The party finds a secret door. Not knowing what’s on the other side, they send the fighter in first. The fighter pushes open the secret door. As it swings forward it pushes aside a corpse on the other side that apparently died trying to pry open the secret door and escape from the next room.
The fighter steps over the corpse, walks into the room, looks around, sees there are no enemies immediately attacking him, and says to the rest of the party “come on in guys, looks like it’s safe in here!”
And then the door swings shut again closing the fighter off from the rest of the party and in the darkness two red eyes open. And then two more, and six more, and twenty more.
OP, you did that didn’t you?
Nah, they were perfectly capable of nearly getting themselves killed without any bullshit from me. The first thing they did in that room was open the door which they knew had a monster on the other side, and for which the whole point of that secret door is to circumvent having to fight that monster.
Like they found the secret shortcut to avoid this nasty fight, and then were like “nah, we’re going to fight it anyway” and nearly got wiped after literally the first turn of that fight. And that wasn’t even the danger in the room that the corpse was meant to foreshadow.
Words to live by as a GM. :P
Absolutely. As the saying goes: you have to give the players just enough rope to hang themselves.
As you become more cynical you start selling them the rope.
To be honest, that’s exactly what I do in any videogame I play where there can be anything worth looting or getting. I first find all secret rooms and passages, and then I find all the enemies and dispose of them for loot, experience, intel or anything else they may have.
My Savage Pathfinder players did this to me in our last session. “Okay, there aren’t that many guys once you’ve climbed up here, so I’m gonna do this as a Quick Encounter…” Player uses “Surprise” card, immediately throwing them into a more difficult fight. Me: (sigh) “Ohhhhh-kaayyyyyy…”