D&D 5E Brief Thoughts on Traps and Player Agency

[FormerlyHemlock]

Ooh...I like it. The rule could be:
- If you react generically ("I jump to safety") or in the obvious way ("I leap back the way I came!") or in some way irrelevant ("I jump straight up") then you roll normally.
- If you react in a bad way ("I jump toward the table!") you roll with Disadvantage
- If you react in a non-obvious beneficial way ("I leap for the hanging chandelier!") you get Advantage

That might give players an incentive to try something creative, rather than just being generic. But it doesn't really penalize the absence of an inspiring idea, either.

Be generous here. I'd call "leaping backwards" beneficial, because if it were some other kind of trap (say, a swinging blade) that reaction would actually be detrimental (you're jumping right into it). Therefore leaping backwards is a cue that the player was suspicious of the floor and not the ceiling, which was a good call in this instance, so he gets advantage.

 

[Celtavian]

The problem I've always had with traps is making them interesting for a group. Most of the skills needed to counter traps are possessed by one or two players. They usually end up dealing with the trap while the rest of the players chat or sit bored waiting for the encounter with the trap to end. But I do like that 5E made traps more logical. 3E traps were illogical when it came to disarming or defeating them. In 5E you can create traps that make sense including the mechanism that allows you to bypass or disarm them rather than a one skill roll works for all mechanic.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Randomized DCs are an interesting wrinkle, but requiring several successes from several different skills - well, you're edging close to re-inventing the Skill Challenge (which, really, could do with some re-inventing)...

Doesn't that lend itself to 'pixel ------?' That is, wouldn't it tend to train players to badger you with constant questions about the environment, even when they really don't matter? And that's not really a question: IMX, that's exactly what happens if you get too consistent in giving out auto-successes for asking just the right question.

To answer the meta-question: yes, it does cause the players to engage with the environment. Quoting again from the blog post in the OP:

The purpose of a trap is to make decisions meaningful. If there is no risk from just walking around, opening chests, or exploring rooms, then those activities become flat and dull. If the only threat is monsters, then you've removed uncertainty from the game making it flatter and less interesting. Traps should make the play of the game more interesting.

If you don't want players to engage with the environment, e.g. because you the DM find tactical monster challenges more interesting than inventing oversized upside-down buckets for the players to freak out over, then you obviously wouldn't use this technique. If you want a campaign which is sometimes about trap paranoia and sometimes about social interactions and/or combat, then you need a technique to signal players when to do which.

My intended solution is simple: if you find spoor from trap gremlins, such as slime trails or discarded food, then you are in dangerous territory. If falling for a trap generates a cackle of naughty laughter and slapping high-fives, you just got pranked by a trap gremlin. If avoiding a trap generates an "Uh-oh" and the sound of a wet explosion from somewhere nearby, and some messy ectoplasmic residue that looks like it could have come from a foot-long transparent banana slug, then you just vanquished a trap gremlin. The ecology of the trap gremlin is mysterious and arcane, but the above is common knowledge. I plan to try this out the next time the players venture into a dungeon, and in fact it gives a specific in-world meaning to the word "dungeon": it's anywhere trap gremlins live or have lived.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I imagine you didn't mean literally "click" - but rather something like:

DM: You feel the floor start to give way with a terrible groaning sound... what do you do?

And, yes, totally down with the "click" approach.

The convention is that the DM says "click!" to indicate "something's hinky, you have to react without knowing exactly what just happened." It doesn't always mean a literal click noise in-game.

 

[Tony Vargas]

To answer the meta-question: yes, it does cause the players to engage with the environment.

There's 'engage with the environment' and there's 'blow a whole session on minutiae without getting anywhere.' I'd like the former, sure, just not the latter. There's a danger of the latter inherent in the practice of granting auto-successes based on player ability rather than character ability.

If you want a campaign which is sometimes about trap paranoia and sometimes about social interactions and/or combat, then you need a technique to signal players when to do which.

Sounds good. Passive skills might be a first step...

My intended solution is simple: if you find spoor from trap gremlins, such as slime trails or discarded food, then you are in dangerous territory. If falling for a trap generates a cackle of naughter laughter and slapping high-fives, you just got pranked by a grap gremlin. The ecology of the trap gremlin is mysterious and arcane, but the above is common knowledge.

That's amusing. Magical critters who exist /just/ to make traps. Reminds me of the 'Living Dungeon' rubric, and makes traps less mundane.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I really like the "click" convention. With a consistent group it might take a few sessions to "train" them, but eventually you'll have true immersion: when the DM says "click" the players' hearts will skip a beat.

As for whether "click" is always the right description, here's what I imagine:
DM: "click"
Player: "I dive sideways!" (said as quickly as possible)
DM: "Roll Dex"
Player: 22!
DM: "Ok, as you turn the key you here a whooshing sound, and a puff of green mist squirts out of the gargoyle's eye. You dive out of the way, only breathing some of the gas. Half damage."

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

There's 'engage with the environment' and there's 'blow a whole session on minutiae without getting anywhere.' I'd like the former, sure, just not the latter. There's a danger of the latter inherent in the practice of granting auto-successes based on player ability rather than character ability.

We've blown whole sessions (I exaggerate; maybe half of a session) on the PCs politicking against each other to get an edge in the village election for village sheriff-mayor-tax collector. It was fun. If my players blew a whole session on various attempts to flip over the bucket without anyone in the room having actually be anywhere near the bucket, I would call that a good session too. If they weren't having fun and/or weren't worried about missing out on treasure, they would just move on to something else, or leave the dungeon entirely.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

That's amusing. Magical critters who exist /just/ to make traps. Reminds me of the 'Living Dungeon' rubric, and makes traps less mundane.

I invented (or deduced?) their existence a while ago because otherwise nonlethal traps in D&D just don't make any sense at all. But you need nonlethal traps in order for gameplay to be fun.

It also helps rationalize the fact that you get XP for defeating (most) traps. It's the kill XP (life force) from the gremlin. You wouldn't get this XP from bypassing a wizard's magical Sepia Snake Sigil spell, because there's no gremlin involved. You would, however, stand a good chance at retrieving whatever it was that he was protecting with the Sepia Snake Sigil.

Wizard traps are not supposed to be fun, fair, or entertaining. A good wizard trap is "anyone who touches or moves this here spellbook gets hit simultaneously by Hypnotic Pattern, Web, and four summoned elementals, one of each type." It costs 1200 gold and a few spell slots to set it up but it's pretty decent protection. (It can still be bypassed via the normal Glyph of Warding countermeasures including Dispel Magic or making a zombie or your familiar move the book for you, or possibly even with Mage Hand.) Too many wizard traps will make your players hate and avoid dungeons; but gremlin traps hopefully will not.

Evil wizards have ways of arranging for gremlin infestations of their towers, resulting in a mix of gremlin traps and wizard traps.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Then pretend it was a more interesting trap, like Grimtooth's lava trap or something. That's not the point--the point is to find a way to allow either players or character skills to engage with the same content. If you're using Grimtooth's The Bigger They Are trap, wouldn't it be a pity if it just turned into "I roll Investigation. Oh, it's a falling rock"? And it would also be a pity if maxed out passive Investigation 32 provided no benefit even against simple, obvious traps. If a player "pays" character resources to avoid certain kinds of content, he should get the benefit of his choice. Choosing the DCs in a range where normal humans would not detect the clues, but an optimized PC could detect the clues, seems like a pretty good compromise. Do you disagree?

Yes. Most traps (and especially the rotten floor you postulate) aren't that hard to detect. They're successful because they're somewhere or something that doesn't get looked at closely and/or are things that can't be avoided (a large pit trap that can't be jumped across by normals blocking a narrow hall, for instance). Your method is placing traps on the level of "normal people will always fall for them unless they pick the right pixel first." Most traps should be able to be found by a normal actually looking for them. I think the method of artificially raising DCs so that passive skills fail to detect while simultaneously having the right questions asked generate autosuccesses to be a poor design decision. If, for example, I was playing a character with a high passive perception and had no clue that the floor was rotten aside from a general statement of 'there's a faint smell of rot in the room, you can't tell where it's coming from' while the person who said, 'I try to tell where the smell is coming from' gets to know immediately, that's a failure in description to take into account the fact that my character is better at noticing such things. You've arbitrarily decided to remove agency from my character to grant it to another. Not a good trade-off.

Instead, the rotten floor can be easily noticed (I even advocate for blatant signalling, like with a previously collapsed section), but can't be 'disarmed'. It has to be navigated. That invites the players to engage the environment to figure out how to get from A to B across the rotten section of floor, and to ask questions, without inventing a pixel hunt or arbitrarily assigning DCs at ridiculous levels. Make traps that require player decisions to overcome, and not just rolls, and you've done exactly what you're looking for. And it's much better than invalidating player choices by arbitrary DC assignations or pixel hunts. If the players feel like the choices they've already made retain use (high perception) while still being able to make decisions that feel like they affect the world (engage the challenge to cross the floor with good understanding of the situation so their actions make sense in the world) rather than dismissing previous choices and requiring specific questions to determine new information, they'll appreciate the game more.

Also, I dislike the 'click' mechanic. The player has already been caught in a trap and now must guess the best immediate reaction to avoid the effects? If you telegraph heavily, I could get behind that, otherwise it's really just asking the player to gamble on a choice. Some players will be good at this, through experience or intelligence, and others will be less good at this. If I suck at synthesizing information in stressful situations, but I play a rogue with high intelligence and catlike reflexes, this method punishes me, the player. Vicely, if I'm good at making decisions quickly and synthesizing the situation (or just guessing) but my character is an ironbound lug, this system benefits me. I dislike systems that test players, not characters, on principle, and that's exactly what this does.

In fact, your whole approach here is one that favors testing players -- can they ask the right questions? Do they guess well when I yell 'click' at them? I dislike that. There's always some testing of players in a game, but mechanics that spotlight player choices instead of character choices aren't my cup of tea.

 

[robus]

The convention is that the DM says "click!" to indicate "something's hinky, you have to react without knowing exactly what just happened." It doesn't always mean a literal click noise in-game.

Edit: I see you clarified that it's not always "click" - I missed that before this response. I still think the PCs need more context in order to have a chance to make an informed choice.

I went and reread the article (because the "click" bit seemed a bit odd) and Angry doesn't suggest you say "click" he just says the DM asks "What do you do?" immediately after the PC declares their action. Not giving any idea as to what it might happening that they need to react to:

In that split second, in that moment between when a trap is triggered and when it goes off, you ask the player “what do you do?” You don’t tell them anything about what’s going on around them except that they triggered something. They caught a trip wire. They stepped on a pressure plate. Or the lid of the treasure chest caught for a moment and then clicked free. And then you say “what do you do?”

Now, take their answer, whatever it is, and figure out whether it would actually help them avoid the trap in a remarkable way OR if it would make them less likely to avoid the trap OR if it would have no effect at all. If it was an exceptionally GOOD reaction, give them a bonus to avoid the trap. If it was an exceptionally BAD reaction, give them a penalty to avoid the trap. And if it’s a normal response that really isn’t anything special, just let them roll normally.
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I'm not sure I'm totally down to giving no clue to the PC - they are receiving a stimulus that is causing them concern but they don't know what it is? Personally I'd prefer to give them some clue:

* You feel something catch your foot, what do you do?.
* You hear a click, what do you do?
* The floor begins to give way, what do you do?

But that's me