Honoring Pit Traps

[Hand of Evil]

mess with the players -- fake them with dungeon hallway art!

 

[Stoat]

I've always liked having one obviously open pit with a second covered pit immediately behind it. PC's jump over pit 1 and plummet into pit 2.

I think I got that from Grimtooth.

 

[Olli]

I doubt it, but you wouldn't happen to be Olli westguard the 3rd?
sorry if it is you and I misspelled your name, but you would know my fatehr

and also, the reverse gravity is always ALWAYS fun, the high ceiling always makes players think something big is in the room, but if you know dungeon design, reverse gravity can be the only way to get to the other half.

no, thats not me, but I would love to have "the 3rd" in my name

 

[Allegro]

I'm a big fan of putting a secret door at the bottom of a covered pit trap at mid-levels. Make the DC low so the PCs can discover it. Either the PCs feel smug because they avoided the trap or are rewarded for searching the bottom of the pit trap. Another favorite of mine is to use impaled dessicated corpses as messengers. The corpses are obvious but not railroad plot obvious things to search to learn clues.

 

[Orius]

Would you say the pit trap is an iconic part of the D&D experience.

Yes.

Is it something every D&D player should experience?

HELL yes. And when I DM, they usually do.

Dragon #254 had a nice collection of pit variants. Including double pits, illisions, reverse gravity pits in the ceiling, reverse gravity pits in the ceiling that cast dispel magic when the PCs fell into them, dropping both them and the big ass rock at the "bottom" back down to the floor....

And while it's not official, we shouldn't leave out Penny Arcade's take on the pit trap:

Penny Arcade - Our Newest Feature

 

[Jhaelen]

Would you say the pit trap is an iconic part of the D&D experience. Has every D&D player experienced a pit trap? Is it something every D&D player should experience?

Yes. Probably. Not necessarily.

Are pit traps high art? Are pit traps to dungeon dangers what puns are to humor? What is the most common reaction of Players to having a PC fall in a pit trap? Is it “Oh no!” or <facepalm> or WTF? or “Well played, sir.”

No. Maybe. Either "Oh no!" or WTF.

I don't like traps. Not even pit traps, although they are among the most reasonable fo the whole bunch.
Still, they are usually not a part of what I consider fun in a roleplaying game, unless they're puzzle-traps - but those are exactly the kinds of traps my players tend to feel are not fun ... and the part I enjoy is the puzzle, not the trap, so I'd much rather just use the puzzle without the trap

Of course I've used traps in my games, but that was usually to please rogue players so they had a chance to shine and feel good about their ability to find and disarm them.

When posting in the Tomb of Horror thread I had this idea of starting a new thread discussing real-world examples of traps and the reasons for their existence because I feel adventure designers generally have a very poor idea about 'reasonable' traps that actually serve a real purpose.

I mean, I enjoyed watching 'Raiders of the Lost Arc', but really, does anyone actually think these kinds of traps make any sense?
3e introduced the idea of 'encounter traps' which has been further developed in 4e. This change in the way traps are used in the game definitely helps to make them more fun than the classic 'gotcha!' style but I still prefer using them sparingly or not at all.

 

[Celebrim]

I mean, I enjoyed watching 'Raiders of the Lost Arc', but really, does anyone actually think these kinds of traps make any sense?

Make sense? No, of course not. There is a reason why no real world culture has ever constructed complex elaborate traps. I frequently wonder just what sort of machines that you could build - regardless of your technology level - which you could balance on a knives edge just before failure and then leave them in a jungle or cave with the expectation that they'd be functional centuries later. No real world ones certainly, but this is afterall fantasy.

One of my standard tropes in dungeon design is to play with this criticism in a useful manner. Early in a dungeon that contains traps, I will typically have one or more rooms of broken traps were most or all of the traps have already been triggered, or ceased to function correctly or at all. This increases versimiltude, so its got a nice simulationist function in the design, but it also has an important gamist function - it alerts the party to be watchful for traps. In this way, I can control whether or not the party is spending time looking for traps. In a sense, what I'm doing with this and other design elements is communicating, "You don't have to waste time looking carefully for traps, unless you are in a situation where traps would clearly make sense."

3e introduced the idea of 'encounter traps' which has been further developed in 4e.

This is not a new thing nor was it introduced. At best, it was labelled. Even a quick purusal of as primitive of a module as 'Keep on the Borderlands' shows traps used as parts of larger encounters. It's pretty much de riguer for running kobolds, for example.

 

[Janx]

Make sense? No, of course not. There is a reason why no real world culture has ever constructed complex elaborate traps. I frequently wonder just what sort of machines that you could build - regardless of your technology level - which you could balance on a knives edge just before failure and then leave them in a jungle or cave with the expectation that they'd be functional centuries later. No real world ones certainly, but this is afterall fantasy.

One of the things I like about Celebrim's ideas is that that he always seems to incorporate D&D tropes into the world such that they make sense yet don't radically change the game world, and then presenting it to the players so they SEE how that concept fits in the world.

If there was a dungeon with the usual random assortment of monsters in it, and prior adventurers running about, then many of the big original traps would likely have been triggered. Celebrim basically covers that, by showing the players some broken traps.

Additionally, showing the party a big pit trap in front of their path does not negate it as an obstacle.

Whereas, a truly hidden pit trap has no fair arbitration in my eyes. The PC might get a Spot or Find Traps check and thats it. Failing that, the PC merrily walks across the floor and falls in.

The alternative is millions of game hours spent tapping the floors with a 10 foot pole across the entire dungeon. Personally, I hate that.

the Grimtooth traps were certainly clever. But I never used them because they felt a bit unfair. The point of them was to offer no clue they existed.

I'm thinking that's part of the problem. A pit trap the players do not know about will kill a PC. Thats actually not much fun, or even involving any great play by the players. A pit trap the players know about and need to figure out is where the interesting game play comes in.

Assuming the players need to cross it, they'll work to test the nature of it, and determine a means to disable or bypass it

They may even use the trap against an enemy later in the session.

 

[Celebrim]

Additionally, showing the party a big pit trap in front of their path does not negate it as an obstacle.

Whereas, a truly hidden pit trap has no fair arbitration in my eyes. The PC might get a Spot or Find Traps check and thats it. Failing that, the PC merrily walks across the floor and falls in.

The alternative is millions of game hours spent tapping the floors with a 10 foot pole across the entire dungeon. Personally, I hate that.

Well, we don't have to use hyberbole to find the problem. Yes, it is possible to waste a lot of time with a party that is being paranoid or even paranoid with good cause because the DM is playing 'gotcha'. But its not essential. A corridor may take a lot of game time to check, but the real time wasted is usually little more than making the proposition that you will use some simple process to check it. (Of course, too much reverse logic here is bad, and likely metagaming by the DM.)

the Grimtooth traps were certainly clever. But I never used them because they felt a bit unfair. The point of them was to offer no clue they existed.

Exactly. Grimtooth and his ilk helped ruin traps. One of my pet peeves with the Grimtooth traps were that didn't seem to exist prior to the PC's triggering them. Pools of acid didn't release noticable fumes. Pits filled with acid didn't seep into the ground water and lose potency over time. Nozzles didn't clog up. Hinges didn't rust. Electrical charges didn't disperse. Wires didn't rust. Glass didn't accumulate dust and dirt, but remained spotlessly clean. Razors remained razor sharp. Ropes didn't rot. Delicately balanced weights didn't fall over for centuries until the PC's breathed on them. Grimtooth's dungeons contained ramshakle boats which floated for centuries in underground lakes but which would mysteriously disentigrate a few rounds after they taken out from shore and only if taken out from shore. I hate all of that. There is a certain amount of that which is required for the trope, because as I said, no trap would work for long on a realistic basis, but ignoring reality principly on the basis of your desire to create inescapable death traps is pure ego gaming on the DM's part. The DM should be utilizing the fact that traps aren't perfect to create interesting interactions, not making traps unrealisticly perfect just to make them work. Creating inescapable death traps is easy; do DM has a basis for bragging on those grounds. Grimtooth's gloating schtick as if what was being presented was creative and worthy of great acclaim irritated me to no end.

I also hate death traps in living quarters or well travelled corridors as if the owner was willing to put up with risking death when stumbling around at night to find the chamber pot. You sometimes get the impression from some designers that they think having a randomly distributed 100' spiked pit traps on ordinary city streets would be the height of good design. IMO, a player shouldn't have to guess whether the evil altar inflicts a curse on whoever dares descrecrate it (they all do), and shouldn't have to guess whether the treasure chamber contains lethal death traps (they all do), but equally shouldn't have guess when he needs to take precautions from traps because the traps only occur in the expected places. In a since, every good trap in my opinion has a neon sign somewhere nearby that says, "Danger: Big Trap Over Here". That sign might be anything from, "You open the secret door and see a treasure chamber, with a mound of gold and jewels spilling out of a chest on the other side of the room." to "There is a tiled floor and one of the tiles has been lifted by an upthrust spear from which dangles the rib cage of a humanoid creature." Maybe for your more experienced players with higher level characters, that neon sign is currently turned off, and might even be partially hidden by ivy, but I don't think its fair for DM's to leave it to the PC's to be guessing when to search for a trap. (And really, if you are going to conceal the signs a little, then the trap better be relatively minor for the character level.) The unusualness of the situation should suggest the need.

Indiana Jones is ran by an experienced player, and an experienced DM. He clearly is able to read the mind of the DM, and clearly the DM is working to make that easy by putting the traps in the situations where you'd anticipate them if you are no great fool.

I'm thinking that's part of the problem. A pit trap the players do not know about will kill a PC. Thats actually not much fun, or even involving any great play by the players. A pit trap the players know about and need to figure out is where the interesting game play comes in.

"There's a pit around here somewhere" is also interesting play, IMO, provided the somewhere is a reasonably constrainted space.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'd say the most *infamous* pit trap is the one at the entrance to the sample adventure (The Haunted Keep) in the Moldvay basic set. Just about every party I've played through that adventure has lost their thief (d4 hp, 10% chance to detect traps) to that pit (covered, d6 damage).

The very first time we played, the party lost two characters to that trap. They lost one going in. Then, when the lone surviving cleric was trying to make his way out, he got trapped on the edge by wandering kobolds before he could reconstruct the materials they used to cross it the first time.

My favorite all-time pit, though, is one that I did myself that wasn't technically a trap at all--though it was put in with deliberate malice. One of the PCs, and elf, had a custom item, "gravity defining" boots. He could define gravity any direction he wanted (gradually, over several seconds, with some risk of failure). To scout, he tried walking on the ceiling, but for it didn't work as well as he had hoped. So he took to walking on a wall, with gravity defined at right angles to normal, and near the ceiling. With his sneaking ability, he could wander almost at will in dark, high-ceilinged rooms.

In the next adventure, I put in a right-hand, 50' passage, with an illusionary wall. Nothing dangerous about it at all for anyone with normal gravity. If he hadn't perceived the faint breeze rising at his feet, he'd have been a goner.