Random Run Bit

[firstfrost]

So, last weekend was the chapter end run for Dragon. Normally mjperson and I run only a subset at a time, but this had everyone, so it gets kind of noisy and confusing. Sometimes one of us will take a player or two out in the hall for a conversation where it's more quiet. At one point, someone went to follow the dog, who was barking about a stolen painting, so Mike took them out in the hall and they got captured by bad guys. A while later, someone else went to look for them, and also got captured. This continued for quite some time, just like a canonical horror movie, as people wandered one at a time into the trap, until about half the party was outside in the hall, and people back in the room were finally starting to get suspicious.

It's so rare to get to lure people into traps like that - if we were all sitting around a table and someone gets captured, then the other players will say pretty quickly "Well, when they don't come back, we all go looking for them." It's not cheating, it's just that it's really hard to not metagame "We don't notice the trap that has just been talked about." But if you can hide the trap so they actually don't notice it, it's much funnier.

(I wasn't the GM in the hallway, I was running people in the room, so I did miss a lot of what was going on, and spent a lot of time myself wondering where the run had gone off to. Perhaps all the players will now protest that of course they noticed the trap immediately... :) )

Comments

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Hee!

I decided it was somebody else's problem, yeah, that's it.

[chengesu.livejournal.com]

I didn't think we ever got more than 4-5 people in the hallway at a time, though a few more cycled through.

I think the way that part of the run was structured, with several things happening at once, helped the trap to work. It wasn't just a bunch of people sitting around a table when several of them left. It was several sub-groups doing their own plots, and thus not really paying close attention to who wasn't in the room.

I was in the "rescue" party which got stuck, though I don't know what dynamic happened in the room after I left.

[merastra.livejournal.com]

Hee! That's a great metagame disguise for a trap! :-) You sure you didn't plan it that way? ;-)

[tirinian.livejournal.com]

I definitely didn't notice the trap until someone came back and said "they got captured." But then I waived my hands at it (and Li Merit) and it got fixed. :-)

[mathhobbit.livejournal.com]

I wasn't walking into a trap, I was rescuing the painting! And it worked, too. Good dog, Ho!