My Detailed Driven Brain
According to the Myers-Briggs model, I have an INTJ personality type. This supposedly means I'm a tactical planner on par with Michelle Obama, Vadilmar Putin, and Friedrick Nietzsche.
I wish.
My brain is an intertwined mess of overly-formal rhetorical, gut instinct, and a sense of curiosity that would put my cat to shame.
The one INTJ trait that is so stereotypical me is my habit of getting caught up in finicky details. There's no such thing as overprepared or over-researched. (Little things are Murphy's favorite way to wreck my day.)
This does interesting things to my creative projects. On the one hand, I'll never run out of 'Overthinking' topics for my blog. On the other, I can't switch off that level of mental intensity. It's my base state.
I run D&D for Kid Brother and his friends. My original quests and content are every bit as overthought and off the wall as my blog topics. (Sewer monsters are actually protected by city ordinance. Kill too many, and the drains don't work.)
The obvious downside is that I've only got so much brainpower to go around. Currently, I need it for rewriting “Don't Fireball the Neighbors” and dealing with the non-writer bits of my life. Something had to give.
Give The Brain a Break
Loathed to cancel game night due to lack of prep time, I bought a D&D module off RPGDriveThru. The monsters, loot, and math were already handled. I just have to weave the plot hooks into my main campaign.
Unfortunately, in addition to being short on brainpower, I'm short on funds. I settled for a 99 cent module with decent reviews. On the surface, Burning Plague was a decent set up. The player would fight kobolds in a mine, deal with three traps, fight the Kobold mid-boss, and fight the boss and his zombies. It had a classic Big Bad Evil Guy, an orc shaman, cursing the water supply as revenge for his people being driven from their ancestral homes.
I speed-read the module, then divided the material into playable chunks. I planned to do an in-depth read before each session. This way, my brain would have less to fuss and obsess over.
The first session went great, my players' blundered right into the kobold first-trap – a noisemaker/alarm system. That meant the Kobolds were warned, and next session would bring them to either the Kobold boss or another trap in the storeroom.
The doorway was rigged with a bag of flour with a ripcord. The warned kobolds would fall back until they entered, spill the flour and then pile into the half-blinded players. It was rated level-one, designed to be a just nuisance, not dangerous.
My Brain Thinks Otherwise
Sadly for my players, I'm an overthinker with a well-integrated memory web. I don't do random trivia. I group facts by their relationship to other facts. One detail - flour - prompts several adjacent topics - eating, kitchen activities, farming, chemistry.
During prep for that next session, the details 'clicked.' This nuisance trap could actually be lethal.
Flour is flammable. Flour dust is very flammable. My party used multiple light sources, one of them an open flame torch. A cloud of flour falling onto an exposed flame? Fwoomph
I don't think the game designers had meant for that level of realism. They actually put a switch plate on a pit-trap in a mine tunnel. However, once I'd thought it, I couldn't un-think it. But... could I really risk a total-party-kill? My players still had their 'training-wheels.' (House-rule is if you're under level three, no death.)
No permanent death, my rules shark grinned. You made that loophole for a reason. Besides, everyone loves a 'Big Boom' a la Mythbusters. Remember the non-dairy creamer?
That sold it for me. Flour was flammable. Kobolds were stupid. The life of an adventurer was unfair, dangerous, and often brutally short.
What Happen In-Game
Next session, the heroes found their way to the storage room. However, my players weren't so gun-ho to step into a dark room. Maybe the noisemaker trap has made them cautious. Maybe they sensed their beloved GM had embraced the dark side. Maybe they were just worried about more kobolds hiding in the shadows.
So they crowded around the door, opened it... and threw the torch into the room!
I'm awe-struck by this point. I double-check the room's description... “ Heavy burlap sacks are piled atop one another in the corners of the chamber. A few have been torn open, leaving spills of oats and flour along the floor.” (Emphasized added.)
Long-story short, the floor caught fire. The kobolds panicked. The players shot the kobold with the ripcord... Fwoomph!
I used the smallest 'fireball' dice possible, and it rolled maximum damage. I made a DM call. Everything in that room was dead; The loot not in heavy barrels was gone; the party all crowded around the door could make reflex saves for half-damage.
Everyone got scorched, and the druid and her badger missed the cutoff. The druid went down to 3 health, and the badger was a crispy critter.
The players at the table were howling in laughter, right until they opened the barrels. Jerky, weak ale, melted cheese, fine wine, and highly flammable lantern oil.
“I put the lid back and start stamping out cinders!” One player yelled.
My players are now paranoid about an open flame. The crafter developed went as far as to develop a recipe for sunrods (basically a magic-glowstick) and is stocking up.
No Apologies
Most people don't overthink things to the extremes I do. However, details do matter. Trivia isn't trivial. I have personally screwed with several DMs with basic grade-school science.
What's baffling to me that I keep catching people off guard. Things like Mythbusters, McGuvyer, and BillNye aren't hidden. There are YouTube channels where people do dumb things with household objects. Yet this stuff this treated like lore from a forgotten outer plane.
I'm an INTJ dungeons master. I'm the demon in the finicky details.
