What’s your favourite challenging situation

[GhostPepper]

I’ve been running a game with a group of friends for donkey’s years and I’m trying to keep things fresh rather than letting the game devolve into “Enter square room, fight monster”. So I’d like to know, what’s the coolest situation you’ve gone through/put your players through? Why was it your favourite?

I’m looking for ideas for traps, terrain challenges and dangerous situations I can throw at my party. The key thing here is that I want them to be interactive challenges (not simply a case of ‘Reflex save for half damage’). One example might be stepping on a switch that releases a wave of water down the corridor that will slam the PCs into the walls, the players could grab onto the walls, run from the wave, look for a door, cast a spell etc, but they’ve got to do something active.

[Lilut Neck-High]

My dude, there are mad challenges you can come up with in a PF game. Here are a few of my faves:

-Oozes are hella rad for a key trap. There's a key on the ground, but it's all up in a clear ooze (custom-made mini Gelatinous Cubes for me), and that can open a can of whoop-ass on players who don't keep some eyes on the suspicious key on the floor first.

-The party enters a freaky room with a bunch of statues creeping at them with their scary-ass gem eyes. The statues all hold down a pressure plate, which triggers an arrow trap from one of the walls if the statue gets budged even an inch. The thing is, all the statues need to be rotated clockwise to open the door to the next room, and trying to push them normally triggers an alarm.

-This isn't quite a trap or puzzle, but it's cool anyways. Have a bunch of scary dungeon things trying to kill your peeps for five or so rooms, then throw something cute at them. Not "Killer Rabbit" cute, though. My dude, you want a completely harmless, mundane room in the middle of a deathtrap. Maybe the vampire who owns this crib likes pink, fluffy things and kitten posters. I pulled this on a few of my guys, and they spent half the session looking for traps or monsters. They dipped out of the dungeon after just seeing that room... It's wicked how soon adventurers freak when nothing's trying to kill them. ADDED FUN- Roll a few dice and laugh every once in a while.

[bitter lily]

GhostPepper wrote:

I’ve been running a game with a group of friends for donkey’s years and I’m trying to keep things fresh rather than letting the game devolve into “Enter square room, fight monster”. So I’d like to know, what’s the coolest situation you’ve gone through/put your players through? Why was it your favourite?

I’m looking for ideas for traps, terrain challenges and dangerous situations I can throw at my party. The key thing here is that I want them to be interactive challenges (not simply a case of ‘Reflex save for half damage’). One example might be stepping on a switch that releases a wave of water down the corridor that will slam the PCs into the walls, the players could grab onto the walls, run from the wave, look for a door, cast a spell etc, but they’ve got to do something active.

On your example: A rogue should get a chance to spot the switch & disable it, surely.

Coolest and favorite are, in fact, two different things, you know. The coolest one has to be what a 3.5 DM created homebrew, an entire metaphysical "dungeon" based on the Tarot -- although I'd probably go with the Harrowing deck if I tried to build anything similar for PF. The thing is, it was a mixed blessing, that could destroy a character if you went through mini-maxing as easily as refine it if you used it to better define your character.

The idea was that there was a room for each card, and each one required a choice that would have a permanent effect on your character. One room might offer three doors that promised a gain to Health, Wealth, or Power -- and only the GM would know the actual mechanics for those gains. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that they open into the same place! (All of the cards had rooms, but no one of us entered them all.) Similarly, another room would make you choose between a loss of Health, Wealth, or Power. Permanently. Well, many of the rooms simply offered an option of an action, which could be bypassed.

And some of them offered a roleplaying interaction with a permanent consequence on the gameworld. I remember that I drank from a fountain or some such thing in order to meet my love. What I didn't know was that the love I met was, in fact, an evil deity BBEG, who then started working to get me to betray my god. Another PC (with cosmic ambitions) worked out a bargain with Tiamat.

Coolest? Beyond doubt. Favorite? I'm not so sure.

[GhostPepper]

bitter lily wrote:

GhostPepper wrote:

On your example: A rogue should get a chance to spot the switch & disable it, surely.

Of course, but should he miss it, I don't really like the standard "Ref to take half damage" option. It's great to see players think on their feet and do something creative.

So situations that force players to think outside the box, or put them on the back foot in an interesting way fascinate me. If the party is climbing down a sheer cliff face and giant spiders start swarming out of holes in the cliff face, this is great because the players have to think of creative solutions (in that particular case it involves the cleric using "shape stone" to create a ledge the ranger could stand on and pick off the spiders with his bow, while the monk jumped from spider to spider kicking them off the cliff to splatter on the cavern floor below).

[SmiloDan]

I had a room once where there was an empty fireplace and some statues.
A plate on the floor triggered a harpoon that struck the person on the plate dragged them towards the fireplace, which ignited. Poisoned darts targeted anyone trying to free the person stuck on the harpoon.

In 3.5, I had a bunch of yuan-ti warlocks with repelling blast for their eldritch blasts shooting at PCs as they jumped from platform to platform. Those knocked off the platforms fell into swarms of poisonous vipers.

A narrow hallway with barred cells containing monsters; the cells open while the PCs are in the middle of the hallway, so they're both surrounded and bottlenecked.

An alchemist's lab with lots alchemical items, alembics, cauldrons, tables, etc. The tables will be filled with some useful items and some hazards. Broken lab equipment PCs and NPCs can fight from on top of the tables, duck under them, flip them and use them as cover, etc. You can also be bullrushed into the hazards and cauldrons, some cause acid or fire damage, some are poisonous, and some might even cure you. Mixing some random materials might make a stinking cloud or even cloudkill effect. Or maybe mind fog or confusion or grease or even web. Shelves of scrolls and formula books can form a maze--and maybe even a burning maze! Homonculi archers might creep on top of the bookshelves, hurling flasks of acid, fire, oil, or poison.

A nest full of parasitoidal eggs could be fun. Difficult terrain, sticky terrain, and spidery squidworms leaping around willy-nilly.

Just throwing in a couple columns can break up lines of sight and effect and give areas of cover and concealment. Pits and trenches and stairs going up and down.

I ran an encounter where the main chamber is 40 or 60 feet in diameter with stairs all around the circumference, with doors on different levels. The PCs come out somewhere along the middle levels. Archery-based monsters come out both above and below the PCs, but they're just a distraction. A bigger, badder monster floats up from the darkness in the middle (I used a beholder zombie when I did this; 5E).