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Schmuck Bait / Tabletop Games

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  • Name something "Forbidden X" or mark something off-limits in any RP session, and schmucks will flock to it like Santa Claus was inside handing out presents.
  • Words of wisdom: If your DM stops something you're about to try with "Are you sure you wanna do that?" or something of the sort, it's best to drop it. Death and/or catastrophic derailment of plot and setting may occur. If they ask more than once? Stop, or kiss your campaign goodbye.
    • On a related note, a pretty standard ploy for illusion-casting villains is to deploy several illusory threats in a row against the heroes, right up until the players are having them attempt to disbelieve everything they encounter. Depending on the game system, an "attempt to disbelieve" might just forfeit your saving throw if a real danger shows up, so once the players are declaring that their characters don't trust what they see, that's when the villain sics a for-real monster or attack-spell on them.
  • BattleTech: Terra is actually this. It's the shining jewel, the cradle of humanity, the planet that everybody wants. Everyone. Which means that whomever has it also has the Inner Sphere's biggest target on their back. In the Star League Era, the Terran Hegemony controlled it, and was destroyed during the Amaris Coup and subsequent ten year war. During the Succession Wars, Comstar controlled it for roughly 300 years. The planet was stolen out from under them by the Word of Blake, their fanatical offshoot. The Word of Blake controlled it for a mere decade before they triggered a war with everyone else and were destroyed. Then the Republic of the Sphere was formed and managed to keep control of it for roughly 70 years. But when the HPG network went down on Grey Monday it was the beginning of the end and over the next 20 years the RoS lost world after world before Clan Wolf and Clan Jade Falcon finally invaded Terra itself. The two Clans first crushed the last of the Republic's defenses before battling it out with each other in a massive winner-take-all final battle to determine who was the true winner. When the dust settled, Clan Wolf stood victorious, but had suffered 80% casualties of its forces and had stripped the defenses of every world that the Wolves held claim to. They may have won the battle for Terra, but whether or not they can win against whomever next comes to claim the planet is an open question.
  • Any Call of Cthulhu game is inevitably Schmuck Bait for anyone with passing knowledge of Lovecraft's work. Why read the fabled book of dark magic? Why go into that creepy cave? Because otherwise the game would be over. Specifically Horror on the Orient Express takes this to ridiculous levels. A suspiciously well-informed quest-giver tells you that you must save the world by collecting the six parts of an ancient doomsday artifact, all located conveniently on the path of the Orient Express. Inevitably, the savvy players ask themselves why they're re-constructing a statue that can destroy the world when the individual parts are dangerous but not cataclysmic. When you finally reach the end of the line after fighting cults, vampires, and fascists and suffering character deaths, permanent insanity, and increasing stat penalties as you collect the parts, it turns out that the quest-giver was the Big Bad all along, and just wanted some Unwitting Pawns to collect the parts for him. Then again, the alternative to taking the Schmuck Bait is to just not take the job, in which case you sit around and stare at each other until the Keeper can come up with a new adventure.
  • Chess: This is why the Scholar's Mate works so well against novices. They'll go for the seemingly exposed queen with their knight without thinking... and completely overlook the ensuing checkmate.
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • Nearly every encounter in Gary Gygax's adventure Tomb of Horrors fits the trope. In fact, the entire tomb is schmuck bait, using the lure of treasure to provide an evil demilich with the souls of the most powerful adventurers. There's never a shortage of players who want to put their characters through the most infamous dungeon in history, but not only are their odds of beating it incredibly slim, the Tomb won't yield much experience or treasure to characters fortunate enough to survive. Over the years, the adventure has gotten this reputation for infamy because it is often falsely marketed as the "most challenging" adventure when it's really just the most unfair and punishing. Gary Gygax was annoyed at his players getting big egos and designed the adventure as a way to put them in their place. The end part of the adventure even tells the DMs to lie to their players about the adventure being over to see if the PCs find the final room or not.
    • Keep on the Shadowfell has a door marked "Do Not Enter. SERIOUSLY." That's where the slime is. The slime that can kill a party by itself.
    • The tragic tale of the Head of Vecna.
    • Deck of Many Things? Sure, there are some extremely good magic cards in there, but how many gamers can resist drawing again? They will almost always end up regretting it.
      • To elaborate, the deck contains a varying amount of cards that can do something as good as allowing you to retcon one event or gain 50 000 in gems, or something as bad as pissing off a demon or removing all property.
    • The Splat book Tyrants of the Nine Hells mentions a location in Dis, the second layer of Hell, called the Garden of Delights, that appears to be a paradise to mortals who enter; it's a beautiful garden where lovely nymphs welcome visitors and lavish affection, along with food and drink of the finest quality on visitors — all for free, no less. The fact that this place is in Hell should tip people off that it's a trap. Dispater, the ruler of the layer, employs efreet sorcerers to maintain the place, and the "nymphs" are erinyes. The purpose of the Garden is to enspell its visitors with its intoxicating nature to prevent them from wanting to leave, and eventually tempt them to evil. (If the erinyes can't do that because a mortal is incorruptible, they just let the visitor starve; the food is an illusion, and visitors will eventually die of thirst or starvation trying to live on it.)
      • There's another one, down in the fifth layer, Stygia. The Pillar of Geryon is a column on which is a bas-relief of the layer's former ruler. It's missing its head and one hand. Stick your hand in the hand-hole, and it gets cut off — but then replaced by a slightly rubbery replacement, which counts as a magic weapon and can slip through weaknesses in enemy armor (and also tempts you towards lawful evil). Put your head in the head-hole, and...
        Knowledge DC 25: No one who has given her head to Geryon has ever gotten it back.
    • Pre-3rd Edition, D&D had an entire class of magic item meant to serve as Schmuck Bait: Artifacts. (As of 3rd Edition, many are just really powerful magic items, though some retain their legacy of Gygaxian cruelty.) The whole idea was largely inspired by things like The One Ring — complete with incredibly specific means of destruction — so that should probably tell you what a campaign was meant to be like with one around. The aforementioned Deck of Many Things is one of the most obvious and well-known ones, and people keep falling for it to this day, along with famous ones like the Hand and Eye of Vecna. Players who should be smart about this keep getting suckered in.
    • Any time you find an item that's way too powerful for your level (e.g a +5 sword at level 2), you can bet it's cursed… which wouldn't be too bad if all that did was make unequipping the item an exercise in frustration, but the majority of cursed items do nastier things on top of being hard to get rid of (such as drawing the wielder's attacks towards their allies, inverting their bonuses to penalties, attacking their wielder, or screwing with the wearer's alignment — and that's just the tip of the iceberg), and if the cursed item happens to be an artifact, things can easily get even worse.
  • In Legend of the Five Rings, the Tomb of Iuchiban was constructed to seal in the deathless, body-jumping sorcerer. The entrance requires several heavily guarded artifacts to open, and every room is full of deathtraps. Incredibly powerful wards and spirits prevent anyone from simply tunneling or using magic to bypass the traps. You may be wondering why the tomb has an entrance at all: Why didn't the builders just seal the tomb on all sides with these wards? They did. The "outer tomb" network of traps is there to lure in Iuchiban's followers and kill them off. There is no way to access the tomb itself.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • The flavor text for the card Fat Ass from the parody set Unhinged has the flavor text, "Our lawyers say no matter how funny it would be, we can't encourage players to eat the cards. Hear that? Whatever you do, don't eat the delicious cards."
    • In an official website article, the author makes a point about the nature of Magic's goblins by offering readers several large red buttons to push. Pushing them (sometimes after several pushes) causes the text and graphics to become scrambled. Except the last button. That one gives a censored preview card for the new expansion.
    • Whenever your opponent plays something you've never seen before, it's a normal reaction to grab the card for a second to look at it and figure out what it does...Unhinged made this instinctive act come back to bite the player with Vile Bile.
    • If your opponent has mana available and cards in hand on your turn, odds are they're waiting for you to play something so they can respond to it somehow. Each color has different ways to respond to different cards, but the biggest example is a Blue player waiting for you to spend all your mana to play a creature so they can either counter or return it to your hand.
  • Munchkin is guilty of this trope in nine different shades; Space Munchkin's "TRAP! The Most Fiendish Trap of All!!" actively illustrates this with a Big Red Button.
    • The Duck of Doom. You should know better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon. (Anything as harmless-looking as a duck is bound to be a Happy Fun Ball or Killer Rabbit if it's in a dungeon...)
  • In the official Mutants & Masterminds module, Time of Vengeance, set in the Freedom City universe, there is a point in the story where Mr. Infamy offers you his card for a chance to get enough power to defeat the villain, no strings attached. Except, of course, power corrupting, and corrupting absolutely...
  • My Little Pony Collectible Card Game: The Problem "Fire When Ready" has a 5 point bonus to draw people in, but its confront requirements are 5 power from each color. Finally, its effect replaces both Problems when a character so much as moves or enters play there. It is virtually impossible to confront, but its effect does make it useful.
  • Paranoia:
    • The Computer strongly advises Troubleshooters not to press any buttons labeled "Do Not Press". During the course of this mission, you may encounter buttons incorrectly labeled "Do Not Press" by traitors. Troubleshooters are advised to press these buttons. The Computer is your friend. Trust The Computer.
    • In one of those after-The-Computer-crashed adventures that no longer exists, The Computer was infected with some ancient evil. After the players manage to trap it, it is stored in a box labelled "Do Not Open". The schmucks in Alpha Complex open it, and unleash the ancient evil (again).
    • In another official adventure, one of the Troubleshooters' secondary assignments is to test an experimental "Traitor Killer". When you pull the trigger, it explodes. This is intentional; the assumption is that there's a traitor in the team, and that he'll volunteer to test it rather than let a teammate use it against him.
  • In Poker, massively overbetting with an unbeatable hand sometimes causes people to call you, because "Surely, if he really had a hand, he would bet less so as to get paid."
  • Some Warhammer players will do this often by having a couple high-value targets draw the enemy's aggro so they would focus all their attention against it instead of the real threat until it was close enough to do some damage.
    • Others send in fast cavalry or flying units to get just close enough to Night Goblins so they release their fanatics or units with frenzy in general and send them on a wild goose chase. Cue Benny Hill theme.
    • In Warhammer 40,000, this is a well known psychological tactic called a DISTRACTION Carnifex, named after the Tyranid living siege engine, where you wave a very scary model in an opponent's face while the much more deadly but lower profile units do their job, ex: a Possessed Chaos Vindicator goes full speed towards the enemy with their BFG while some Predators sit back and eat your opponent's tanks with their Lascannons. One can also use cheap, weak, and very obnoxious units (aka tarpits) to fufill the role of bullet sponges such as Nurglings, small fat daemons that sneak up to the closest cover and attack, or Ork boyz supported by a Weirdboy, who uses Da Jump psychic power to jump them close to the enemy and not get chewed up when footslogging.
    • Necron Tomb Worlds are this to the Adeptus Mechanicus. Look at all the nice shiny machines and all th- BY THE OMNISSIAH!!
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! card game:
    • The illustration of Reckless Greed shows a greedy man reaching for a treasure chest that is clearly over a trapdoor and filled with snakes.
    • Trap Cards in general. Your opponent has a completely monster-free field, and you're packing five monsters with 3000 ATK each, ready to bash their brains out. All they have is one measly face down card in their back row. You take the shot, and suddenly you're hit with some ungodly powerful card that completely wipes out your field, and allows them to special summon their 6000-ATK flagship monster for the endgame attack.
    • The Trap Card Dark Coffin. If your opponent notices that you're a little too eager to sling around Spell and Trap removal cards, you may walk right into this one.

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