Quote from: Omega;908434Why assume they arent ventilated? Do you assume all real world mines arent ventilated? (Ok. Some arent ventilated well.) People work and live down in those fantasy dungeons so obviously they are ventilated and everything else.

I assume they're not ventilated because they don't have ventilation shafts or ventilation equipment.

If they DID, then parties would notice them, and immediately start checking them out.  "Fuck going down in there and fighting all the way down.  Let's plug the shafts from the top, wait a week until all the monsters suffocate, collect XP for killing each and every last one of them, then unplug the shafts, go down in there, and scoop all the loot unmolested.  Who's with me?"

Tell me you can't see that happening.

Quote from: David Johansen;908460So, I'm going outside and I'm going to find the vents and pour bleach and ammonia (baking soda works too) into a glass jug.  Seal it.  Shake it.  And throw it down the vent, if it doesn't break I'll throw some rocks down after it.

My Call of Cthulhu GM grew to hate me

... with this post as Exhibit A.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;908474Side note: Vents? See this lichen growing pretty much everywhere? It generates air. Done.

Oh, then fuck battling all those monsters for their spare change.

I'm going to scoop me samples of that lichen instead, if it produces such a vast quantity of air.  I'm gonna hire me some druids to grow as much of it as I can, and I'm going to set up a limited liability company to market the stuff.  Sealed helmets for adventuring in low- or toxic-atmosphere environments.  Viable low-tech submarines.  And, yeah, deep bore mines without the need for ventilation shafts and expensive pumping equipment.  Get stuffed, Swede Momsen, I'm gonna beat your record by half a thousand years.  I'll die fat, happy and rich.

Quote from: Ravenswing;908477Oh, then fuck battling all those monsters for their spare change.

I'm going to scoop me samples of that lichen instead, if it produces such a vast quantity of air.  I'm gonna hire me some druids to grow as much of it as I can, and I'm going to set up a limited liability company to market the stuff.  Sealed helmets for adventuring in low- or toxic-atmosphere environments.  Viable low-tech submarines.  And, yeah, deep bore mines without the need for ventilation shafts and expensive pumping equipment.  Get stuffed, Swede Momsen, I'm gonna beat your record by half a thousand years.  I'll die fat, happy and rich.

I'm gonna call Poe's Law and treat it seriously. :cool:

- Yes, it produces vast quantities of breathable air, because it's everywhere. You're looking at layers upon layers of air-producing living organism. It lives inside of walls, it's underneath of floor, it's above the ceiling. It spills through numerous cracks, it's covering pretty much every surface. And it's here since the dawn of time. Which bring us to next problem...

- ...Feel free to try and grow it, but it might turn out that it needs certain conditions, like underground, darkness, temperature, micro-climate, etc. As your GM I'm gonna determine what are said conditions and whether your PC is gonna ultimately succeed or not.

- Helmet might be not enough to produce the correct amount of air, but you might want to try and use it to produce something along the lines of "diving suit" equipped with lichen filled backpack containers - enough to breathe for limited amount of time in no-atmosphere/poisonous conditions. However, be warned that as your GM I might demand that you spend helluva time researching the stuff, learning how to achieve perfect conditions so that it produces expected results and organize R&D laboratory tasked with inventing "Lichen-suit" light enough and not that cumbersome.

- Same goes for submarines. Expect even bigger challenge and longer periods of time spent on R&D.

- Mines? Why not? If you want to try it, I see no problem in that, however don't mistake "one problem out of mind" with "no problems at all". As your GM it's my task to keep you (and myself, mwahahahahaa) entertained, after all.

In the end... If that's what you're willing to do, rather than descend into the deeper dungeons and uncover what's waiting for you there, then have it your way.

Quote from: Ravenswing;908476I assume they're not ventilated because they don't have ventilation shafts or ventilation equipment.

If they DID, then parties would notice them, and immediately start checking them out.  "Fuck going down in there and fighting all the way down.  Let's plug the shafts from the top, wait a week until all the monsters suffocate, collect XP for killing each and every last one of them, then unplug the shafts, go down in there, and scoop all the loot unmolested.  Who's with me?"

Tell me you can't see that happening.

1: How do you know they dont? Or that they even need them?

2: How are the PCs going to notice them? They might look like animal burrows. There might be alot of them. There might be dummy vents to fuck with exactly those sorts of scenarios. The vents might be watched/guarded/trapped/all-of-the-above.

And best of all. They might not need vents. Magic, underground air producing/cleaning flora, portals to the plane of air, catalytic converters, etc all not requiring above ground vents. And so on.

Not to mention plugging up vents might well alert the residents some jokers topside.

3: Ive had it happen at least twice. First time the Players have their characters looking for air vents with intent to try exactly the scenario you mentioned to deal with some orcs. I allowed it. After a time the PCs go in to reap the rewards. And all promptly suffocate because they forgot to open up the vents before going in. They did get a level up though before croaking.

Second time a different group tried that. All the inhabitants rose as rather irked undead. PCs didnt have a cleric. Survivours got double exp for re-killing the inhabitants.

X: Keep on the borderlands mentions chimneys in at least two areas. AD&D has as one type of dungeon feature pockets of bad air. Dungeoneers Survival Guide elabourates on that.

Ummm...   What the hell happened to this thread? :confused:

Quote from: Exploderwizard;908491Ummm...   What the hell happened to this thread? :confused:

It got better. :cool:

Quote from: Exploderwizard;908491Ummm...   What the hell happened to this thread? :confused:

The 200 goblins stacked atop each other's shoulders like The Flying Zamboni Brothers trying to fit into a 20'x20'x10' need air logistics for their flintlocks and their extra virgin greek fire olive oil.

I suggest backing away slowly. I myself am apartment hunting here before the topic post prices get too high from the speculation. Wanna sub-let? Granite countertops!

The point I was originally making was that the whole "D&D" tropefest is held together by the thinnest of we're-all-just-going-to-agree-to-ignore-this threads[1], and tugging on any of them too hard causes the whole thing to fall apart.  Once you start arguing realism or physics to explain why someone's tactics are stupid, you've already lost the argument.



[1] Dare I say "gentlemen's agreements"

Got to say I completely disagree. As a GM I love niche protection. People like to be special and distinctive even if they don't think they are. Niche protection enables this well. There are ways to enable this without niche protection, but this makes it one less thing I need to worry about as a GM.

Quote from: Bren;908398Where getting to food is concerned, tree rats are smart. Very smart.

When it comes to getting food, every animal is smart, or it's dead.

The point of the anecdote is that this rodent was able to identify repeated behaviors by backpackers and formulate multiple strategies to exploit them. Habituation makes for complex relationships between animals and humans. Every ranger who works in the Sierra has stories of black bears stealing food caches which rival that annoying cartoon animal and picnic baskets. The birds who congregate at the top of Mt Whitney are tame enough to eat out of your hand, but some will also dive-bomb hikers when they open trail mix but not other kinds of trail food.

Quote from: tenbones;908418This has all the makings of a good encounter.

It beats the shit out of half the stuff churned out by fat-ass game designers who spent their formative years in their moms' basements.

Quote from: daniel_ream;908500Once you start arguing realism or physics to explain why someone's tactics are stupid, you've already lost the argument.

That would depend on whom you are arguing or more to the point, on how convinced that person is of the universal applicability and supremacy of argumentum ad fireballum in every RPG discussion.

Quote from: Omega;908434Why assume they arent ventilated? Do you assume all real world mines arent ventilated? (Ok. Some arent ventilated well.) People work and live down in those fantasy dungeons so obviously they are ventilated and everything else.

The thing that gets me about the ventilation tangent is that the discussion seems to be focused on modern underground construction (one person even mentioned ventilation equipment.) Only problem is: there's lots of pre-Industrial Revolution underground construction, some of it quite extensive. There's tons of underground cities in Cappadocia in Turkey. There's catacombs under several European cities. People were able to handle ventilation, sometimes with multiple shafts, but probably more often by building partially into natural living caverns that already have ventilation.

Trying to drop a gas bomb down a ventilation shaft would probably be futile, since the gas is only going to fill a small area at the bottom of the shaft. Also... well, it's a ventilation shaft. Without machinery, ventilation generally works by temperature differences around two shafts causing air to drop down one, flow through, and rise out the other. Any gas from a bomb is going to be dissipated. If it doesn't... well, now how are you going to get the treasure?

And then there's the fact that there's probably lots of ventilation shafts, not just one. Or, again, a cavern system. This is why blocking off all the ventilation is probably not going to work. Sure, it could be done, if you've located all the shafts or cave entrances (and can reach them.) But you're basically talking about a large construction process. Assuming no one from down below comes up topside to find out why there are a hundred laborers hauling stone to block off every opening, you might be able to suffocate every living thing... and then you have to pay the laborers more money to haul everything away again to get the ventilation going again, so you can go down and get the treasure, which probably won't pay for all the laborers you had to hire for your massive public works project.

All of this is pretty much why you don't see much of those tactics in history. But we're talking fantasy, here. We haven't even touched on the fact that some of your opposition doesn't need to breath. The undead will be real amused at your attempts to suffocate them. Hell, you have to figure that at least a few of those goblins you suffocated will rise as undead, too.

And that's not even getting into my theory that those horrific fantastic beasts in the lower dungeon levels must be theoretically immortal, able to live without food or water or air for ages. Suffocating a chimera isn't going to kill it. It's just going to piss it off. Time to go get your treasure!

Semi-related anecdote about real-world physics, etc., harming our imaginative play: had a friend of mine relate an incident with a group he is in the process of quitting. His 20-STR character wanted to cart  a barrel of wine or ale or some such beverage to another character's abode for a birthday party or some such celebration. DM nixed it outright, which led to a long discussion of whether the character could actually haul it. Worse yet, when the player proposed alternatives to get the barrel moved (borrow a horse, rent a cart, what have you), the DM wouldn't just hand-wave the thing and move on (as hauling the barrel wasn't really a significant thing, one would think). My bud said they spent half the session arguing about what could be hauled and what couldn't. But this sounds part and parcel with this DM, who, evidently, sucks huge balls in almost every way.  By the way, the player really could give a shit whether his PC could actually do it. He just wanted the barrel delivered. The other players and the GM started getting into it, so he just sat there on his phone till they finally stfu.

(P.S. I'm typically a DM-defender, because it's not an easy job, and we all do stupid stuff--but this type of stuff is massive forest for innumerable trees--unless [I guess] he was worried the player would start throwing barrels of wine at his monsters? (in which case, allow the seller to help with delivery or something--sheesh))

You'd be surprised how many monsters can be defeated with a cart load of liquor.  

I always buy a cart full of rutabegas because the liquor won't reach the monsters if the rest of the party knows about it.

Ammonia and Bleach aren't available in the average fantasy cleaning supply cabinet.  It's the kind of chemistry that's hard to argue with.  That's one of my modern game tricks.  That and the ubiquitous propane cylinder bomb.  Never mind the gas lines.

Attempts to smoke out the monsters tend to be futile due to back doors and said ventilation shafts, but the real goal is to draw them out into an ambush anyhow.  Or to get them to give chase so the stealth squad can slip in and grab the treasure from a reduced garrison.

Never underestimate the usefulness of black powder explosives that do little more than make a bang. Excellent for distractions.