Fourthcore question

[Kinak]

Healing surge loss: traps involving energy drain, endurance, holding breath, starvation/dehydration, or significant effort over time to escape

Death saves: traditional save or die situations, petrification, powerful necromancy, possibly lethal poisons

Lasting Injuries: particularly vicious traps like deep spiked pits, or traps which obviously target a specific body part (eg. Booby trapped finger slicing scroll case), or traps imposing curses/diseases

I think your breakdown here works pretty well, but I understand your concern about death saves being very metagamey.

You could consider a large number of healing surges for those sorts of things. So death magic and lethal poisons drain four surges (instantly killing someone without surges), but can be fought off by the average adventurer.

Another thought is to allow people to spend action points or hero points or bennies to avoid traps. That way, they can choose when to use their "death saves." And obviously they'd pull those out for instant-death traps. It's still metagame, but if you're attaching it to some metagame tool you're already using, it shouldn't be so bad.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, this. I'm not into the save or die stuff, but I do like the increased threat of Sersa's trap design.

Here's the core of my problem: Most of the Fourthcore traps are magical, which allows you to say "screw logic! it does this!" I'm soon going to be running my players thru Dragon Mountain, and the premise for most of those traps is that they're designed by kobolds (low-tech, high-design, non-magical) or else were part of the original dwarves settlement and have been repurposed by kobolds. Since these traps are mostly mechanical in nature, I need some logic behind their functioning. That helps me narrate, and helps the players create solutions.

For example, if I introduce a dart wall trap and then ask for a player hit to make a death saving throw, they might suspect the darts are coated with some kind of lethal poison. The mechanics (sort of) gel with the narrative: you can only have so much poison in your veins before it becomes lethal, and your body is working daily to purge the poison. Death saves model that pretty well.

However, if I had a falling block of stone and asked for a death save, both me and the players are going to be scratching our heads: is there some invisible meter tracking how many times you can get squashed by rocks? magically the third times the killer rock fall? isn't that what HP are for?

Now, that falling stone block might be a good place to impose an injury...

While it is true that in terms of 'method of action' non-magical traps are more constrained to 'make sense' there is a whole other level of making sense. That is the one at which you would consider what you would do in terms of making a trap who's RESULT makes sense.

In other words why would someone create some bizarre magical trap which challenges adventurers when they could simply make one that obliterates anyone who doesn't avoid it and has no way around it. The goal of the trap maker being to do away with the target this is the sensible RESULT. Now, maybe sometimes there's a different goal. Maybe sometimes there are insufficient means to accomplish the most drastic effect, etc. Still, the sort of 'puzzle-trap' that is so much beloved of dungeon builders the multiverse around is pretty close to always nonsensical in any way shape or form. I think this is the sense in which Joshua Randall was referring to 'logic'.

Fourthcore in general doesn't do logical traps. It does bizarro-world mad wizard this makes no kind of sense at all traps. The truth is a really good trap made by a cunning high level caster would just not be all that fun.