In the tomb of horrors, there is a door that summons a monster to attack the players if the players stab the door. This is apparently something that not only happens in Gary Gygax's campaigns, but happens often enough that he encoded it into one of the most famous dungeons of all time.
It used to be a common strategy to poke or stab things to see what is real and what wants to hurt you, I think stranger things even touched on it a bit.
Yeah ten foot poles were standard gear for a reason.
I don't really like traps too much as a DM, it seems too easy to make a lethal trap (at least in a fantasy setting) and why would the makers bother with a non-lethal one?
One of my favorite player backstories was a well-to-do guy having a midlife crisis and going on adventures while still writing home sometimes to assure The Wife that he's just on a business trip. grillman
My current campaign has a character whose parents still live in the town where the adventure is largely based. A lot of effort is spent convincing other townsfolk not to tell his mother what he's been up to. It's fantastic.
One of my party members is the last survivor of a noble family who got murdered by an usurper, the other is a paladin who swore vengeance against a demonic cult, and the other is a girl who sold her soul to obtain enough power to get retribution against the one who killed her entire family.
And then there's me, a goofy dude who has spent a peaceful life as a city guard and is actually pretty chill and looking forward to inheriting his family's shop.
I'm playing a wizard who had a great life but was fascinated by the Underdark and wanted to go there. Everything was fine until she started adventuring lol.
Back in 3rd Edition D&D there was a spell called "Holy Word" that could kill non-good creatures within a 40 foot radius of the caster, if the caster was sufficiently high level relative to the creatures. Good creatures were completely unaffected.
When tightly packed you can fit about 2000 people into a 40-foot-radius circle (total area is 5000 square feet). So one casting can deal with the population of a good-sized town. My gaming group speculated for a while about a society where it was a routine ritual to round up all the peasantry and nuke them with Holy Word to keep the population clear of evil. Never incorporated it into any campaigns, though. It's a bit of a sticky philosophical puzzler.
Here’s the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.
Which is kind of horrifying because most of the population of any given setting is supposed to be neutral. The average commoner isn't so greatly committed to following airtight moral codes that they'll ping on a detect whatever spell, whether that's good, evil, law, or chaos. Cast that on a crowd of randoms and you've probably wiped out three quarters of them.
This is a weird one because despite being a "good" spell, it entails the mass murder of innocent neutrals. It really doesn't seem like a good action to me.
It seems like anyone who was okay with this would fall to neutral or evil simply by virtue of being okay with mass murder, and in turn fall victim to the Great Neutral Purge.
Indeed, hence the sticky philosophical puzzler. I would think that the clerics themselves would start getting affected by the spell. Fortunately (for them), the effect of the spell when cast on someone of the same level as yourself is only deafness for 1d4 rounds. The Church could probably cover that up.
There was another interesting related situation that came up in an actual campaign I was in, involving the Blasphemy spell (a variant that only kills non-evil targets). My party and I were in our "home base", a mansion belonging to an allied NPC noblewoman, planning out our next excursion. A powerful demon we'd been tangling with attempted to scry-and-fry us, teleporting in and nuking us with Blasphemy. Unfortunately there were a lot of low-level NPC staff working in the noblewoman's household and the spell wiped them out instantly... except for one guy, who happened to be of evil alignment. He survived the encounter because of that.
Even though his alignment was evil, though, he'd never done anything wrong and didn't seem like he had any reason to do anything wrong in the future. So we weren't sure if we should fire him or what. It wasn't illegal to simply be evil, you had to actually do something evil before you could be punished. We just warned him we'd be keeping an eye on him, in the end, and kept him on staff.
Okay, he hadn't done anything wrong to us. I guess we could have paused the main campaign to spend a while investigating him, but we were doing one of those save-the-world things so we didn't have the time. :)
I feel like there might be interesting ways to deal with it. Perhaps the mass killing of neutrals only ever happened the first time, which could have been many generations ago and under singular circumstances. Since then, only the odd one here or there ever dies during the purge. Perhaps it's been decades or centuries since anyone died to the purge, reinforcing belief in it's effectiveness as a basis for a pure society. It may have been so long that people wonder whether the purge is even real, or just a traditional ceremony carried out annually based on old myths. Then one year, it wipes out half the city. The party investigates?
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