Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks by gradenko_2000

Overview

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks



I'm always on the look-out for GM-ing advice-type books, so when this showed up on my radar, I had to try it. I did not like it.

I'd like to preface my read-through with that. I'm going to be uncharitable, and some of this is going to come down to my own personal style clashing with this person's and probably me calling it badwrongfun, but I can't help it, that's just the way I feel.

To start us off, the cover art itself shows us someone, ostensibly the GM, rolling a d20 and gleefully crushing a pair of what I can only assume are player-characters. That, plus the opening to the introduction, sets the tone:


He says that these "tricks" are usually lifted from all sorts of media, but he doesn't do it verbatim, because otherwise his "victims" might already be familiar with them.

As further background, Bill Webb himself is the CEO of Frog God Games, the publisher of Original D&D retroclone Swords & Wizardry (and also Pathfinder-compatible equivalents), and especially the Rappan Athuk megadungeon, which is purportedly inspired by Gygaxian classics like the Tomb of Horrors.

That should give you an idea of what we're in for: cutting the legs out from under your players, and referring to them as victims. Great.

The book is divided into multiple parts:

Part 1: Bill Webb's House Rules


This just sets off all sorts of red flags in my head. Make the characters weaker and make them earn their fun .

Part 2: The Players Got Too Much Treasure


So, you're the GM, right? You're the ultimate arbiter of what gets dropped in the dungeon. How is it possible that you're going to give the players "too much" treasure? If you hand-selected your treasure, it couldn't possibly be too much, because you made it that way! If you randomly rolled it, how about biting your tongue and deleting one line of the roll results before awarding to the players rather than dicking around with them?

The last bit about the car breaking down after getting a bonus is also very God complex-y. Unless I'm maybe playing a game of Red Markets where economic horror is the self-advertised name of the game, I really don't need to experience capitalistic "poverty trap" mechanics in my game of reality-escapism.

Part 3: Situational Advantage (Environment)

This one is not so bad. It talks about how you can make tunnels slippery, or dungeon rooms have stinky air, or battlefields have mud and rubble, to add an extra layer of difficulty so that you can keep monsters simple while driving up the challenge.

Part 4: Time Wasters


Whenever the players are set-up to succeed at something, dick with them a bit to show them what for.

Part 5: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing


More of what I'd consider bad GMing advice: deliberately withhold information from the players, then use it against them.

Part 6: Sheep in Wolf's Clothing


Again, if you drop a lede on the players to elicit a specific reaction, then you point at them and laugh for taking that reaction, you're an asshole.

Part 7: Trickery

This is more of the same - things to "keep players on their toes" or "teach them how play more carefully"

Part 8: Greed is Bad!


And I think we've hit antagonistic GM bingo here, with the author referring to punishing the players.

Next: The Battle of Agincourt

Bill's House Rules

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 1: Bill's House Rules

Experience Points

The first house rule is with regards to experience points. Most of it is standard D&D fare: The whole 1 GP = 1 XP conversion doesn't count until the money's spent. Specifically, Fighters and Thieves have to spend it on "wine, women and song", while Clerics, Druids, Monks, Paladins and Rangers have to donate it to charity. Wizards have to spend it on magical research.

There's also a note about simplifying monster XP: 1 XP per hit point, times the monster's Hit Dice (as an equivalent to the monster's level). So if you killed a 7 HP monster that had 2 HD, you'd gain 14 XP. This is, of course, very low, but most of the XP in an old-school D&D game is supposed to come from treasure anyway, but at least this method is easier to compute.

He also doesn't award XP for finding magical items, but arguably that's okay, since the value of a magical item should come from the increased power that a Sword +1 gives you to begin with. Fine.

He even mentions handing out "quest XP" for completing objectives, at the DM's own judgement.

Where it gets ugly is when he talks about how these methods should come together to determine how fast the characters should level up. If you've played World of Warcraft at all in the last couple of years, you may have seen hand-wringing about how the "instant boost to level 90" feature would produce players that didn't know how to play their characters, because they didn't learn by leveling up. This is sort of like that, in tabletop form:


And with a follow-up sidebar for how this translates to Pathfinder:


So what I'm getting here is that he has his very own particular way of running a Swords & Wizardry game, and he's going to make it take forever for you to get to level 2 because that's going to teach you, over time, how to adapt to his particular style of GM-ing.

Instead of, you know, talking to you and informing you about genre tropes that you need to watch out for, it'll be by trial-and-error. It's like there's a platonic ideal of how to crawl through a dungeon and he expects you to learn it by osmosis. I'm a little flabbergasted because if I was, for example, playing WoW and the Hunter player next to me isn't pulling off their "rotation" correctly, my hands are tied beyond trying to teach him because that's just how the game works.

If, on the other hand, I was playing a tabletop game, whose enforcement of rules are completely up to me as the GM, and the player is about to do something that sounds like it's going to be a stupid course of action, it's not like I'm obliged to let him go through with it, especially when I'm partially responsible for not giving the player enough working information to make an intelligent choice in the first place. How was he supposed to know?

Attributes and Bonuses

The first part is again, standard fare: if the attribute is 13 or higher, the character gets a +1 bonus to relevant rolls and a 5% XP bonus. If it's lower than 8, it's a -1 penalty instead. It plays well with his own rule that character stats are 3d6-in-order, since it doesn't matter if you roll like crap if there's no huge bonus to miss out on.

And then it turns ugly again:


It's incredibly ignorant of game design and mechanics to just turn around and recommend you play a Pathfinder character with 3d6-down-the-line stats, especially when you also expect them to make up the difference via "player skill", when you're also not going to teach them anything! And on top of all that, you're also supposed to use the Slow XP Advancement track and make it twice as slow!

Table Dice Rolls


Okay, the first half is pretty reasonable. It's just a particular way of handling table manners, whatever floats their boat, that's as good an approach as any.

The second half again makes a reference to "player skill" as something that matters. Like, when you're playing a game that's as open-ended as OD&D, maybe you can earn a +2 AC bonus from "hiding behind the bar", but because there's no rules to cover it, the GM has to tell you what's possible. If they were playing a game as regimented and procedural as Pathfinder or 4th Edition D&D, then maybe you'd have a leg to stand on because the players could always be aware of the myriad mechanics that interact with the game, but otherwise you're just pulling their leg when you don't tell them that they could have slowed down the skeletons by throwing up tables and chairs in front of them but they didn't, and now they're dead.

Damage Rolls and the Value of Magic Weapons

This is probably the least objectionable part of this chapter. He just says that everything deals 1d6 damage, except smaller weapons get a -1, two-handers get a +1, and natural 20s and 1s are just plain hits and plain misses.

Hit Points and Rolls to Hit


To his credit, he does acknowledge that it's a controversial houserule, and maybe he's right about double-dipping, that you shouldn't also get a better chance-to-hit when you're already getting more HP, especially when to-hit and AC are going to have an escalating arms race anyway.

What doesn't sit well with me is that he has this heartbreaker's idea of how combat should work, complete with a reference to a historical event as how it should have worked realistically , and then he's projecting it onto this game instead of a new/different one.

Lamentations of a Flame Princess had the idea that only the Fighter should get a better to-hit, and that a Magic-User's to-hit never improves across the entire level range, but that was LOTFP as its own game. Swords and Wizardry already is its own game outside of OD&D, and then he's piling on this other system on top of it too.

Even worse is when he even recommends it for Pathfinder, because of course he does.

Up Next: Manipulating the gargoyle's buttocks

Bill's House Rules (continued)

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 1: Bill's House Rules (continued)

Travel and Getting Lost

For every 5 miles traveled, roll a d6 to see if the party actually moves in the direction that they want to. A 1 means they get Lost in Plains or River terrain, with rougher terrain tupes increasing the chance of getting Lost, all the way up to Badlands and Swamps causing misdirection on a 1 through 4 on a d6.

Druids and Rangers act as cumulative +1 modifiers to the roll, as do high WIS characters, and GM fiat regarding familiarity with the area.

If the party becomes Lost, there's a d8 table to check which direction they randomly go off to.

Food and Water, or “Let Them Eat Cake”

Basically, a man needs 2 pounds of food and 1 gallon of water per day. Draft animals need more, and more hostile environments act as a multiplier on the amount of water needed. Couple this with the Lost rules, and the expectation is that you'll have to stock up on provisions, and have a buffer in case you get so lost that you spend additional days out in the wild.

Foraging

If you need to live off the land, there's a d20 table with a base 45% chance of letting you successfully roll on the d100 Foraging Results table. Having Druids, Rangers and Thieves in the party grants bonuses when foraging.

Up until this point, the previous sections have been reasonable. Maaaybe the Lost rules are a little bit of "hidden GM information", but otherwise, as long as you have that conversation with your players that you're going to need to play out Fantasy Oregon Trail, it should be manageable.

And then we get to the Foraging Results table. It has a 90% chance of yielding something useful, a 5% chance of letting you unwittingly drink poisoned water, and a 5% chance of letting you unwittingly eat poisoned food. Both poisoned water and poisoned food are save-or-die effects.

But hey, look on the bright side: if you have a level 3+ Druid in your party, they're never affected by poison food and water, and:


So how much are you willing to bet that it's considered part of "player skill" for the Druid to need to explicitly declare that they're inspecting the foraged food and water?

Surprise, Initiative, and Melee Order and Spellcasting in Combat

Surprise is simple: roll a d6, and the party is surprised on a 1 or 2. If they have a Ranger, only a 1 will result in surprise.

Player skill alert:

As for initiative, you first declare your actions, THEN you roll a d6, then your declared actions are executed in initiative order, with higher Dexterity to break ties. There's a bit in here about how you must declare missile fire, spellcasting, and weapon swapping before initiative is rolled, but if you lose initiative and a monster runs up to you and you get hit, then your missile attack does not go off, or your spell is disrupted, or you're caught with the wrong weapon. I'm going to be charitable and not really call this out as the author being particularly vindictive, since that's a "natural" objective of every old-school initiative system anyway.

Hit Points, Death and Dying

This part goes back to being reasonable:

* Max HP at level 1, rolled HP for every succeeding level afterwards.
* 0 HP means unconsciousness
* Death comes at [negative of character level] HP
* He says he explicitly allows Raise Dead spells, so long as you can get the body to a Cleric at a temple

Doing Things Rather than Rolling Dice


So, let's break this down:

First, you have to have the ability (or the narrative presence-of-mind) to detect a secret
Then, you have to roll to detect it
Then, you have to play 20 questions with the GM to get it disarmed

He even provides you with a handy table of trap mechanisms:


And then he does it with secret doors, too:


You must ... Slide up ... The gargoyle's buttocks ... Forcefully

Like, this is precisely why the Thief class was created! Does he also expect the Fighter's player to benchpress in front of him to gain a +1 to attack bonus? Maybe have the Wizard rub their belly while patting their head to cast a spell?

Up Next: A Europa Universalis reference

The Players Got Too Much Treasure

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 2: The Players Got Too Much Treasure

As I mentioned in the introduction, this one is about ways and means to reduce the amount of riches that the players have, in the event that they end up with an amount that you, the GM, feel is too much for them (or for you to handle). Again, I'm not quite sure how this happens, but lets set that aside for now and get right into it.

Tax Collector


The book does at least present the situation as a possible source of plot hooks:

The players could in fact just pay up the 25% tax, and that's supposed to be completely acceptable, no dirty tricks. I mean, mission accomplished if they're out so many thousand gold in arrears, right?

They could kill the tax collector, but that would make outlaws. This sounds like a great way to derail the campaign, but as long as you tell the players that it's going to bring down the law on them, so be it.

They could play along with paying the tax, but exploit things like stuffing the real goods in a bag of holding or Paul the Collector's inability to identify magical items to get away with paying less than their true net worth.

Finally, the players could try negotiating with Paul to lower the tax rate. Paul would play along as low as 15%, but not much lower or else he doesn't get his kickback. Players who are exceedingly investigative might even figure out Paul's scam and plan a course of action from there, or players might want to deal with the King directly.

These are all fine ideas, though I'd be wary of it being too distracting from the whole dungeon crawling aspect if you get caught up in financial and court intrigue.

Framed!

This one is about things like having a player's weapon placed next to a dead body, or an NPC Assassin impersonating a PC and making it look like the player killed an NPC that then brings down the law on the party.

The first scenario that could come out of this is the "prove your innocence by finding the real killer" episode. There's also a bit in there about PC Paladins being conflicted over the law demanding their surrender and knowing that they're not responsible.


Credit to the author for suggesting that the stuff gets regained at the very end.

I guess what sticks out to me at this point is that I'm beginning to see why Webb's games might take so many years if they're having to deal with a season of Prison Break in between dragon hoards.

That, and the fact that he's suggesting mystery and investigative scenes in a game that's decidedly not Fantasy Night's Black Agents.

Wilderness Bandits: The Gatekeeper

Place a dragon or some other large, imposing creature at the entrance to a dungeon (with the entrance being too small for the Gatekeeper to enter themselves), and have it demand anywhere between 30% to 50% of all treasure brought out.

The Gatekeeper has to be strong enough that the party just doesn't decide to kill it instead, but the tax rate shouldn't be so high that the players decide to head for a different dungeon, either.

Wilderness Bandits: The Opportunist

The author suggests cranking up the random encounter rolls in the overworld if the players are traveling with large sums of gold at their disposal.

Further, he suggests creating a party of NPC characters roughly equivalent to the players in relative power and stats, and have them form the core of a bandit mob that'll dog the players.

The schtick is that the bandits are supposed to act like, well, bandits . That is, even if they're roughly as powerful as the players, their main goal is to grab some of the players' gold, then run away. The theme seems to be the tabletop version of the Diablo 3 gold goblin where the players will throw all caution to the wind once they realize that the bandits have grabbed a sack of gems from their draft horse and are making off with it.

A Friend in Need


The author starts off this section small: an old, one-legged soldier, a homeless waif on the street, various other beggars asking the players for alms.

Then he escalates it: NPCs pitching the players with a business investment to open an inn or research a new spell, with the promise of a return on investment.

And then, he goes on to explain that well, in medieval times, most business never actually made enough money for their proprietors make a living off of , which strikes me as a rationalization for continually hitting up the players to inject the business with cash, without outright suggesting that you just scam the players.

One bright point though is the story-related idea that the people that the players help along the way serves as justification for why they attract followers upon reaching name level.

Holy War

This just means that the temples and clerics that the players have come to rely on suddenly charge exorbitant prices, but of course you need to have some kind of background justification for it ...


... so that it's not obvious that you're just doing it to dick over the players.

Disaster in Home Town

This is A Friend in Need writ large. If the player's background involves a certain place that they came from or are especially fond of, you can have an earthquake level its temples, or have a great fire raze its castle, or have an 80s villain threaten to buy out the orphanage unless the players move to put a stop to it, and of course putting a stop to it is going to involve handing over cash to pay for the rebuilding.

Here is your new Castle (aka The Money Pit)

Personally, I'm not averse to let players have property. It's within the spirit of old-school D&D to be the masters of a domain, no matter how small. So I thought this was nice and a reflection of what I'd done a campaign before: the players wanted to build a castle, so I let them build it - I just didn't let them have the name level benefits until actual name level.

Well no, it's not like that at all:


What he's suggesting is a Medieval Fantasy version of MouseHunt where the players are given ownership and control of a lot and its accompanying buildings, except they're super fixer-uppers and now it's a constant drain on their cash to get it all repaired, and then once its repaired, its going to need upkeep.

To be fair, he does emphasize that it should be possible to clean out the mines, drive the kobolds out of the fields and de-zombify the cemetery so that the domain will eventually become profitable, and that this process of turning a dump into a successful venture is going to make the players feel real good about themselves at the end of it all, but boy did that intro make it sound like you're just handing them the deed to a lemon and calling it good.

As a final word, he does suggest that there's a 10% chance every in-game month that some other random bad event happen to the domain, just to keep the players invested by forcing them to go back every once in a while.


Up Next: Part 3: You're Going to Need a Zamboni

Situational Advantage (Environment)

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 3: Situational Advantage (Environment)

This chapter is about tricks you can pull to make your combats and encounters less routine.

Slippery Conditions


One of the first things I learned about GMing was to not use "fumble tables" or "critical tables" because it turns a heroic fantasy into the Three Stooges.

Bill Webb's suggestion for doing exactly that is to set combats within icy caves, or slimy caves, or cave tunnels with a steep incline, or frozen lakes (whose ice can be broken!), or even just wet floors, and to ask the players to make a saving throw every time they move.

And to complete the ensemble, the players should be fighting either flying monsters, or cold-climate monsters that can walk on slippery ground without impediment.

Bad Air

Put the players at a disadvantage by putting their supply of oxygen in peril. He suggests using poison air, or flammable air (coal dust), or ...


He mentions that it's part of the players' responsibility to buy a songbird from the equipment list, and monitor its health.

And of course, that the players fight monsters that don't need to breath, such as the undead.

The most restrained part of this section is the mention that the players shouldn't be arbitrarily placed in an instant save-or-die situation: they should at least know what they're getting into. You're not supposed to tell them directly though, as his example of play suggests:


That last part is super not-cool. You can't push and prod the players to hurry along if you're not making them aware that they're actually on a timer!

Stinky the Skunk

Similar to the stunt he pulled with torches versus monsters that have darkvision/infravision, Webb suggests having Pepe le Pew wander into the players' campsite as a random wilderness encounter to inflict an effect that gives them a -4 modifier on the 1d6 surprise rolls.


I'm quoting this just to emphasize that he's being explicit about this sort of behavior. Outright hide information from your characters.

Slow Movement (Mud, Brush and Rubble)

Similar to Slippery Conditions, you can throw all sorts of debris and detritus in the battlefield terrain to cause reduced movement rates, blocked missile fire, and our by now regular "you cannot achieve surprise" because stepping on loose tree branches is too too noisy.


The example scenario is one set in forest underbrush, where trying to move more than a quarter of your speed at a time will require you to make saving throws to avoid tripping and being proned, and where ranged attacks have a -5 penalty. Meanwhile, your enemies are Kobolds that can move at half of their normal speed.

Death from Above!


After pitching and idea for his new game: QWOPgeons and Dragons, he also indulges in a bit of historical commentary:


And continues his pattern of negating player abilities by remarking that the Paladin with a +5 Holy Avenger cannot hit an enemy that they cannot reach.

By "training" the players to constantly look up, you can then justify placing more traps and tricks in places above eye-level. This in turn forces the players to bring extra ropes, grappling hooks and iron pitons. That in turn consumes their weight capacity, leaving them with either less to haul out treasure with, or has them make hard choices about their survival.

Finally, he recommends using flying monsters - both as scouts to notify other monsters farther up ahead to prevent surprise from being had (yet again), or also as difficult challenges themselves, since as the GM you're entitled to imposing as high as a -4 penalty to ranged attacks against flyers.

Up Next: Part 4: Insert Goggles Joke Here

Time Wasters

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 4: Time Wasters

(the point of this chapter is rather self-explanatory)

Fake Secret Door

So we learned from the earlier part that Bill Webb doesn't just let you roll to open a secret door: you have to figure out how to do manually/mechanically manipulate the doohickeys in the door to get it to open. He had a bad experience at a con game where the player party was composed of eight elves, which meant that they'd always find secret doors, since OD&D lets elves find secret doors on a 1 or 2 result of a 1d6 roll.

To extract a measure of payback (and he does explicitly use the word "payback"), you can throw a secret door that does nothing:


You're supposed to let the players futz around with this for as long as possible. His con game story ends with the players spending an entire real-time hour and six wandering monster checks before they left the fake door alone.

False Adventure Lead


He recommends things like fake treasure maps, false rumors, writings that lead nowhere and say nothing once deciphered, and puzzles that reward nothing once solved. The reasoning seems to be that it's more "real" if not every quest the players undertake is a productive one. He cites Harry Potter as an example: one of the Horcruxes was replaced by a fake one.

To his credit, he does say that you should use this trick with caution: if too many storyline leads aren't real, then the players won't want to play for any of them. Perhaps he's missed the irony of that statement in a book filled with false leads.

The example of play is about a con-man that sells the group a treasure map that describes a cave so many leagues from town, except nothing's there. The map is impervious to the Read Languages spell because, as Webb puts it, if the faux-Runic scrawl is just nonsense random gobbledygook then there's really nothing to decode, even when magic is used.

Finally, he says that such things dovetail well with draining the players of their loot, because they just paid the con-man 1000 GP for a fake map.

Magic Key (Does Nothing)

If you give the players a key, and especially a magic key, they will spend hours hunting for its matching lock.


Unobtainium

This is the one that some of you might be familiar with: show the players a massive treasure hoard, but make it completely impractical to extract. He mentions the massive mithril gates at the start of Rappan Athuk as a specific example.


Everything since the end of the houserules section has so far been one big fuck-you after another, and he just keeps upping the ante when he tells the GM that he should deliberately craft the dungeon in such a manner that creative solutions by the players should not be allowed to work.

His example of play is to prevent a large cave in the middle of the desert. The interior of the cave is encrusted with huge crystals, all sorts of gems, and the interior walls are just one huge vein of raw gold.

And the players cannot access any of it because the crystals are larger than the cave's mouth, the gold needs to be melted down and refined before it will be honored as coinage, the cave will collapse even if you get manage to mine the gold or try to widen the cave's mouth, the cave-in is a save-or-die that still inflicts 6d6 damage on a successful save, and there's only 6 man-days of air if a cave-in happens, a cave-in needs 3d6 days to be tunneled out of, and assuming you survived all of that, you'll leave the cave to find that you're in the middle of a desert.

Extra Heavy Flavor Text


The other thing that stood out to me in this section is that you should never describe a goblin as "a goblin", or a ghoul as "a ghoul".


This is perhaps not explicitly bad GMing advice, but it is almost word for word the same kind of advice that you get in the GM section of Lamentations of the Flame Princess , another old-school D&D retroclone, except that one is focused on Gothic Horror .

Anyway, it is very much a time waster: describe the depth of the pool, elaborate on how the water ripples, and remark about how the color seems just a little bit odd. The players will investigate the pool for a while, and find nothing.

Or maybe there really is a sharktopus waiting to eat them when they get too close to it.

Or maybe they'll take a sip of water in curiosity, only to find that it's perfectly drinkable fresh water.
Or maybe not.

Monkeys Typing Shakespeare

This is pretty much an extension of the False Adventure Lead: every so often drop a scroll or put some dungeon graffiti that either cannot be deciphered via any means because the writings are literally not of any actual language, or it's just random words that the players will spookily wonder and make assumptions about.

Buttons and Levers

This is like the Fake Secret Door trick, but you don't even need elves to fuck with the players. Just place some random buttons and levers across the dungeon and have the players manipulate them. Except they don't do anything.

Or maybe they actually do and it releases a crushing ceiling trap. And yes, he actually does say this.

Up Next: Part 6: The book's biggest sin yet - a Monty Python reference

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 5: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

This is about tripping up your players by throwing threats at them that they will either not know about, or will underestimate

Cursed Items


The reasoning behind pulling a stunt like this is so that the players don't get complacent, and also to discourage them from putting on magic items as soon as they're acquired.

To be fair, the author does say that "you put it on, and then you die"-type curses should be avoided, as the players cannot be taught a lesson if the item just straight up kills them. Rather, he suggests creating items are critically flawed in one way or another, such as:

* A Berserking Sword that looks perfectly normal until you enter combat, at which point the wielding starts randomly attacking any and every living being within 60 feet

* A Backbiter Spear that looks perfectly normal until it is either thrown or rolls a 1 during the melee attack. When either of those two happen, the wielder deals themselves twice the amount of damage that should have been dealt to the enemy.

* Magical plate mail that falls to pieces when the wearer hits 5 HP or less

* Magical weapons that heal certain types of monsters when it hits them (of course, you won't know this until that particular monster is hit and healed)

* Magical potions that end suddenly or create delusional effects that aren't really there. "Flying is fun"

* A potion of growth, except it doesn't include your equipment.

You can also use this to "counterbalance" certain items: give the players a Wand of 12d6 Fireballs, except 10% of the time the AOE will be centered on the caster!

Kobolds with Toys

This is the author telling the reader to go ahead and practice Tucker's Kobolds against the players to keep them on their toes. The small 1 HD enemies can all have ranged weapons and will flee from any melee combat, their arrows will be poison-tipped, they will ignore the Fighters and shoot for the casters directly, they will hit-and-fade like the Viet Cong, and they will routinely lead the party into traps, bad terrain, larger monsters, killing zones, larger monsters, and gotcha encounters like skunks and rust monsters.

Super Bunny

Practice that one Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene against the players:


Symbiotic Monsters

Like the section on interesting terrain, there's a nugget of good GM-ing advice here: don't make homogeneous monster encounters.

Pair medusae with monsters that don't need eyes. Pair mummies with gas spores. Pair incorporeal undead with spiders since the former won't be inhibited by the latter's webs. Basically, a gimmick monster is usually weak in a couple of other categories, but if you, say, combine rust monsters with a traditional threat like an owlbear, then the party then has to decide between putting away their metallic weapons to avoid getting them destroyed, or fighting the owlbears on even terms.

The Unkillable Monster

The point here is to challenge the players to be better problem-solvers by presenting them with a monster that cannot be killed. The author tones down the "gotcha"-ness here by suggesting that the monster should be slow enough to be regularly outrun and should not be overtly hostile to the players, but he still underscores the importance of players that end up suiciding against the immortal monster by charging in without considering what it is or could be.

Beauty is only Skin Deep

This is about pulling a switcheroo on the players: supposedly, if you have a beautiful woman as your NPC, the players will zero-in on her as being important/the villain. So instead, have a plain-looking woman NPC and maybe even have her need rescuing by the players, to lull them into a false sense of security, and then make her backstab the players to their surprise.

He later expounds this into other expectation-defying tropes: a small child, a grizzled old man, a geriatric farmer - all of these could be "the real enemy", but the language and descriptions used in this section are a little off-putting:


We're just a Comeliness stat away from this becoming really uncomfortable.

Up Next: Getting your players to waste spells on non-existent threats

Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 6: Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

The opposite of the previous section, this is about misdirecting your players into threats that they think are more serious than they actually are.

Kobold with a Glowing Stick (aka the “Wiz”)

He namedrops the Wizard of Oz as a great example of this concept: using flashy parlor tricks and whatnot to seem more powerful and intimidating than they actually are.

The objective is to make the party think that they're in for a killer encounter, and then scam them out of money when they pay the puffed-up monster for the privilege of passing through unharmed.

A low-level Wizard might use a Potion of Gaseous Form to try and look like a djinn.
A kobold might wear flashy threads, cast Light on the end of its stick, and threaten the party with oblivion
A goblin might quaff a Potion of Giant's Strength and tear a breastplate right in front of the players to make its point (I'm pretty sure the Pathfinder rules don't allow this)


Stuffed Dragon

This is an extension of the first idea. Have the kobolds manipulate a junkyard dragon with lots of drums and loud clanking. Have the goblins put up "scarecrows" that look like the shadows of powerful monsters against the dungeon's limited light. Line the parapets with inanimate skeletons that all have bows and arrows to make it look like the party is horribly overmatched.

As with the first idea, this mostly relies on the GM being an unreliable narrator. I think this is rather unfair to the players - at the very least you should use Perception or Insight or Investigation or Will to first determine if the character can, in-character, see through the ruse. If you make the kobolds try to give the impression of a dragon, but you tell the players that there's all the real and literal sounds and smells of a dragon out there, you're not really giving them any chance to react in a manner that'd be logical or reasonable than if they knew exactly what they were getting into.

Scary Looking Things

When dressing your dungeons, leave things like puddles of blood, green slime on walls and large inexplicable paw and claw marks on the floors, to make the dungeon look more spoopy than it really is.

There's perhaps nothing directly wrong with this advice, but it kind of reminds me of Death Frost Doom where you're mostly just pulling off the tabletop equivalent of the jump scare with nothing "real" to back it up.

The point of doing this is to make players think that a big important encounter is about to come up, so that they'll waste time/wandering monster checks being careful, as well as throwing up defensive buffs for a fight that's never coming.

The Loud Leaping Ghoul

The next time the party fights Ghouls, have one of them be an acrobatic Ghoul that swings from trees and ledges and walls and hedges. Narrate how the Ghoul is screeching and angry and fidgety. Basically make it the most annoying Ghoul possibly in the hopes that the party will expend a disproportionate amount of resources and effort towards killing it, even if the statblock is functionally the same as all other Ghouls.

Illusions


He goes on to describe effects like what happened in Conan the Destroyer where a phantasm was able to hurt people if they believed that it was actually real, or for Hallucinatory Terrain to provide actual movement rate penalties if the players fail to disbelieve.

You can also have illusions covering pits and traps, illusionary walls hiding the correct corridor to go down through, an entire illusionary camp that the players can sleep in only to be attacked in the middle of the night, and other such tricks.

Personally, I've never used illusions in my games, so I can't directly comment, but like the previous bits of "advice", it seems like these rely on the GM being an unreliable narrator, or that it requires pixelbitching players - I poke every wall and wait for my 10-foot-pole to pass through if it's an illusion.

Neither of which sounds very fun to me.

Up Next: Recursive Asshole GMing

Trickery

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 7: Trickery

All the other parts are already trickery, so I'm guessing this is just trickery in general rather than against a specific theme.

Hidden Compartment within a Hidden Compartment

The player thinks they're a good player after they're managed to find the secret and managed to open it and get the goodies inside without killing themselves. Now you get to chuckle to yourself inwardly because there was actually another bit of loot, more valuable loot, inside the chest that they already emptied, presumably because they didn't explicitly declare that they're running their hands over the chest to check for a false bottom. You're supposed to place some loot in the first hidden compartment, just to make them think that they're all done now.


What the fuck, guy. If you're so contemptuous of your players actually making progress, why are you still playing this game?

Trap on a Trap

A variation on a theme. The player has already disarmed a trap, so they proceed down the corridor ... and ah-ha! Skewered by a second trap! You should make the initial trap easy to disarm and/or easily detected, just to lull players into complacency.

Another idea is to have a trap that does nothing, except it is impossible to disarm - the players won't want to proceed down the hall knowing that the mechanism is still active, but what they don't know is that triggering the mechanism doesn't actually cause any harm!

Yet another idea is to make disarming the trap, the trap itself: place a pit trap right in front of the exposed innards of a crushing pendulum mechanism and watch as the Rogue walks right into it!

There's also a conversion of Pathfinder's Phantom Trap spell, for use in your Swords & Wizardry game. It lets casters plant an illusion that will "set off" a Rogue's trapfinding ability, even if it doesn't actually do anything. Put it on a thimble, then place the thimble on the pressure plate of a spiked wall.

Time-Limited Magic Item

In order to inject a sense of urgency into your games, create magic items whose abilities are on a timer. A magical sword that only works for so many attacks/kills. A potion of flying that only lasts 1d6 rounds. Better yet, an item that grants waterbreathing, but only until 200 feet of depth, at which point it turns off and does nothing.

As an example of play, the author tells us a story of a scenario he ran at GenCon:


The Melting Lock

This one is fairly simple: create locks that either destroy a key that you put into it if it's not the correct matching key, or create locks that destroy the contents of its container if you try to lockpick it or open it with an incorrect key.

After all, just because the players have killed the monsters doesn't mean the players should have free and access to the loot.

Tesseracts and Teleporters

This one involves using teleporters, bottomless pits, one-way doors, and sealing/shifting corridors and rooms to create a dungeon that is not straightforward to navigate through. It's not implied that any of the features should necessary be lethal, but they should result in the players getting hopelessly lost if they can't figure it out.

I Can Get In and You Can’t!

This one involves creating threats and bounties that the players might want to get through, but cannot because they are 5-foot-tall humanoids. Rat lairs, bricked-up chambers, or even completely sealed rooms partnered with incorporeal monsters are all places that are inaccessible to players unless they can come up with creative solutions.

To be fair, he does say that the placement of the room should make "sense", as in placing a sealed-up room in the middle of nowhere with nothing to tempt the players into it or even clue them to its possible existence is useless.

A sample scenario follows:


This is also, in my view, a variation of the hidden compartment in a hidden compartment trick. The players have already checked the coffin - they would never think of checking underneath the coffin, right?

I Got It, Now What?

This one is the most devious bit of fuckery yet, so I'll leave you with another excerpt, as I could not possibly do it justice:


The fucking gall of this guy to write a book, then throw you back to goddamned wikipedia for more examples of material!

Up Next: The Final Stretch

Greed is Bad!

posted by gradenko_2000 Original SA post

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks

Part 8: Greed is Bad!

This final section involves tricks and scenarios that try to exploit the players' desire for more loot and treasure.

Collapsing Treasure Room


Yet again, he's outright condoning the killing of player-characters in order to teach them a lesson, and for the mistake of not playing carefully.

Examples of this trick include:

* Load-bearing treasure: the loot is embedded in the walls, such that removing it will directly cause the building to collapse.
* Load-bearing enchantments being maintained by the Evil Wizard: when you kill the big bad, the structural integrity of the dungeon/castle/tower becomes compromised because reasons, and you only have a limited window to get out with what you can before it all comes down.
* A monster pulls a Samson and begins tearing down the walls of the dungeon, either as one of the enemies the party was already fighting, or as a new entrant into the fight
* From any of these situations, assume that the exit is some distance away and so the players have to make a break for the exit ... except the encumbrance rules mean they can't move that fast!

The point is that you must force the players to make hard and fast choices regarding how much treasure they're going to try to get away with.

I've seen this pulled off well exactly once, in a Dungeon Crawl Classics scenario. The players fought a purple demon on some island, they slew it, and it triggered a tsunami that would drown all of them. The GM made a secret roll to determine how many rounds the players had before the tsunami hit, and then played out loot recovery by rounds, something like "1 round of rummaging through the gold pile nets you 100 GP". That's probably the best use of this trope, because it's an interesting decision that the players are somewhat informed about, rather than being a gotcha.

The Apple Tree

The idea here is to have some sort of boon that looks like it might be replenishing, except it takes so long to replenish that the players will have to (unbeknownst to them) have to make a Golden Goose decision.


I'm calling out that last sentence as at least a good thing, that the presence of a Druid would allow the party to be fully-informed of what the deal is.

Magic Pools and Potions (Is One Enough and Two Too Many?)

This is supposed to be a lesson in moderation.

Drink from the fountain once and you gain flight. Drink from it twice and it is poison.
Make a wish on the statue once and your attributes increase. Wish on it twice and it decreases your attributes instead.
Eat a certain herb and you're healed a little or lose a status effect. Eat too much of it and you suffer "an entirely horrible effect"

The author makes an alcohol and overdose analogy, and also a "pop rocks and coca-cola" analogy: if a character drinks two potions in quick succession, go to the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide, look up the Potion Miscibility Table and inflict a bad effect on them because the two potions mixed in their stomach!

And we're right back to gotcha/Nethack-spoilers gameplay. This is exactly the kind of thing that turned me off from ever touching a shrine in the original Diablo I. While I could look up all of the effects and match them to the generic and vague names, it was too much work to bother doing that, and especially the ones that are only good for you if your stats/character status falls within a certain range.

Hiding in Plain Sight

This one is the gag from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: the Holy Grail is actually the plain-looking wooden cup, and the ogre's tattered, ratty, stinky bedsheet is a Cloak of Elvenkind. He mentions this as yet another way to deny the players from obtaining treasure if they're just not thorough enough.

I want to title this short paragraph "Burying the Lead". Besides the fact that very few players in TYOOL 2016 are going to miss the gimmick of a bunch of golden ornate objects next to an ordinary one, this is just another of those things that you, the GM, are completely in control of by dint of how the players can't know anything unless you tell them.

Conclusion


As a final send-off, he gives us a "role-playing, not roll-playing!" good bye.

And that's the end of the book. It didn't sit right with me skimming through it and going through the introduction, and the close read-through did not improve my opinion of it any. It's a very antagonistic, very "cull the weak" style that may well have been in vogue 30 years ago, but just strikes me as mean-spirited and punishing today.

A lot of it is founded upon hiding essential information from the players, or making it so that they cannot learn it until they've paid some dire cost first, or exploiting the player-to-character knowledge gap to force the players to make decisions that the characters should honestly be more informed about considering they're supposed to be adventurers.

The second is perhaps forgivable to a point, but the first and latter approaches rob the players of agency because if a game is a series of interesting decisions, you cannot have one if you have any sort of background with which to make an informed choice about. While I have no doubt that there are people who enjoy playing his games, and that that sort of game can be enjoyable if played off well (as I mentioned, Dungeon Crawl Classics' level-0 funnel plays the killer dungeon trope to the hilt), this book isn't for me, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.