Two Dozen Nasty DM Tricks

[Rechan]

Movable cover. (I'm pretty sure this one has been mentioned before in another thread.) The orcs, bugbears, hobgoblins are hiding behind cover that has wheels on it in your standard 10' wide corridor. After their initial archery barrage, they tilt up their cover and charge the PCs, pushing their cover ahead of them. If you really feel vicious, have the front of their cover soaked with oil - so the bad guys can set it on fire before smashing into the heroes.

Reminds me of a tale someone else told. You have a pit trap in front of a narrow hallway. The PCs enter the hall. AT the other end is a large, spiked barracade on wheels that fills the hall. The kobolds behind the barracade push, backing the PCs towards the pit.

Love the "unfinished" dungeon/tilting brick trap.

 

[Reynard]

Me. And many I've played with. It gets old REAL fast. Traps that make sense are fine, but those illogical and/or overly complex traps yank everyone out of the game. This happens because when these things are brought out, the characters are no longer exploring a world and fighting the bad guys. The players are trying to protect their characters from being killed by the DM.

I fail to see how such a situation draws players "out of the game" any more than having to direct their attention at a grid or hex map with small figures or tokens or pennies or M&Ms or whatever and suddenly shift in mindset from "what would Wulfgar do?" to "what spells/feats/actions do I have available to me?" In fact, IMO, the "overly complex trap" is less damaging to suspension of disbelief. While there are often dice rolls involved, there's a lot more DM/player negotiation going on that is till immersed "in character" and more particularly "in setting".

The exploding zombies trick looks pretty good though. Also the falling apart ladder, <nitpick>but that would just be a hazard </nitpick>

Only if you cotton to certain definitions of those terms.

 

[Iron Sky]

A couple of my favorite traps:

An iron door that opens easily, but a giant magical fist punches whoever opened it and then pulls the door shut again. The solution is to knock, in which case the magical hand opens the door for them.

In the same wizard's tower, there was the following item:

A solid gold Necklace. Upon examination, it boosts the wearer's defenses. The party identifies it and someone puts it on. Upon leaving the tower, or the wizard casting dispel magic on it, the Enlarge spell cast on the Ring of Protection ends, strangling whoever was wearing it and thought it was a necklace.

A pit trap about 10-15 feet wide - just enough that players will try to jump it. The last 5 feet of it has a pressure plate that drops a door closed on the other side of the pit flush with the other edge of the pit. The players leap, their last step triggering the door, then slam into the door on the other side and fall into the pit.


In my last 4e game I had a creature in mind that I never ended up using. The game featured some scarab beetle constructs (think the Mummy) that could tunnel into corpses and animate them (very creepily). After a fight with a big pile of minions, a special kind of those "scarab zombies" was going to show up with a breath weapon of scarabs that not only covered the PCs with flesh-burrowing scarabs, but rose all the minions just killed with more scarab zombies.

I'm sure there are more, but can't think of them atm...

 

[Pbartender]

It always amazes me that, from certain perspectives, our hobby is based on 10-15 years of badwrongfun. Indeed, it was a time where players were all dreadfully miserable, DMs were all devolved masochists, and the creativity gene was clubbed to death before it could infect the chromosome.

No need to be hyperbolic.

Nobody's saying it was badwrongfun... But as has been said time and time agains, not everyone has the same tastes. And even for those of us who did enjoy that style, tastes do change.

I played just like you talk about back when I was in Junior High and High School. It was a blast. Even now, I get the nostalgia bug, and I like to play an adventure or two in the Old School Style, and we have laughs about it.

But I definitely would not want to play that way long term anymore. I'd get awfully tired of it awfully fast. Plus, not all of my players go back that far, so what's fun nostalgia for me can be nerve-wracking, hair-pulling, tooth-grinding drudgery for them, if we aren't careful.

 

[Reynard]

Reminds me of a tale someone else told. You have a pit trap in front of a narrow hallway. The PCs enter the hall. AT the other end is a large, spiked barracade on wheels that fills the hall. The kobolds behind the barracade push, backing the PCs towards the pit.

I used a variation of this once where there was a heavy log with blade sticking out of it and notches cut into the ends. The walls of a sloped hallway had grooves, allowing the log to "roll" down the hallway without breaking the blades off but only leaving a few inches of clearance. In this case, goblin sentries loosed the log when they saw the PCs star up the hall and pull a lever that opened the pit (filled with both spikes and offal) behind the party.

For added fun, light the log on fire and fill the pit with pitch or greek fire.

 

[Rechan]

An unrelated idea I have. I am trying to run KotS for an online group. I've made some changes to the adventure, for instance instead of guard drakes, the goblins/hobgoblins use giant bugs.

After the PCs have cleaned out most of the first level (or possibly the whole keep), they'll come back to that first room with the pit. A vengence-seeking kobold commando squad will have taken up shop here, waiting for them. They've taken a barrel of grease or oil and smeared it across the floor from the front of the pit, to just inside one of the hallways the PCs are coming from.

In the pit, they'd put another barrel or two of the grease or oil, and place two fire beetles the goblins keep in cages.

The plan: they wait for the PCs to come back down the hall. The PCs see the kobolds, someone charges - hits the oil slick, goes into the pit, and the fire beetles do their thing, blowing up the barrels and inadvertently setting fire to the grease slick above. The flames and the smoke provide a nice buffer for the kobolds.

 

[Pbartender]

So, here's one of my favorite tricks. It's not real fancy, but it has a history of stumping PCs (at least briefly).

The "Airlock" Room... A small room with two doors. It's best to make the doors and walls of the room out of some practically impervious material that can't easily be reshaped by magic. At it's simplest, one door cannot be opened without the other being closed.

Most adventurers open a door and enter a room, never bothering to close the door behind them. It a gotcha puzzle, and it'll really get the player thinking about how to get past that second door.

To make it interesting... When both doors are closed, have something else happen after both doors are closed, but before the second can be opened. Perhaps it is an airlock, and the rooms slowly floods with water before the second door opens to an underwater area. Perhaps the room is an elevator and moves between levels in the dungeon before opening the second door. Or maybe it's a decontamination room, and breifly fills with a mildly poisonous gas, or sterilizing flames.

What ever happens, be sure to give it a slow onset, so that the PCs have a few rounds to initiate appropriate counter-measures, if they happen to have them available. Plus, it really ratchets up the tension when you describe the faint wisps of greenish gas leaking from tiny holes in the ceiling and very quietly make hissing noises for the next three minutes while the players try to decide what to do.

 

[merelycompetent]

Love the "unfinished" dungeon/tilting brick trap.

Thank you

Brings up another one out of my senility:

Party is confronted with a difficult climb 30' up to a ledge. Most groups would send the thief up first, covered by archers and spellcasters at the bottom, carrying a rope and other climbing gear. The trap is actually up past the 20' mark. Unless the lever (disguised as a depression in the rock) is thrown, a 10' diameter section of the cliff face detaches - with the thief still clinging to it - and falls on the rest of the party.

Please note the damage values involved: 1d6 per 10' fallen. I treated the falling rocks as regular falling damage. The thief would take 2d6, and anyone at the bottom would also take 2d6 (save for half). Not much damage for a 6th level or higher party (1E or 2E). But it did serve to slow down intruders, make lots of noise for alarm purposes, and drain off a few healing potions/spells.

They found out later that the evil cleric who kept his surplus undead horde here used boots of levitation to bypass this trap and a few others. Kind of ironic that they finished him off with a dispel magic targeting his boots: He was floating down the side of a much higher cliff - laughing maniacally as he escaped. "MuahahahahaaaAAAAAAAAHHHH*SPLAT*!!!"

@ Iron Sky: I really like the idea for the scarabs. Consider it yoinked!

 

[small pumpkin man]

YouTube - Greatest Movie Scenes - Raiders of the Lost Ark- Golden Idol

The difference, I find, between good traps and bad traps only partly whether or not they give you a save, or how deadly they are, I find the larger part is whether or not it involves pixel-bitching.

A while ago my old DM ran us through an old style dungeon full of horrors which had been sealed off, because obviously you can't just destroy them style dungeon, full of absurd traps and things you're really not supposed to touch. It may or may not have been called the Bane Warrens.

When the Rogue decided to steal the Evil Axe, and was mind-controlled, went on a killing spree before being killed by the city watch it was cool. When I decided to pull a lever just to see what it did and it flooded the room and released several giant octopus it was funny (well, I though it was). When the Fighter was almost killed because he tried putting on some cloaks without IDing them everyone except him found it amusing. When I fireballed some large clay pots and it released a bunch of demonic wasps it was amusing. When the same Fighter was turning into a vampire because he walked into the sickly green mist which came out of a small obviously Evil Jar he complained but everyone else kinda saw it coming (well, not the vampire part, that was weird, but something bad, sure). I'm pretty sure there were a bunch of traps on doors to, and some sort of giant magma ooze exploding out of a chest when it was opened, I'm sure there was a mimic and a bunch of different coloured tiles where some were traps and some were good and which were which was based on the fibinachi sequence there somewhere, and if there wasn't there should have been, but the point is I was okay with all of that, all of them involved either conscious choices, or genre blindness.

When the next rogue had his favourite awesome greatsword taken out of his hands by some sort of magic trap halfway down an unmarked corridor with no means of retrieving it, (even though he saw it slowly floating away help by an invisible force hand) that was not cool, and the player, citing other reasons, did not come back the next week, or until we started a new game. I do not blame him. I would consider things like "You didn't check your new bag of holding to see if it had rust monsters in it because you didn't say you did" to be somewhat similar.

 

[Rechan]

There's always the "Player response" to this kind of DM tactics.

Make a character named Kenny. Don't get upset when things happen to Kenny, because he just walks into every room and open the door, or walk into the trap, and die. And then, play a new character, named Kenny, who...