*Sigh*
So, this is a bit of a rant. I finally came to my second-favorite scene in Hall of Harsh Reflections—the pit trap with the false bottom. I altered it a little, having the false floor possess mystical runes indicating "departure" so the players might suspect teleportation and leave—or better yet, jump in after.
So the party barbarian falls down and takes some damage. I'm carefully keeping it all to spoilers, and I politely request that everyone else at least try to do the same.
Barbarian immediately posts outside a spoiler revealing that he's down there with what's otherwise a completely redundant action. It's almost literally "[Barbarian] gets off the spike and tries to say, 'Ow', but is silenced."
Okay, maybe he wasn't really just blatantly and deliberately giving away IC knowledge to avoid inconvenience, but this still pisses me off. Is it so hard to just keep to spoilers for a bit? The doppelbard has been awesome at deceiving the rest of the players. The least the barbarian could have done was make this encounter a bit, y'know, memorable. Now the whole party recognizes, whether they wanted to or not, that it's an illusion.
Blegh. I'm sure he just wasn't paying attention, but I'm still pretty disappointed. This is such an awesome encounter, and unlike many others, there wasn't any reason it had to be foiled by lucky and/or clever player. I just failed to account for lazy and/or dishonest ones, I guess.
Actually, let's put this thread to a more constructive purpose. Who here has stories of the pit trap? How'd it work for your group?
It's been a couple years since I was at that part, but I do recall it was pretty disappointing for me too. A character did fall down, but I believe she was able to just use a magic item that didn't require a verbal component and fire off some sort of ray up through the illusory floor to alert the other party members. Even without metagaming, it seems like a trap that's maybe better on paper than in execution.
The trap provided some fun for my group. The doppleganger was impersonating the scout that was moving side by side down the corridor with the paladin, so they both fell through. The scout/doppleganger floated down via a ring of feather falling. The paladin didn't take that much damage, so doppleganger didn't try to kill the paladin of Tyr right (there was another reason, but that is too long a story for this thread).
I took the two of them aside in another room with music playing so each group wouldn't overhear the other. The paladin threw a grappling hook high enough to clear the illusion, but it didn't catch. The top group noticed the grappling hook, so they lowered one of the clerics of Tyr Mission Impossible style down the pit, who promptly got hit in the face with a second try of the grappling hook. :)
Later, they obsessed for about 20 minutes about how to get to the (fake) door on the opposite side of the pit. My group has a pathological desire to search every nook and cranny of dungeons.