IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 33B: THE INTERROGATION OF ARVETH

December 28th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

After briefly discussing what they wanted to ask the prisoners and how they would go about interrogating them, they started with Arveth. Agnarr grabbed her by the ankles and held her upside down above the turgid sewer sludge. Tor slapped her awake.

She woke up angry.

“Who are you who dare to defy the powers of chaos?” She scanned their faces, but when she came to Tee’s she blanched.

“That’s right,” Tee smiled with vicious glee.

“You bitch!”

Tee smiled and shrugged. “Where’s Wuntad?”

Arveth’s eyes filled with confusion. “Who?”

Tee studied her carefully for a moment, and then suddenly her face broke into a large grin. “Oh! You don’t know anything, do you?”

“You insignificant worm! You’re not worthy of knowing the secrets of chaos!”

“Wrong answer.” Tee signaled to Agnarr, who dipped her into the channel of sludge. She came back up spluttering and gagging.

Tee pulled out the thick stack of papers they had collected. “Did you mean these secrets of chaos? Because I know these secrets. For secrets they don’t seem very well secured.”

Arveth glared. “You came so close to greatness.”

Tee laughed in her face. “Let’s try something simple. Who do you work for?”

“Dilar.”

“The centaur? Okay. What else can you tell me?”

Arveth hesitated.

“I guess you really don’t know anything. Well, in that case…” Tee raised her hand in Agnarr’s direction. The barbarian began lowering Arveth back towards the sewer sludge. Arveth panicked.

“I know things! I know!”

Tee held up her hand to stop Agnarr. “Like what?”

“There are at least eight people who come in and out of this building.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they do here?”

Arveth hesitated again. Tee laughed. “You really don’t know anything. Did you even tell anyone before you came rushing in?”

“Yes. They’ll be here soon.”

She spat the words. But she’d hesitated for just a moment. Tee laughed again. “You didn’t! And you just tried to lie to me again.” She leaned in close and whispered in her ear. “You came so close to greatness…”

Tee gave a signal. Arveth had just a moment to struggle, certain that she was about to die, before Agnarr slammed her head into the wall of the sewer, knocking her unconscious again. Dominic took a moment to make sure that the wound wasn’t lethal and then they turned their attention to the spellcaster.

THE INTERROGATION OF URANIK

“I’ve seen him before,” Ranthir said. “He was one of the Venom cultists who killed the cultist from the Brotherhood of the Ebon Hand.”

“The one you saw while using clairvoyance?” Tee asked. Ranthir nodded.

They blinded the cultist and Agnarr dangled him above the sewer sludge. Elestra slapped him awake.

“Whoever you are, you’re already dead.” His voice was possessed of a cruel, sardonic tone.

Elestra laughed at him.

Tee ignored him. “Do you know where you are?”

“You blindfold me and then ask me where I am?” The man sneered.

At Tee’s signal, Agnarr hit him across the face. Hard.

The man licked blood from his lip. “All right. I’ll play along. Judging by the smell, I’d guess we’re in the sewers.”

“That’s right. We found our way down here.”

“You found a huge hole in the floor? Congratulations on your powers of perception.”

Agnarr hit him again.

“What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with your name”

“Uranik.”

“So you can tell the truth.” Tee smiled through her bluff. “That’s right. We know who you are. Now, tell us about the Brotherhood of Ptolus.”

The man laughed. “It’s a fiction. A front for the Brotherhood of Venom.”

“Which you belong to.”

“That’s right.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Being questioned by amateurs.”

Tee wasn’t amused. She signaled Agnarr, who lowered him and began swinging the top of his head through the sewer sludge.

“Stop it.” Uranik managed to keep his sardonic tone, but there was a slight edge of tension in his voice.

“Pull him up,” Tee said. “Hmm. You seem to have gotten a little dirty. Now, I’ve got one of your fancy pieces of cloth here – the one with the purple liquid on it. I suppose I could just wipe your face clean with it…”

“This isn’t necessary,” Uranik said. “If you let me live and let me go, I’ll tell you whatever you want.” He was outwardly calm, but it was clear that Tee had rattled him.

Tee considered it for a moment. “Dunk him so that we can talk.”

Uranik opened his mouth to protest… which was a mistake.

While he gurgled they quickly talked it over. Elestra didn’t like the idea of letting him go – unlike Arveth, Uranik had been directly responsible for the atrocities performed in the apartment building above them. But the rest of them decided to accept his terms.

Agnarr hauled him back up and they sat him down on the ledge. Tee quizzed him about the work that had been done in the apartment complex, and by comparing those answers to the papers they had retrieved she confirmed that he was being truthful… about that at least.

They learned that the cultists had broken into the apartment complex and started their experiments on the residents. When they ran out of residents, they started bringing in slaves from the Temple of the Rat God.

“And what’s down here in the sewer?”

“The Temple of Deep Chaos,” Uranik said. “It was founded by Wuntad.”

They quizzed him about Wuntad. He had apparently left the Temple here about a month and a half ago and Uranik hadn’t seen him since, although he believed that Illadras – who was now in charge of the Temple – was in contact with him. Uranik claimed to know nothing about Pythoness House.

“You work here with the Ebon Hand?”

“And others.”

“So why did you kill the other priest?”

“Reggaloch? He was planning to betray us.”

“And yet he’s the one who’s dead.”

“There were two of us and only one of him.”

“How do you get into the Temple?”

He told them of two entrances – an iron door down the western tunnel and a secret entrance up the northern tunnel. If they went through the iron door, they would enter a long stone hall. He described one of the walls of this hall as being illusionary, and said that there were four priests who stood as guardians and could look into the hall through a peephole.

“And through the secret entrance?”

“There’s a tunnel with two sentries on duty. If you can get past them, you should be able to come up behind the priests through their quarters. There’ll be a staircase down—“

“We’re going to leave you here. When you get out of your ropes, don’t try to warn your friends. We’ll make sure they know you’re a traitor. And we both know what you do with traitors.”

Agnarr knocked him unconscious. Tor loosened his ropes… slightly.

Running the Campaign: Bond. The Opposite of Bond. – Campaign Journal: Session 33C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

The core structure of a mystery is not the absence of knowledge (as one might first assume), it is the acquisition of knowledge: It’s the detective finding the murder weapon. It’s the sleuth following the werewolf’s footprints. It’s the kid on the bike spotting the guys in Hawaiian shirts loading packages into an unmarked van.

So if that’s the case, why is the failure to find a clue so vital for a rich and engaging mystery scenario?

This can actually be a controversial statement, so let’s back up for a moment. If you go poking around the RPG meme-sphere, you’ll find all kinds of advice telling you that allowing the PCs to fail to find a clue in a mystery scenario is a sin somewhere on par with murdering a nun.

Much, but not all, of this advice is the result of running fragile scenarios in which Clue A leads to Clue B leads to Clue C in a breadcrumb trail that completely collapses the moment a single clue is missed. This isn’t good either, of course, and techniques like the Three Clue Rule can be used to build more robust scenarios where missing a clue doesn’t become apocalyptic.

Far more important than simply being able to miss a clue, however, is for the investigators to go looking for a clue and not find it because it doesn’t exist.

You can think of this a little bit like the scientific method: As the PCs investigate a mystery, they will form hypotheses and will then test those hypotheses to see if they’re true. (“If it’s a werewolf, then the attacks will only have happened during the full moon.” or “If the murderer came in through the window, then they would have left tracks in the mud outside.”) Null results are an essential part of that problem-solving process because it allows the PCs to discard false conclusions and refine their hypotheses (which can, of course, be tested through further investigation).

You can experience analogous problem-solving when working on a crossword puzzle, for example. Your read a clue, reach a conclusion about what the word might be, and then test it against the grid. If it doesn’t work, then you have to think about other possible solutions; or combine the clue with other information (e.g., letters crossing the answer) to figure out the answer. Sometimes you’ll think you have the right answer, but then later discover (due to crossing clues) that you were wrong.

You may have encountered techniques like these:

• Improvising a clue so that the PCs find a clue, no matter what method of investigation they used.
• Altering the solution of the mystery to match whatever theory the players come up with.
• Auto-finding all clues (so that the players can have complete surety that they didn’t miss anything).

These all remove texture from a mystery scenario by damaging or completely removing the feedback between creating and testing hypotheses: It can be a pleasant pastime to fill in a crossword grid with words you choose at random, but it’s not actually the same thing as solving a crossword puzzle.

It should be noted that these techniques can be quite popular, however, so I have no doubt that many hackles have been raised reading this.

So, to be clear, these are not intrinsically bad techniques, per se. In fact, they are often successful in redressing the problem they’re designed to solve, and it’s far better to have, for example, a shallow scenario than a broken one. It’s also quite possible for these techniques to be moderated or modified to good effect. For example, Brindlewood Bay is a storytelling game designed entirely around the players inventing the solution to the murder, succeeding because (a) it explicitly replaces the joy of solving mysteries with the thrill of creating them and (b) it mechanically enforces null results in the form of failed theories, forcing the players to create anew. Similarly, permissive clue-finding is a form of improvising clues, but with the important proviso that you’re doing so in a way consistent with the solution.

To return to the point: You don’t need to choose between shallow mysteries and broken ones. There are methods for creating robust mysteries that will preserve and even enrich the depth of the scenario.

Next: Returning to the Scene of the Crime

RUNNING MYSTERIES
The Null Result
Returning to the Scene of the Crime
Enigma
The Two Types of Leads
Hints
Proactive Nodes
Background Revelations

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 33A: Down the Sewer Hole

They collected their two cultist prisoners (replacing the manacles with knotted ropes firmly tied by Tor) and dragged them over to the hole in the back corner of the first floor. Climbing down the rope ladder they found themselves, as they had predicted, in the sewers. Tee came last, dragging a rug over the hole behind her to help conceal its presence, cutting the rope ladder, and then floating down using her boots of levitation.

They were standing at the intersection of four major sewer passages. Narrow walkways of beslimed stone ran along a wide, slowly flowing channel of raw sewage. Agnarr examined the ground and determined that the walkways to the north and west had recently seen a great deal of traffic. They suspected that was the direction the cultists would come…

You’ll often read that the large, walkable sewer tunnels that we see in movies, TV shows, and our D&D campaigns are complete nonsense and have no basis in reality.

But this is not entirely accurate.

It’s true that sewer systems (both today and historically) were mostly made up of pipes too small for humans to traverse. (The drain in your sink does not drop directly into a tunnel.) It’s also true that medieval European cities mostly lacked sewer systems of any kind. (Paris, for example, didn’t have an underground sewer until 1730.)

But that doesn’t mean sewer systems don’t have any walkable tunnels. (They do. Ironically, Paris now has one of the largest networks of walkable sewer tunnels.) It’s also not true that sewers are a modern invention, or that historical sewer systems lacked the larger tunnels. (As far as I can tell, they were actually more common because (a) it was more likely that humans would need access to clear out clogs and debris and (b) older sewer systems were more likely to be primarily focused on draining storm and flood water than waste disposal, and therefore needed very high capacity.)

Rome, for example, had the Cloaca Maxima, which had tunnels, walkways, the whole bit. The final act of The Third Man, Carol Reed’s classic noir film featuring Orson Welles, takes place in the sewers beneath Vienna and was filmed on location: These spacious tunnels were also constructed by the Romans in the 2^nd century. Other Roman sewers of similar design have been preserved in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Although it appears that Romans were allowed to connect their privies to theses systems, recent archaeology suggests that they rarely did: Their toilets notably lacked traps, so nothing would stop sewer gases (and smells) from simply coming up the toilet. Animals and other pests would also use them to invade homes. (We have tales about alligators coming up from the sewers: Aelian and Pliny tell us of an octopus in Iberia that would swim up the drainage tunnels at high tide and sneak into kitchens to eat the pickled fish. On a similar note, there were Victorian tales of pigs living in the sewers of Hampstead. But I digress.)

On the gripping hand, it would nevertheless be quite unusual to find a sewer system like this–

–with twenty-foot-wide passages kept surprisingly tidy and flanked on both sides by walkways. (The entrances to weird, subterranean caverns are actually slightly more plausible: It wasn’t unusual for ancient sewer construction to piggyback or unexpectedly run into preexisting underground structures. In fact, many ancient sewers, including possibly the earliest version of the Cloaca Maxima, were just rivers that had been bricked over.)

But all of this, of course, begins to rub up against the fantastical architecture at the heart of D&D. If the cities of D&D were meant to be strictly modeled on the cities of medieval Europe, we could sagely nod our heads, stroke out chins, and pronounce that it’s just silly for them to have sewers like this.

But D&D cities aren’t medieval European cities, are they?

First, there’s no reason that a completely alternative history wouldn’t see your D&D civilizations preserve the hydrological knowledge of the Romans.

Second, as we’ve seen, some medieval cities DID have sewers like this because they preserved Roman ones. (And it’s not like D&D-land isn’t peppered with ancient civilizations.)

Third, even our declaration of “medieval European city” is pretty biased. The Byzantines were still building large waterworks during this time, as did the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople.

Fourth, the construction capacity and resources of a typical D&D setting far outstretch those of medieval Europe due to the presence of ubiquitous magic (whether arcane or divine).

So if I want to feature something like this in a D&D campaign, instead of reaching for reasons why it can’t exist, I instead reach for the reasons that it can and then apply them.

In doing so, of course, I don’t necessarily need to achieve absolute realism — just plausibility. Because, sewers aside, fantastical construction is a concept that D&D’s worldbuilding inherently holds in tension. The entire game is fundamentally based on architecture which is simultaneously fantastical and irrational: To what possible purpose could the tunnels beneath Castle Blackmoor have been constructed?

(There’s a reason that both Gygax’s Greyhawk and Greenwood’s Undermountain are justified by the whims of a Mad Mage, Zagyg and Halaster respectively.)

We don’t want to abandon logic entirely — because then the PCs are simply trapped in a madhouse of random noise, unable to meaningfully apply thought or problem solving — but the skein of verisimilitude can be pulled very tight when it comes to D&D and a milieu which often operates only on laws of convention.

Campaign Journal: Session 33B – Running the Campaign: Bond. The Opposite of Bond.
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 33A: DOWN THE SEWER HOLE

December 28th, 2008
The 18th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

With the two cultists securely manacled, they went upstairs to deal with the tentacular horror of translucent protoplasm.

Tor and Agnarr removed the barricade of furniture from in front of the door. Then Tor kicked open the door and stepped through.

Its abode disturbed, the creature surged out of the broken cocoon and lurched its way across the room. As it came, it spat a viscous glob of acid spittle towards Tor’s face. Tor narrowly dodged the spittle and then sinuously whipped back the other way as a pseudopod lashed out towards him.

Having kept his balance despite his acrobatic dodging, Tor lunged forward with his own blade. But the creature burst apart – opening a gap through which Tor’s sword passed harmlessly.

As the creature reformed its mass, however, Agnarr slipped into the room as well, and cut down at it. The barbarian’s blade ripped into it, leaving an acrid stench as it burned its way into the heart of the creature.

This sent the creature into a frenzied rage. It spat venom randomly in all directions, catching Dominic in the eyes, and then lashed out at Agnarr with a half dozen tentacles. Agnarr managed to weave his way past a few of them, but the sheer mass of the attack overwhelmed him – four of the pseudopods struck him and latched on. These clung to his flesh and then, using them like anchors, the creature hauled itself towards him. Before anyone could react, the creature had engulfed him.

Tee tumbled into the room and stabbed at it, hoping to lure it off of Agnarr. It spat venom in response. She was struck in the face and cried out in pain, trying to wipe the blinding, burning goo out of her eyes.

Ranthir, seeing Agnarr’s plight, hurled the familiar spell of enlargement at him. At its touch, Agnarr literally grew his way out of the engulfing creature. It ripped painfully free from his body, leaving trails of blood to pour down onto the floor.

The creature retreated from the now enormous Agnarr, spitting venom into his eyes as it went. Crying out from the literally blinding pain, Agnarr swung his greatsword—

–and struck Tee! The blow cut her down where she stood.

But the wide swing also had the effect of forcing the creature back into the corner of the room, from which – with no place to flee – it propelled itself forward again, latching two of its large pseudopods onto Agnarr’s chest. As the others stared in horror, it began sucking the blood from Agnarr’s body – sending misty trails of crimson fluid pulsing through its amoeba-like body.

The barbarian, still fighting blind, raised his sword back and struck mightily at the floor directly beneath the creature. The unsupported floorboards splintered beneath the strength of the blow, and the creature fell through the hole. It tried to drag Agnarr down after it, but Agnarr’s prodigious strength held and the tentacles ripped free.

Dominic, still blind, cried out in fright: “I think the floor is collapsing! We need to get out of here now!”

Agnarr’s vision, however, was clearing now, and he could see the creature still writhing on the lower level. With a grunt he leapt up and plunged down through the hole, driving all of his enlarged weight (more than two tons) onto the creature.

With a squalmous squelch, the creature burst – spattering eddies of protoplasmic grotesquerie through the room.

Agnarr straightened up, poking his head back up onto the second floor. He saw Tee lying in a pool of her own blood. “What happened to Tee?”

His wounds were still bleeding badly, but Elestra was able to tend to that.

Dominic was regaining his own vision. “Ah!” he cried. “You weren’t that big the last time I saw you… What happened to Tee?”

Dominic was able to heal Tee’s wounds easily enough. With a grimace of pain she sat up.

“What happened to me?”

DOWN THE SEWER HOLE

They were satisfied that they had done everything they could to cleanse the apartment complex of the horrific experiments that had been conducted there (albeit while wreaking massive property damage).

“Well, at least we didn’t burn the place down.”

“We did not burn down that house!” Tee insisted.

“What should we do now?” Tor asked.

“We should hurry,” Tee said. “It’s been at least ten minutes since the fight broke out on the street.”

“Right,” Elestra said. “The guard will be coming.”

“Or more cultists,” Tee said.

“Yes. That would be worse,” Dominic said.

They collected their two cultist prisoners (replacing the manacles with knotted ropes firmly tied by Tor) and dragged them over to the hole in the back corner of the first floor. Climbing down the rope ladder they found themselves, as they had predicted, in the sewers. Tee came last, dragging a rug over the hole behind her to help conceal its presence, cutting the rope ladder, and then floating down using her boots of levitation.

They were standing at the intersection of four major sewer passages. Narrow walkways of beslimed stone ran along a wide, slowly flowing channel of raw sewage. Agnarr examined the ground and determined that the walkways to the north and west had recently seen a great deal of traffic. They suspected that was the direction the cultists would come from, so they decided to take the prisoners a little way down the southern passage instead.

Quickly searching them, they found several carefully folded and oiled silk, each of which contained some sort of alchemical substance (which Tee guessed was poison). They also turned up a thick sheath of research notes in a hidden pocket of the spellcaster’s robes. They took the time to study these and the other papers that they had recovered from the alchemical laboratory upstairs.

THE BOOK OF VENOM’S TRUTH

This small, gray-covered volume is a paean to all manners of vile activities – drug abuse, sexual perversions, acts of cruelty and violence – treated with the reverence of holy ritual.

In totality, the book appears to be a cult manual for the “Brotherhood of Venom”. They worship chaos, speaking of the “slow swarm of the Elder Brood” – by which they appear to mean the slow, methodical, and (above all) secret sowing of chaos and dissolution. They perceive ordered society as a curse and seek to undermine it through a slow and steady erosion of disintegration.

Entire passages are given over to describing the basic dynamics of power and how to subvert them – serving as a generic manual n how to infiltrate the highest levels of a society through its most important individuals.

The cult prefers the clandestine. They are patient and careful, never wanting the authorities or other potential opponents to know they exist.

A name is scrawled on the inside back cover: BROTHERHOOD OF PTOLUS

THE MASKS OF DEATH

This folder of blood-red leather contains a collection of associated parchments which appear to serve as something of a cult manual for a group calling itself the “Brotherhood of the Deathmantle”, the Death’s Grimace, or the Tears of Blood.

The cult serves chaos through the worship of murder and slaughter. The more chaos and fear each murder creates, the greater the veneration. Mass murder – the slaying of a whole town, a whole city, or a whole nation – is their ultimate goal.

Each cultist wears a death’s head mask, usually of copper or bronze but occasionally of iron painted skull-white. The cult frequently associates with the undead, and there is even the suggestion that the most faithful among them are undead themselves. They venerate graveyards as holy places and speak of the end of days as “the grave of all worlds”.

Much of the book is given over to the painstaking detailing of the instruments of death: The making of poisons, the care of weapons, and so forth.

Some of the manual is given over to what they would consider the ultimate religious ecstasy: The death of a god.

ALCHEMICAL NOTES ON ASKARA

These notes detail the creation of a magical poison referred to as askara. The notes appear to have been frequently altered, apparently in an effort to perfect the process. The effects of the poison are not described.

The notes appear to combine alchemical and mystical knowledge credited to both the Ebon Hand cultists and the Brothers of Venom.

OBSERVATIONAL NOTES
ON VENOM-SHAPED THRALLS

These are detailed notes on the effects of a poison referred to as askara. The poison is designed to mutate its victim in a prolonged misery that lasts for weeks or even months before the victim dies. During this time, however, the victim’s mind becomes pliable – effectively becoming a slave of those administering the poison.

When victims are injected with askara, they weaken until they collapse. Within twelve hours, their bodies secrete a dark, syrupy substance that covers them and then hardens, forming a black, spherical cocoon. Within another twenty-four hours, the victim emerges from the cocoon, mutated into a hideous amalgam of an insect-like creature and their former selves.

A large section of these notes detail the perfection of a solution that must be applied to the cocoons during the gestation period. Without that solution, the resulting creature “lacks cohesive physical form”. This solution appears to have been difficult to perfect, and was reached only after “Wuntad assured us access to the teachings of the Deathmantles”.

Other notes refer to “unexpected activity in the post-emergent cocoons” including a reference to “violet slime” and “secondary spontaneous cellular generation”, but these are not particularly detailed.

Running the Campaign: Fantasy Sewers – Campaign Journal: Session 33B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Tomas: Okay, I’m going to search the room.

GM: Give me a Search check.

Tomas: (rolls dice) Aw, shoot. I rolled a 4, which only gives me an 8 on the check.

GM: You spend a couple minutes tossing the room, but you don’t find anything.

Maria: Oh! I want to check, too!

Steve: Me, too!

Samantha: I got a 17!

This is dogpiling the check. It’s not always a bad thing, but when it crops up during play it often just feels… wrong somehow. Are the players pulling a fast one? I mean, it just makes sense that Maria and Steve and Samantha could help search the room. So why can it be so frustrating when this happens?

There are actually three different problems here, and it’s probably useful to split them apart and look at each one separately.

First, there’s a metagaming issue. If Tomas rolled a 30 on their Search check and the GM says “you didn’t find anything,” Maria (and Steve and Samantha) don’t pipe up to say, “I’ll try, too!” It’s only when the thief muffs his roll and fails to find something that the rest of the party uses that metagame knowledge to have someone else make the check.

If this is your concern, you can address it by simply making these types of checks secretly: Since the players don’t know the check result, they can’t metagame it.

This won’t necessarily stop the dogpiling, though. The uncertainty about how well Tomas did can actually motivate the players to always dogpile the check. Other types of action checks may also make it more immediately obvious if Tomas failed or succeeded (e.g., he either picked the lock and can open the door or he didn’t) and have the other PCs queuing up to try, which isn’t metagaming but still dogpiling.

Which leads us to the second problem, which is a pacing issue. Is it really interesting to have everyone sit there sequentially rolling the check? What a huge drag! Let’s wrap it up and move it along! (This is particularly true if there really isn’t anything for them to find in the room and Tomas’ check result is irrelevant.)

You can often bypass this issue by calling for all of the PCs to make a check at the same time.

GM: You’re ushered into a grand ballroom. On the wall hangs a huge, heraldic banner of a red stag rearing on a checkered field of blue and white.

Samantha: Do I recognize the heraldry?

GM: Everyone give me an Intelligence (History) check.

In fact, you should often be anticipating this type of check: All of the characters can see the heraldic banner and they either recognize it or they don’t; it’s not something requiring active study, so you should be immediately asking everyone to make the check. (We call these reactive checks.)

Even if it’s a non-reactive check (like searching a room) and the player is the one proposing the action, you can still try to get ahead of the dogpile: “Is anyone helping Tomas search the room?”

But the third problem is a balance issue.

Let’s say that a particular check has a 70% chance of success for the first character, but a 50% chance of success for the other four PCs. This probably falls into the range of checks that’s both interesting and relevant to resolve. But if the check is dogpiled (with all of the PCs rolling and only one needing to succeed), that 70% chance of success suddenly becomes a 96% chance of success, at which point you have to ask yourself why you’re even rolling the check in the first place.

Compound probability adds up quick, and this is particularly true in systems where the range of the die roll is larger than the skill bonuses: The shift in the average die result over multiple rolls rapidly makes skill almost completely irrelevant. (For example, a DC 15 check where most skill bonuses are +1 to +5 and you’re rolling a d20. The successful check is more likely to come from whichever player rolls the highest number on the d20 than it is to come from the PC with the highest skill rating.)

DOGPILING vs. GROUP ACTIONS

Dogpiling a failed check isn’t the same thing as a group action (where multiple characters are working together). Many games already include effective mechanics for resolving group actions. In D&D 5th Edition, for example, you have group checks (everyone rolls and the group succeeds if at least half the checks are successful) and the Help action (the character with the best check modifier makes the check with advantage if there are other characters helping them).

For more on resolving group actions in any system, check out Part 14 of The Art of Rulings.

FAILURE MUST BE MEANINGFUL

Somewhat ironically, the solution to dogpiling largely goes back to the first principles for framing a check: If you’re rolling the dice, then failure should be interesting, meaningful, or both.

So whenever a PC makes a check, there should be a penalty or consequence for failure.

But yet another reason that dogpiling can feel frustrating is that it can trivially bypass what initially seemed like a meaningful consequence. For example, failing to pick a lock on a door is meaningful because it means the PCs need to find another way to get through the door.

Of course, this also reveals that dogpiling is, in many ways, indistinguishable from one PC repeatedly rerolling the same check.

We could start by reviewing the three techniques described in Failure for the Beginning GM:

No Retries. This obviously solves the dogpiling problem by definition. Whoever made the initial check represented the group’s best effort, and no subsequent checks will change that outcome — e.g., we have established that this door cannot pick and you’ll have to find a different way of getting in.

If your group is used to using narrative resolution, this may be all that you need. But frequently it will just leave people scratching their heads, “Why can’t Samantha search the room after Tomas or at the same time as Tomas?”

A technique I’ve been experimenting with in D&D to “soften” the concept of No Retries is a gradated group check. Basically, it interprets the dogpile as a retroactive group check. The group check requires half of the people attempting the check to succeed, so the second character to make the check has a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But if the second character also fails the check, now they’ve dug a hole and it would take two more successful checks for the group to work their way back to success.

The effective application of this technique can be a little limited, but I’ve found it can be a great mental model for social scenes: Tomas has clearly screwed up the negotiations with the vizier. Can Samantha step in and smooth things over? If not, then it will be quite difficult to salvage the situation.

Failing Forward. This preempts the problem because the first character to attempt the check can’t fail, they can only suffer a consequence — Tomas finds the hidden jewel, but triggers a trap; he picks the lock, but his lockpicks break; etc. Since the initial attempt didn’t fail, there’s never a reason for the other PCs to dogpile.

Progress Clock. When all else fails, start or tap a failure clock. The flexibility of this option is great, making it easy to default to when all else fails.

To sum up: Once the dogpile starts, you’ve just got to start looking for additional consequences. Not in a punitive way, just in a, “Okay, you’re spending a lot of time on this lock… what does that mean in the context of the wider world?” way.

DO YOU DARE TO DOGPILE?

With that being said, you also don’t want to discourage the second-best skill rating in the group from flaunting their stuff occasionally. So you may also want to think about how each additional success on a check could provide a benefit:

• A gather information check where each successful check gives a different piece of information, but a failure results in the bad guys becoming aware that the PCs are asking questions.
• A check to craft a magic item where each successful check adds a unique feature to the item, but each failure results in a curse.

This may require a more complicated framing of the check, but it carries the benefits of extra successes needing to be weighed against the increased risk of failure for each additional participant and forcing the group to make a strategic decision.