What's your favorite trap?

was said:

First of all, I do not appreciate sarcastic and inflammatory posts designed to bait me into an argument.

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I'm not trying to bait you into anything. I would like an open debate on the virtues and misuses of traps. That is to say, in the context of a discussion of 'favorite traps', I find it appropriate to also investigate what makes a trap good and memorable - otherwise, some novice DM is just going to repeat mistakes that have lead to whole groups rejecting dungeon crawling as worthwhile and fun. If you want to call it an 'argument', fine, it's an argument. We disagree. Feel free to not respond, if you don't find it worthwhile to disagree, but what's the point of saying you don't want an argument and then arguing with me?

I find your example of your favorite trap to be a misuse of traps of the sort that gives traps (and dungeons) a bad name, and indeed I find the question of 'how can I design good traps' rather more important than lists of traps. Or hobby has already suffered from too many lists of stupid traps. I find you example poorly designed - it's random, doesn't provoke any interesting problem solving or team work, carries little weight as an encounter (despite requiring a 20th level caster to pull off), is nothing but irritating after the 'joke' wears off, and above all can't logically be anticipated by the players with the result that it creates a scenario where you are punished for not checking for traps on everything. So either the player must choose between ruining his experience of play by pixel bitching, or randomly putting up with the DM's petty 'gotchas'. I don't approve of your trap; I consider it abusive and unfun, and would never use it or recommend anyone using it. It has no place within a coherent logical dungeon environment, except the far over used 'mad god's funhouse' trope.

You can consider strong contradiction inflammatory if you like, but any emotional response is your own. Don't take it personal; I'd be perfectly willing to take on the writers of the Grimtooth books as well.

Back in the early days of 3E, I was running an adventure for a couple of guys that I just met. One eventually became a pretty good friend; the other had anger issues. Their characters were chasing an NPC villain through a fallen city (looked deserted, really infested with monsters). Anyway, said villain had intimate knowledge of the city and had a number of preplanned escape routes that were all trapped.

As they chased the villain, the character of the player with anger issues hit every single trap. None of them were really insanely clever, but taken together, they took their toll. One of the traps involved a collapsing step with a hidden blade. When Mr. Angry's character stepped on the step, it gave way; and his foot was both impaled and held tight by the trap. He managed to pull free of this only to lay hands on a doorknob coated in a contact poison.

They were both simple, obvious traps that were heck on anyone not paying attention. It was a fun time until Mr. Angry turned red and had to go take a time out.

While in the deep bowels of a cavern , the party met and overcame a vampire giant. Upon reaching zero hit points, it turned to gaseous form and fled at its most impressive 20' per round. The party decided to follow the gaseous cloud, naturally back to its coffin where they could destroy it. However, while watching the gaseous cloud flee down the cave, they neglected to notice it was leading them into a covered pit area that was filled with green slime.

Sure it didn't end up protecting the vampire giant all that much, but it was a well thought out trap on its part...

Note, that I generally dislike traps and I feel they're overused.

Nonetheless, our group had a hilarious session when playing 'Seekers of the Ashen Crown' which features a puzzle/trap in one of the railroady entrance rooms to old goblin underground ruins. I hope I still recall the details correctly:
Basically, you were supposed to depress several floor-plates arranged in a chessboard pattern with different words on them. If you depressed the wrong ones, monsters would be summoned. There was also a statue with a lever disguised as a torch. The thing was: The puzzle wasn't meant to be solved by the party. In theory, by solving it, the statue would have slided into the floor, revealing a secret passage, allowing the party to skip several rooms on their way to the 'end boss'. After a number of failures there was simply no way to make it work.

But my players of course didn't know that. And they kept trying and trying and trying... The things they tried were getting more ridiculous all the time and the hints I dropped that it wouldn't work also got more heavy all the time, until everyone was laughing so hard, we couldn't continue playing for a while. The encounter is still mentioned occasionally as a running gag whenever someone is trying something that is obviously futile.

double post - ENWorld seems to have some issues currently...

A mysterious black circle in the mouth of a demonic bas relief ...

I've gave several examples of traps that worked, I might as well also describe a failure of design by me.

The party was exploring an underground Necropolis of a lost civilization that had been ruled by necromancer kings - some of whom they knew had ruled as lichs. They'd entered into the Necropolis through the tunnel of a grave robber that was trying to recover a particular necromantic artifact of great power, and they were trying to head him off before he found it. The party had deduced that they could track the bad guys basic movements by only going through the open doors, thereby avoiding most of the lethal traps the ancient kings had filled their tombs with. So far so good.

In theory a lot of the stuff in the necropolis was way over the parties current level, which at the time was mostly 5th-6th. For the most part, I'd blocked off access to the higher CR stuff or felt I'd left very obvious clues that said, "Warning: Don't go this Way", and for the most part that was working as intended. One part of the dungeon consisted of a ghoul warren that straddled several of the ancient Kings tombs. In that area I'd placed several CR 2-4 traps that I felt the party could manage and which I hoped - together with past experiences with my traps - would to help promote the atmosphere I wanted, which was, "You are in way over your head!"

In one side area I'd decided to place a trap based on Evard's Black Tentacles. I'd rated this trap as CR 7 based on the general nastiness of that spell, and I had some misgivings about it but simming it in my head I figured the party would be safe - there'd be basically one tentacle per party member and most members of the party had some effective counter strategy (turn ethereal, short range teleport, high escape artist check, brute force, etc.) and everyone had enough hit points to survive at least 4-5 rounds. To be extra safe, I decided to telescope the hazard in the room in the description by describing it as a treasure vault, that there were large number copper coins scattered around the room, the fact that the furnishings of the room had been smashed, and the pointlessness of the room by describing the only other exit as being sealed shut. All of this was meant to signal high likelihood of trap with low likelihood of a worthwhile reward. I figured the party would avoid it - which initially they did - and at worst it would be a tough encounter involving a lot of heroic party cooperation to rescue PC's in harm's way.

Everything however went wrong.

We had an unfortunate long break with no gaming. When we got back, the players were rusty, panicky, and got into a relatively easy encounter where party cohesion broke down, players stopped trying to help or cooperate with each other, and it turned into every man for themselves with PC's employing the "I don't have to run faster than the monster, just faster than you" strategy. My atmosphere was back firing because of the players loss of self-confidence following the break. In very short order, we'd had two PC deaths (only the second time we'd had PC deaths in 2 years of fairly regular play). Then, to make matters worse, the party became separated and then got lost and panicked some more. Unsure what to do, they started blundering about, trying doors and exits they'd formerly eschewed as too dangerous despite the fact that they were now at less than half strength. The result of this is instead of the six players encountering the above party level trap, I ended up with just 3 of them in the room. This meant 2 tentacles per party member, which meant greater difficulty in evading or escaping and almost no expectation of another PC being able to assist.

So long story short, we had 2 more deaths. As an excuse, it was only one of two nights we've had with PC deaths and both nights involved separating the party and some sheer stupidity by some or all party members. But it's a bad excuse, because the trap deaths were unnecessary, and I'd once again written cascading failure into the scenario. For the second time, I'd only narrowly avoided a TPK. Had I enforced the 1 tentacle per party member rule in the details of the trap description, or flexed to that design when I realized my mistake, the trap could have still captured the feel, flavor, and danger I intended without being overpowered if my assumptions about the number of PC's in the party proved erroneous.

On what I think should be the larger discussion, "How do you make good traps", these are the elements of what I think makes a good trap:

a) It's logical. If you can suspend disbelief enough that you have a universe were complex mechanical traps can be made and persist in working order (or something like it) for centuries, then that framework the trap has to be something you'd believe people would pay to make and would in fact persist in the described state awaiting victims. If a trap isn't logical, then there is no real expectation that it should be avoided.

b) It's predictable. As follows from 'a' above, traps should occur only where they make sense. You could as a DM place a 100' spiked pit trap on the well-travelled main thoroughfare of the town near the dungeon, and no one would check for traps there! "Gotcha, you forgot to check for traps!" But that's not being clever, or fair, or reasonable. Who would pay for and live with a death trap in a well travelled living area? Who would put up with a death trap on a door they have to pass through all the time? If the trap builder ever planned on passing through an area with a trap, certainly he's going to leave some sort of easy (if not necessarily obvious) way to bypass the trap from himself. If a trap isn't predictable, the danger you have is that the player's are reduced to having to check for traps every 5' and before every action. That reduces what should be an exercise in caution and skill and creativity and resourcefulness, into an exercise in tedium and ritual. The best traps pass what I call the Indiana Jones test. Right at the beginning of Raiders, Indy is going through the iconic trap filled tomb, and at each point he recognizes where the trap is. He knows not to go rushing blindly into the room with the idol because he knows this a good place to put a trap and it looks like somewhere a trap should be. Good traps are telegraphed in the description and by the environment so that the players know whether this is an environment with traps somewhere, and there are clues that will help the players place where the trap is.

c) The DM is not disappointed if the party isn't caught in the trap. This is an issue of DM attitude toward traps. One of the biggest flaws a DM can have is becoming emotionally invested in particular scenes playing out the way he wants them to. In the case of traps, this means DM should never be trying to win or be emotionally invested in the trap impressing the players. Winning is trivial for a DM. You have infinite power and resources AND you are the referee with infinite power to pass judgment. There is no way for a DM to lose if he's trying to win. It's not a contest. If the PC's bypass your trap or never even know it was there, it's all good. Be sure to give the party every reasonable benefit of the doubt when judging a trap.

d) The trap doesn't use reverse logic. This is the result of combining 'b' and 'c' above. You can tell things have really gone to heck, if the DM is reduced to using reverse logic or reverse-reverse logic in the trap design. This is the DM meta-gaming against the players, taking into account how he knows they will behave after having become - at his instigation - paranoid players that engage in rituals to avoid traps, and then designing a trap to avoid the rituals and entrap players that attempt to evade the effects of the traps. Using reverse logic does only one of two things. Either it provokes an arms race, with the players inventing ever more elaborate rituals, or else it provokes resignation and ennui where the players no longer bother to avoid traps and ultimately lose interest in stroking the DM's ego by going into dungeons solely to let the DM validate to himself how clever he is. If you are going to use reverse logic, be careful about it, and try to be consistent about it. Once you've established that the trap builder employs reverse logic, almost all his traps should use reverse logic, and the climax of using reverse-reverse logic is therefore predictable at one level also.

e) It's memorable, meaningful, and suitable. The trap builder went to all this effort. The payoff better be reasonable for the cost not just to the trap builder, but to the game. Your game is being slowed down by the need for the players to be super cautious. The payoff for that cost you are imposing on the game better be good. If the trap is meaningless, then it's better that it not exist. While you shouldn't be frustrated by player's cleverly avoiding your traps, there is a lot of value in actually provoking respect for your traps when the player fall into them.

f) Your traps should promote meaningful interaction and intraparty cooperation and problem solving. Note however that respect doesn't necessarily come from lethality. Your traps should be designed to consume player resources, and this could include killing players by depletion of hit points, but outright killing the player should not be the actual goal. For one thing, out right death traps tend to be rather binary. You are either dead or you aren't. Really good traps impose conditions on the victim and force either the victim or the non-victims to come up with ways of extricating themselves. A trap that pours burning oil on the floor that does 1d8 damage for 4 rounds is a far better design than a trap that does 4d8 all at once. In fact, you can actually use this fact to make traps more theoretically lethal - maybe the oil burns for 8 rounds (8d8 damage in the worst case) - on the expectation that the resourceful party is going to figure out how to remove the oil, remove themselves from it, or put out the fire sometime before the 8 rounds is up. Really good traps let the party react to the problem. Remember, the ideal situation is not to win. The idea situation is to get the players to tell stories for years about how they narrowly escaped that devious trap. A simple fireball trap isn't going to do that, even if the fireball trap ultimately does the same amount of (or less!) damage than some other prolonged trap. In short, don't let your traps be or become ho hum.

g) Less is more. You are better off with a few well designed traps than lots and lots of minor ones. Use traps sparingly.

I always loved creature traps; the cloaker beast, or the lurker from above, ear seekers, and rot grub. Just nasty 1st ed stuff.

Jesters Hand said:

I always loved creature traps; the cloaker beast, or the lurker from above, ear seekers, and rot grub. Just nasty 1st ed stuff.

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Well, as mentioned, I don't particularly like traps, but these 'living' traps are even worse. They are too obviously specifically designed by the DM to screw the players, without regard for making any actual sense. I hate that kind of meta-gaming arms-race.