[Kromm]

In my last fantasy campaign, one of the players' favorite "dungeons" involved no monsters or fighting. It was the leftover training facility of a long-forgotten cabal of assassins, designed to challenge the alertness, athleticism, and technical skills of would-be members, confirming their ability to spot and evade security measures, both mundane and magical. The critical path involved dealing with locked portals, secret and concealed doors, obvious obstacles (walls to climb, pits to cross, swinging blades to dodge, etc.), unobvious traps, and "tricks" that could be solved using unusual skills rather than by asking the players to think like 400-point heroes. There were also dead-ends and secondary routes, equally full of challenges.

The players liked this because it tested the characters and because it was almost completely programmatic. That group actually enjoyed riddles that tested the players, and story-heavy scenarios that relied on a lot of GM judgment, so that's what I provided most of the time. This adventure was a departure from that, which is what made it so memorable.

Honorable mention goes to an encounter I mentioned in another thread: the creepy traveling carnival. It was obviously supernatural, and the carnies were not what they appeared to be (nobody discovered what they actually were). Getting the carnival to move on and stop endangering the nearby village was the primary quest, and while the PCs could have gone on a rampage, it was clear to them that they'd have lost the fight, so they resorted to talk and game-playing to get the carnies to move along. The games were high-stakes, and while some were essentially gladiatorial and thus violent, others amounted to gambling . . . with the heroes' long-term physical, mental, and spiritual health at stake. The prizes were wonderful, of course.