I was watching Justin Alexander’s stream yesterday when one of his watchers lamented that newer players didn’t know about all the tricks used in the old days. Such as using marbles to test if a passageway sloped downwards, or a ten-foot pole to test if the passageway ahead had a pit trap in it.

Justin replied that it doesn’t take much for that sort of knowledge and approach to spread – he’d seen many times that a single player using those approaches caused other players to start doing the same, and from there it had a viral effect, with those players introduced to the method taking it to more tables!

I rather enjoy it when people use their marbles and come up with unexpected ways to deal with challenges. And while it’s something the players do, it’s also something the DM enables. It’s very easy to shut it down and just require a die roll instead, doing things “by the book” when everyone at the table would be more entertained by this other method.

And then I started thinking about a variety of other related things.

D&D (and other RPGs) have a few ways of resolving things, and they rely on player decision-making. Just not always at the point you expect. For instance:

• Detecting a trap using passive Perception is an example of character creation decision-making. The player made the decision to invest in the Perception skill and the Wisdom ability score.
• Stopping walking down a corridor, searching, and detecting a trap using an active Perception roll uses both character creation and requires an active decision method. (I need a much better name).
• Detecting a trap using a ten-foot pole (no roll) is an example of character preparation (they brought a pole), an active decision to search, and possibly player ingenuity.
• Detecting a trap using a method no-one ever say before is definitely an example of an active decision and player ingenuity.

There’s also the bit where the player checks the ceiling rather than the floor based on various clues. Is that player perception? (As opposed to the Perception skill.) Or just another aspect of the player being ingenious?

The most boring resolution is when the DM says “You find the trap” which doesn’t rely on any decision the players made at all. There is a reason to do this as the DM, which is to get to the interesting bit: how the players deal with the trap. But if the DM were to say, “you find and disarm a trap”, then does that DM need the players there at all, except as an audience?

I’m an old school player in a lot of ways. I always enjoy it when player ingenuity comes into it. The drawback of this method is that sometimes the players can’t think of the solution, especially when the DM has set up an intricate puzzle. There are times when just rolling dice allows the game to proceed! Is it as fun? Nah, but being stuck for thirty minutes feeling frustrated as the DM keeps saying “No, that doesn’t work” isn’t great either.

Give me a solution that both depends on the character’s abilities and the player’s ingenuity? Yeah, that’s what I want. I just accept that it’s not always going to happen.

But the other side of using a ten-foot pole to find a pit trap is that it’s ingenious the first time you think of it. After that, it just becomes expected behaviour and a mundane procedure.

The first group to come up with the idea of taking a ten-foot pole into a dungeon is impressive. They’re using their ingenuity to do something people had never thought of doing before. The group that hears of this and uses a ten-foot pole themselves? It’s not as impressive. It feels good from a verisimilitude perspective, and the DM rewards the players for doing a good technique, but at this point it’s not borne of their own ingenuity.

The moments I love? When I see players doing something I didn’t expect. If they use a ten-foot pole, I get that rush of nostalgia, remembering my early days looking at the equipment list. But I’m not thinking that “no-one has done this before!” and being impressed in that manner.

After a while, poking ahead with a ten-foot pole and rolling a Perception check becomes identical – it’s an accepted part of the game. The Perception check streamlines a bunch of clunky one-off methods. Those methods were great the first ten times you did them. After then? Less so.

I occasionally tell the story of a trap (in Logan Bonner’s The Lost City) that was placed on a pedestal in the middle of a trapped floor. The problem was getting the rogue over there to disarm it. So, the wizard summoned his familiar (a bird), cast a spell that enlarged the bird, cast Tenser’s floating disc, had the rogue get on the disc, and then rode on his familiar, dragging the disc and the rogue behind him to the trap. None of the elements used there was original, but their combination certainly was, and my players and I loved it!

You can see the evidence of these techniques becoming stale even in the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. There’s a monster called the ear seeker. It lives in the wood of doors. So, when you listen at a door to detect if there’s a monster on the other side, it burrows into your ear, makes you ill, and might eventually kill you. What’s that in the game for? It’s to provide excitement after what was originally a great innovation of players (listening at doors) became just another boring procedure.

This also happened with pit traps. The very first traps were just open holes in the floor. Then the early DMs started putting concealed lids in them. Spikes down the bottom. Skeletons or Green Slimes living in the bottom. Both on the DM and player side of things, you want to mix it up.

Ingenuity requires new material on both sides of the table! The players need to see something they’ve never seen before, and then come up with a solution the DM hasn’t seen before!

The streamlining of what was once ingenious down into the die roll does have problematic side effects, of course. It’s great for established players – making a repetitive activity easy to resolve. However, the newer players didn’t go through the discovery of all those methods. They just see the (by now) more boring result, and don’t realise that there are different ways of solving things apart from rolling dice. What I hope things like Justin’s book do is alert people to other methods. It’s always the first time for someone, and that makes it exciting again!

I really need to get back to reading So You Want To Be A Game Master. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far, but other things (like Alan Wake II) have distracted me!