When you bind, harm or deceive a soul or a spirit, it’s personal. Those kinds of conflicts/obstacles are often dramatic and exciting. They’re against someone.
As a GM or player, what are some techniques you use to make actions taken against inert objects, e.g. a lock or a hidden panel, feel cool? Exciting?
/sub This is a great question since the only tool in the GM arsenal is evocative description of events, dangers, and resistance to PC actions.
One thing that occurs to me is to have fine quality locks accompanied by some kind of psychic link. These were made by one of a handful of master locksmiths in Duskwall. When you’re picking these locks the “camera” flashes to the locksmith in their workshop working on the lock being picked. They are perhaps named, described, and seen to look with guarded envy towards the intruder. A virtual battle of wills ensues. An extra die might be offered if the locksmith is allowed to ferret out the scoundrel’s identity, by sight at least. This would bring a person with intent into the conflict.
In some games, “The Hand” of The Unseen might be one of these master locksmiths.
This basically turns some “locks” into a kind of “ward” that is best handled with the Secure action.
Matthew Gagan That’s great. Even if the lock isn’t actually psychically linked like that, pitting it as a personal conflict between lock picker and lock maker is an awesome twist.
As your Lurk overcomes tumblers and countermeasures, but doesn’t quite finish it, the GM can ‘present a new obstacle’ by flashing back to the maker adding some experimental (or accidental) bonus feature, perhaps with the leader of the place your robbing paying extra for “top of the line” or “something nobody else has.”
Another way to present challenges the PC doesn’t know about yet (traps, surprises, etc) can still make the players as audience feel more satisfied about would be flashing back to that lockmaker and their patron talking about what horrible things will happen to the person foolish enough to try to break in. The PC may not even know what they avoided, but the players do, the world seems to make sense, goods seem as secured as they really ought to be in a city of thieves, and that’s what counts.
I tend to gloss over these things heavily, making a “Locks” clock for a whole operation, for example, rather than a progress clock for a particular lock. Partial effect means disabling a number of them, but not enough to penetrate the target location.
The interesting things, to me, are the dangers of discovery while working on the lock, of leaving evidence behind, or perhaps tripping an alarm. The lock itself need not be particularly interesting, unless it’s a very special case.
That said, I like the weird psychic lock idea.
The locksmiths worth using are, of course, demons.
“The Locksmiths”…awesome faction concept!
When you’re picking the lock, the danger also probably isn’t the lock. It’s the patrol that’s 20 paces from rounding the corner and seeing you. I hope you’re quick with your rake and torsion!