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.
Look, you spring a door mimic on them just once...
It was probably even worse in 1st Edition, when characters could buy experience with gold and when they said "adventurer" it was understood to also mean "mercenary"
I've played a bunch of 1e, and this is accurate.
I am with this 99 % of the time. I have met the 1% DM sadly. He simply never shuts up to let his polite players input ideas
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I think that blue slice should be way larger.
Lovecraft monsters are great.
I cant help but feel like they've lost their appeal over the years though. When you can point at a monster and say "oh thats a Shoggoth! it has x stats and y HP and has z special ability" on sight, the fear of unknown that's so essential to lovecraft is gone and its just a funky slime.
Many games can turn into Surprise, It's Call Of Cthulu.
Which seems appropriate. Few of Lovecraft's protagonists set out to discover untold horrors. They're investigating a murder, or searching for a missing person, or seeking magical power. They don't know what genre of story they're in.
Yeah best Lovecraft inspired creatures still attempt to tap into that fear of the unknown thing instead of just "giant octopus uwooo".
