The "Gas Spore" is a monster that looks like a Beholder...only when you attack it...

Yeah and I bet you like Grimtooth's Traps too, don't you?

Don't worry, one day you'll grow out of it.

Get on my level Gas Spore pleb.
And cloakers and ropers

It's sad how terribly it aged. I remember really enjoying the series

>That fucking everything
Do you want paranoid players? Because that's how you get paranoid players.

It only works once.

It only HAS to work once.

If something has aged terribly, it's because others have improved the concept, and you can watch those instead.

No, that's an incorrect statement. The Mummy aged terribly because the methods used to make the concept have been improved upon themselves, making the whole piece rather tame in comparison, as well as our shifted perceptions and raised tolerances towards certain subject matter.

The Mummy aged terribly because the shallow plot laden with terrible CGI and nonsensical action pieces that don't really fit in with the narrative of a horror movie remake are terrible by todays standards.

The original Night of the Living Dead has aged terribly, not because other zombie scenarios do it "better", but because the original shock and awe factor of the zombies has gone away with built up resistance, leaving behind slow-moving and nonthreatening masses of corpses that was even lamp shaded in the color remake.

There are times where your statement is true, such as adventure games from the 90s compared to the 2010s, or with console RPGs compared from the 80s to the 2020s, but overall, something absolutely can age terribly just because the individual aspects of it no longer hold up to scrutiny upon further viewing.

I feel like that applies to old school D&D, honestly. It's not that the WotC editions are truly better than the TSR stuff, but the medium has evolved since then and a lot of what's in there is out of touch with what modern players want and how they roleplay. This thread is a perfect example of that. A lot of these classic traps have become memetic. No one is shocked when the chest suddenly grows teeth and tries to eat them anymore because we've come to expect it, so there's no real reason to include them in your adventures. The first time around it's a dick move, since the players know exactly whats coming when they see a seeming unguarded room with a chest in it but have to proceed anyway or it's metagaming. Every time after that they're just going to check every chest they find, rendering them pointless

>The original Night of the Living Dead has aged terribly
idiot detected, opinion discarded

Sorry friend, but the movie is slow paced with little tension other than from the one asshole in the house, the themes are incredibly weak in general and no longer apply to us as we've long since exited the cold war, 90% of the cast is just filler and under utilized, ESPECIALLY Barbara, and the asshole guy himself is uninteresting and just barely escapes being one-dimensional by a hair.

Suck some other black & white film's dick for once.

This. Dawn was always way better anyway.

But... I still like the Mummy and think it is a legitimate good watch. I just watched it again last month with the wife (her first viewing).

Why?

I mean, I don't care that you like trap monsters. You are allowed to like different things than me.

But do you really just like fucking with your players? Or are you a player and do you really like being paranoid about everything?

I'm legitimately curious.

>"I know! Let's breed a gelatinous cube and a rust monster together!"

Three sessions later they had overrun the entire continent in our steampunk setting.

This is some of the spergiest shit I have seen in a while.

How the fuck do you breed an ooze with anything else other than hentai-style?

Magic.

What else are all these wizards gonna do with the expensive wizard labs included in every "wizards first tower" kit?

They come with the catalog order so you might as well make some funky chimeras before the chemicals go bad

>Not letting the chemicals 'go bad' first
It is called aging it.

because losing is fun

You... You like just dying in a meat grinder to random bullshit?

I honestly can't tell if you are trolling me or not. But if that's how you roll, that's how you roll.

Not even him, but if you die to this shit, you deserve it. Part of the fun of trap monsters is trying to figure them out, where they'll strike, and how to effectively avoid them. High-level fantasy tactics, do you even?

Or you know, he likes fighting against tough odds so when he does eventually come out on top it's an accomplishment. Some people get kicks out of an awesome story. Some get kicks out of rolling high, planning out everything, and overcoming the odds. Neither is better.

But how would your character know about these things if immediately upon running into one, you die? There is no room for error, no room to learn from the mistake.

Am I being memed?

I get that. But for trap monsters I feel like there is nothing you can do about them unless you meta game most of the time. The first time you run into a spore cloud and think it's a beholder, you die. That's it. Nothing to overcome, no way to avoid it.

Unless this is like an OSR thing where there isn't much roleplay and it needs to be a player skill to know all about these monsters and shit. That makes more sense to me.

By assuming that everything by default is a trap or enemy in some way, shape, or form, and having better investigative skills as opposed to fighting skills.

Why do you think 10 foot poles and ball bearings are part of adventuring kits?

There's not much to figure out when you die from the trap. Unless you mean metagaming. "I saw something similar when I lost my warrior, this time around Ill have my paladin test it." Theres no reason for the paladin to be suspicious, but whatever.

>not having a modular bundle of poles ranging in sizes
>not having several quick release kittens attached to the end of the pole
>not throwing a halfling urchin in first.

It's one thing if the party is up against a powerful dragon and a ton of its minions, and since they're both outpowered and outnumbered they need to plan carefully and use clever tactics to pull off a victory. It's an entirely different thing if you attack the dragon and the DM just says "ha ha, the dragon was actually just a giant bomb all along, it blows up and you die". The first involves high-level fantasy tactics and fighting against tough odds. The second is just a gimmick that makes the DM feel clever.

>Old man in Tavern who tells you about it says that no one has ever exited the place alive
>Your character isn't allowed to have residual knowledge of traps or dangerous creatures from bards, former adventurers, or even books written by in-game NPCs.

That's the difference between level 1 adventurers and level 10 adventurers.

>Paints a scenario of a bad DM instead of the good dm that will leave bread crumbs about the true nature of the beast
>Such as the fact that the beast never blinks and hovers there very slowly and makes no bodily movements or signs of intelligence
>Implying you have an argument.

To be fair, the Wolf-In-Sheeps clothing comes from a module (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks) that places it in an /incredily/ conspicuous location.

There's a similar monster in Hackmaster, I think it's called a Sinewy Mugger, which looks like a treestump but they're almost exclusively found deep in caves.

>not rolling a log down every hallway
>not sending an illusion ahead of you to bait enemies
>not starting a fire at the mouth of the dungeon to asphyxiate the enemies within

Well the last 2 are just common sense but we supplement the safety pole with the safety rock occasionally by rolling a decent sized rock down the corridor after the ball bearing test but before the kitten test.

I am pretty certain that its a reference to Dwarf Fortress.

I'm really liking the old art, especially that Roman style chainmail the fighter is wearing.

Same here. Classic D&D had the best art

>but then a retarded blue camel thing snorts all the magic out of your bag of holding
Das it mane.

Well, there go my sides.

You react to his well-thought-out movie review with... an insult.

Not one word about why it has aged well, just an insult.

Fucking Christ I'd tear your eyes out if I could.

>The original Night of the Living Dead has aged terribly, not because other zombie scenarios do it "better", but because the original shock and awe factor of the zombies has gone away with built up resistance, leaving behind slow-moving and nonthreatening masses of corpses that was even lamp shaded in the color remake.

I would knife fight you, but you obviously didn't get the point of the movie if all you're talking about are special effects.

The Mummy was pretty terrible though, yeah. Like they had all the images required for a good action movie, but they just fucked up.

>but you obviously didn't get the point of the movie if all you're talking about are special effects.
But he doesn't. He talks about special effects failure in Mummy, while the problem with NotLD is just that the zombies have been overused and now even the original zombieflick is boring.

If the GM decides to suddenly decides to describe a rabbit sitting on a stump you know it's a monster. There's no other reason he would describe it to you.

Or he knows you'll waste time poking the stump with your 10ft poles while the orcs are surrounding the clearing.

>adventure games from the 90s compared to the 2010s
Adventure games made these days are just walking simulators where you're asked to press a button every once in a while to progress the story. King's Quest VI is still one of the best games of the genre.

>console RPGs compared from the 80s to the 2020s
Again, now we're talking about dungeon crawlers like Wizardry on the SNES to, what, BioWare's dating simulators or the absolutely terrible experience that was The Witcher 3?

Oh an if you expect orcs, the stump is also actually a monster.

AND is actually an independently-active lure of a bigger monster the size of the whole forest.

Oh and your paladin catches a super-magical disease that ignores his immunity. But when you find the cure, the cure is a benelovent disease as well so it doesn't work on him because of his immunity.

>Assumptions
>Assumptions
>Assumptions
You know what they say about assuming things

you're a faggot

Millennial spoonfed by governments and GMs alike detected.

Cry more faggot.
Losers that enjoy bad-ends are still losers and barely above that guy in retardation.

i'm having trouble believing that you think any DM using these monsters on anything even approaching a regular basis is intelligent enough to drop clues
unfortunately these things are used - and to be honest, designed - to just 'gotcha' players both paranoid and not

oh well, at least we got mimics from them - there's still some more salvageable ideas in there.

>the log hits a trap designed specifically to catapult logs back down the hallway from whence they came
>the enemies were an illusion too, roll illusory initiative
>the enemies have set up complex a/c and ventilation systems

>it seemed like a good idea at the time

Aww Shit.
I roll to roll illusory dice.

>turns out your GM is illusory
>everything you knew about your life is a lie

Awww shit....
I red pill myself?

No, user. Your sudden enlightenment was actually a mimic. Roll initiative.

off by one

Pretty much wizards who hate adventurers breaking into their towers/dungeons.

Think of it like this, you could get some horrible monster from the back of beyond, but that A: gets killed by skilled adventurers and B: needs to be fed and maintained if not enough adventurers turn up. So instead you animate a box into becominga strange self-replicating living golem that can cast disguise self at will, or whatever, that can catch and eat high-level adventurers because they've never seen it before and it's kind of arbitrary in your dungeon if a chest is a real chest or the above chest golem.

Then after a while you die, either due to age, or a magic miscast or some canny adventurer eventually murders you in some climatic duel, and your chest golems escape out into the world to plague adventurers till the end of time.

It's just a shame you didn't autograph the things.

>immune to the antidote for the totally-not-a-disease

Oh, hello John Wick. Say hi to Satan for me.

Gah piss! Nirvana has shown that nothing is real and thus i no longer exist in this mortal coil. I may need some help rolling the dice what with my lack or complete utter existence of hands.

now this is roguelikes

I like how the gas spore works exactly the opposite way than actual organisms that use similar mimicry. If one applied actual biological knowledge, one would assume the gas spore mimics a beholder (a very powerful monster) as a form of protective mimicry, ie. the appearance is supposed to scare off potential predators. But the reproductive strategy of the gas spore is actually reliant on some dipshit mistaking it for an actual beholder and hitting it with a sword, causing it to explode and infect nearby creatures with its spores. It's a creature that's evolved to take advantage of murderhobos (I know, later editions made it an artificially created creature specifically designed to function as a trap).

There's a family of parasites who go through as much as 7 hosts in its lifetime. Each one, or as an egg, is designed to look appetizing to at least one species or another so its eaten and killed but its eggs live on. One goes so far as to infect caterpillars eye stalks, engorged them, take over its brain, take the caterpillar up high and in the open, and then undulated to mimicr a type of slug that bird likes to eat. This kills the parasite but its eggs live on. But those eggs don't hatch. The bird then shits them out and a beetle eats that shit and then they hatch.
Even as a nymph its eggs are fertilized and ready to go so whether that beetle burst open and they squirm out or it gets its ass eaten by another bird is entirely irrelevant. It doesn't even have to live to ensure species survival as anything but completely burning it won't stop it's march. It even self regulates by only hatching and growing in hosts that don't have a shortage of species members and staying solely in egg form or non-harmful nymph form in species that will cause a bottle neck if harmed.
It does everything parasites do and more including mimicry and zombism.
Life be cray, yo.

Counterpoint: the Mummy always sucked and you just liked it because you were 7 when it came out.

>his

>The Mummy aged terribly because the shallow plot laden with terrible CGI and nonsensical action pieces that don't really fit in with the narrative of a horror movie remake are terrible by todays standards.
But it wasn't a horror movie. Also, I still like all that, even if the CGI is dumb.

"looks like I've got all the camels!"
"Looks like you're on the wrong side of the RI-VER!"

She's not talking about special effects. She's talking about the concept of "when there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!"
It doesn't have the shock that it would have. We as a culture have become inured to it.

Gotcha monsters and traps like these are good for curtailing the triggerhappiness of murderhobos and greediness of JewyMcBackstabbers, but otherwise they don't make the game fun. Inducing general paranoia in players is only going to turn dungeon delving into tedious, by-the-book slogs.

That's actually a hilarious thought. Murderhobos are such a ubiquitous part of the D&D ecosystem that dungeon animals have evolved symbiosis with them.

Well, for the kind of games these are made for, they WANT you to go through checking everything and being paranoid (and then it turns out checking things and being paranoid is also punished).

See for instance some of the things in Grimtooth's Traps, where you punish players for being hasty and punish them for being cautious.

Counter-Counter Point. You're a faggot user and The Mummy rules.

Old school D&D was primarily about resource management. A dungeon has around 30% or so of its rooms empty, but the players can't know beforehand whether this particular room has hidden treasure or trap that could be revealed with some scrounging. The choice they have to make is whether to look around for a while, using up torches and risking a wandering monster appearing - and that's where those shitty traps a la Grimtooth come in, for punishing the party proceeding at the 'wrong' pace (according to the GM).

How come Brendan Frasier isn't in movies anymore?

I am not disputing his review. Just the way he he immediately went off on a huge rant was really spergy.

I bet you would try, sperg.

You don't like extreme challenge and impossible odds constantly? FUCKING LIBTARD REEEEEEEEEE

He kind of made himself a pariah amongst the hollywood exec's, he hasn't been in a good film for ages and then when he was going to get his career restarted by being part of the journey to the center of the earth franchise, he overplayed his hand holding out for the director from the first movie to come back for the second. The execs figured it was easier to dump Frazer and keep their planned director than get the old one back, especially as they could get the rock to replace him, so he's been left out in the cold ever since.

I actually do that from time to time. just describing the enviroment and see how my players get more and more nervous by the minute.
Extrafun if all your characters are townpeople with no wildlife knowledge at all. Because then you can describe it acordingly

"You see an odd wooden artifact - it has roots like a tree, but its upper part is mysteriously amiss. A tiny ball of white fluff with ears jumps on top of it, scanning its surroundings with alien, jet black eyes..."

Pretty sure mimics can turn into anything that is approximately the same size. They aren't always chests, and that's what makes them truly frightening. You never know if the chest is a mimic... but then again, maybe it's the pedestal the chest is sitting on.

Is grammatically correct when referring to someone of unknown gender in mixed (or unknown) company?

Pretty much this. I don't really care for Grimtooth's traps or stuff like them, since OSR games tend to punish you for being cautious already (time/resource management, and the aforementioned wandering monsters).

intriguing. but i rather describe sounds they never heard, the feeling of being not alone and rustling in the bushes. also dem eyes in the dark, reflected by the fireplace.
and those dense forrests

...

>There's no other reason he would describe it to you.

Lose 250 xp metagaming scum.

>Millennial spoonfed by governments
Is that how it's supposed to be? I thought we were supposed to be bled out by higher taxes and student loans while slowly dying from malnutrition and the abominable state of health care.

According to Lords of Madness, they're made by beholder mages who want adventurers to stop stabbing them.

Rot grubs are just vermin. Disenchanters are presumably the fault of asshole wizards.
Wasn't it inside a starship or something?
I like using this shit to establish that an evil wizard is an immature dick. They also do things like fill chests with crawling claws that jump out like snakes out of a peanut brittle can.
It's not symbiotic, cuz it's bad for the murderhobo. More parasitic if anything.

Wouldn't they just start shooting arrows at them, instead?

Sure, but if you fight a beholder at range you can't hide inside its antimagic field to avoid its various rays. Instead, you just have to sit there and take disintegrates to the face.

Parasites are a kind of symbiote.
Biologically speaking, symbiosis is divided into three main groups: commensalism, mutualism, and parasitism. Commentsalism is where one organism benefits and the other is unaffected. Mutualism is where both organism benefit, and seems to be what you've conflated symbiosis as a whole with. Parasitism is where one organism benefits and another is harmed. All of these are a form of symbiosis, defined as the interaction of two organisms in close proximity to each other during their life cycles.

>Wasn't it inside a starship or something?
The module instructs the referee to put on a show when they encounter it.
The players also get an illsutration taht makes the stump look /really/ wonky.
>17. WOLF-IN-SHEEP’SCLOTHING: When this encountertakes place roll as if on the wandering monster table, look unhappy, and then show the group ILLUSTRATION #42, “The Cute Little Bunnyoid on the Stump”.
And rolling for a wandering monster before showing an illustration of a stationary object is pretty suspicious, too.

Also, there's an NPC in that part of the dungeon who willingly provides a description of everything on the level.
It can only go into great detail for a few things nearby, but it can still at least tell you about everything

Oh, ok. Yeah, I had symbiosis and mutualism confused.