."
Me: "Well, your ten-foot pole is now a two-foot pole, charred black from where it hit the darkness."
Wiz-kid #1: "Ah, let's not go in there. I check around the mouth for secret doors."

Gee John, now was that so hard?

If anything, the main problem I had with Tomb of Horrors is that it caused within the group a case of ten-foot pole sickness. Ever afterwards somebody would always be out in front tapping everything with a ten-foot pole. The floor, the cieling, the walls, the Evil Viceroy, the Queen of Spiders. It put some serious crawl into our dungeon crawls. I think I finally forebade the use of the ten-foot pole with the promise that I would simply ignore all traps. In truth, it's been so long I can't remember.

Which kinda sucks, because traps are fun. They're fun to think up and plan out (and read about in countless Grimtooth books), but they are very hard to implement, and that is because one thing which was missing from those early days was the ability to depend on the GM to tell you everything you perceive.

AD&D had no perception check. Instead you had the thief and the hairfoot would go into a room, check for traps and be done with it. It was an annoyance but a small one. Tomb of Horrors gave us traps that could not be detected and players responded with a barrage of ten-foot poles being tapped about like a blind-man's cane. In a way it was a unconscious admission that the PC's cannot see where they are going because they no longer trust the DM to show them what is there.

Later editions of D&D would "solve" the problem of the ten-foot pole by replacing it with the perception check. Now, instead of tapping everything to see what is there we had players making perception checks out the wazoo. It didn't actually solve anything. It just turned the ten-foot pole tap into something more dream-friendly yet still agonizing to have at the table.

With the game I'm (nigh-endlessly) designing I've settled on the "Save Vs Traps" event. It's more than just a die roll. It's almost a contract. The GM doesn't have to describe everything a player encounters but whenever a trap comes into a game, even the most oblivious of characters should be given a chance to roll the dice and detect the trap before it has a chance to go off. The players do not have to state that they are searching for anything. It is just assumed that their minds are always thinking and their senses always perceiving, and if they know what to look for they will get a bonus on the save roll. If they succeed they notice the trap before it has a chance to spring, fail and it hits them.

Which is not a perfect fix.

Won't people go back to tapping everything with a ten-foot pole to avoid having to make the Save Vs Traps roll? Yes. Which is why I say that it is a bit of a contract. If the players choose to do this then they don't get the Save Vs Traps roll. You can use one or the other but not both. Which is good because options are good.

I think back to that encounter with the devil mouth in the Tomb of Horrors and in truth, I prefer the way we did it. It would have been a disappointment to have the players simply roll the dice and detect the trap and move on. But. Tomb of Horrors is a special dungeon (hence the module designation), it is one where you should crawl through it, constantly tapping ahead of yourself with a wooden pole, one where you should have a rope tied about your waist and a bunch of people holding onto the other end just in case some some portal decides to suck you into it. Tomb of Horrors should not be taken as precedent for the way the game should be played. Too much of that and you get Steve Jackson's TOON which may seem like a simple cartoon-based RPG but was actually created out of frustration with people thinking too much and doing too little.

Don't let TOON happen to you!

Although actually do because TOON was a riot to play and one of the best games SJ Games ever produced. If I ever find the free time I'd love to rewrite Tomb of Horrors as the Toon of Horrors. Complete with falling anvils and sticks of dynamite. I wonder if John Wick will playtest it with me?

Muhwhahahahahahhahahahahhha-ha!