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The Game Master Show Ep 91 (General) Random Question Wednesday
In response to Mario's question about the idea that you thought would be really cool but ended in epic FAIL...
Back when I was a new DM; I thought I had a great idea for a fight scene. There is a movie called The Name of the Rose which stars Sean Connery and Christian Slater as Franciscan Monks investigating a series of murders at an abbey. The library contained within the abbey is beyond awesome... secret doors in and out and open staircases leading to various individual rooms of books which appear to be in some sort of "towers within a tower" kind of a set up. It is a confusing layout and it is easy to get lost. I figured it would be a great place for a problem-solving encounter with perhaps some combat as well. I envisioned archers exchanging ranged attacks with spellcasters from balconies at different levels all while the characters are trying to find their way out, etc. I spent days... literally days... putting together a series of overlapping overhead sheets that I could lay on top of a grid depicting the entire building. It was color coded for different elevations, had false stairwell traps, rooms with dead ends, fake doors, and I had even worked out the proper way from entering to exiting the labyrinthine structure with a series of symbols that depicted the proper way to go. The idea was that it would lead to the private offices of the vampire that was the BBEG of the adventure. I had hoped to create a sense of dread and mystery in having them work their way through the library to get to the offices and then having the vampire flee into the labyrinth for the final scene.
I thought it was cool as the players started casting some buff spells expecting trouble. I was hoping for this... thinking that the time it took for them to work their way through the library would get them panicked to find the way out before their buffs ran out. My plan appeared to be working to perfection until my cleric player says: "I cast Find the Path"... the dude had it memorized and everything. This was before 3rd edition so it wasn't like he could spontaneously cast it into a heal of some sort. It completely threw me off and it ended up being extremely anticlimactic. I loathe the Find the Path spell to this day. I realize now that there were several options I had to still bring the scene into play but I was a pretty new DM and wasn't ready to improvise very well. All I could do was mourn the loss of my "awesome" encounter. Bleh.
