How do you handle Craft (trapmaking)?

[MerakSpielman]

I'm joining a new campaign and I'm playing a dwarven rogue. This rogue's specialty is locks and traps. To fit with the character concept, I added ranks in Craft (trapmaking), figuring I could make a few little traps here and there.

So for my first trap I design an Alarm Trip Wire. Simple enough. Mechanical trap, Manual Reset, blah blah. The rules didn't have anything for traps that don't deal damage, or for traps that are portable (I want to be able to set it up wherever we go), but my DM and myself decided 1000gp was just fine. Search DC 20, Disable DC 20, CR 1.

So I look up the Craft rules in the PHB and promptly have a heart attack.

Assuming I make my Craft (trapmaking) check every week, it will take around 25 weeks to complete! Even if I increase the progress per week to gp, it will still take 2.5 weeks to complete.

This just doesn't seem right. Why would it take so long to finish a trap? Some of the better traps in the DMG could take years and years to complete!

So how do you guys handle this?

 

[Starglim]

This just doesn't seem right. Why would it take so long to finish a trap?

Because you priced a tripwire and a bell at 1000gp, I suspect.

The trap costs in the DMG are patently ridiculous. Apart from the common-sense check of adding up the cost of all the parts that a trap could reasonably contain, where is a tribe of kobolds going to get 330gp in materials for every trap they build, and how do they afford to own such things as 1st level NPCs?

I'd eyeball it by pricing a standard ranged attack trap (CR 1) about three times as much as a crossbow, or 100gp. It looks as if costs for CR 1 traps, at least, should be reduced by a factor of 10.

Your trap is less effective than an alarm spell that a 1st level wizard could cast, so it should be CR 1/2. I'd say it would be a pretty amazing tripwire that would require a DC 20 Search check to find in a 5' by 5' square, so I suggest you should reduce the search DC.

I'd price your trap at about 20 to 30gp (by the above house rule) or 200 to 300gp by the book.

edit: You probably don't want "portable" to be a feature since that would increase the trap's cost. Your GM might agree that you can mostly craft the trap in a workshop somewhere, but leave the last Craft check unmade, so you carry around an unfinished piece of work. When you want to set the trap, make a Craft check to install it.

 

[MerakSpielman]

I tried to design another trap that would spray ink in the face of anybody who opened my personal treasure box. However, adding a "liquid" to a trap requires a +5 CR adjustment.

I can't believe they don't have rules for non-injurous traps.

It also costs a hell of a lot of money and many months to dig a 20' deep pit with wooden spikes. Now, I realize digging a big hole is more difficult than it sounds, but I don't think it would take me more than a week, presuming I was in good enough shape to work on it full-time...

 

[lotuseater]

d&d is no place for common sense. go with what the rules say.

 

[MerakSpielman]

d&d is no place for common sense. go with what the rules say.

So you think it's reasonable for it to take 13 weeks to create an alarm tripwire (assuming I lower the price to 500gp and successfully make my craft (trapmaking) check every week)?

When it only takes one day and 190gp to craft a Wand of Alarm, which is much more powerful?

 

[Klaus]

Let's see:

A bell costs 1 gp (PHB)
A roll of twine (10') costs 1 sp (Arms & Equipment Guide).

I'd rule it thusly:

- One bell and 5 feet of twine can ward a 5' square. Spot DC = Craft (trapmaking) roll. You can't take 20, but you can take 10. If intruder actively searchs for the twine, the intruder gets a +2 bonus on a Search check.

- If intruder fails to spot the twine, he gets a Reflex save (DC = Craft (trapmaking) roll) to stop just before the bell goes off. If he fails, the bell sounds (Listen DC 0, modified by distance).

- It takes 10 minutes to ward a single 5' square. So it'd take two hours to ward effectively a small perimeter.

- Masterwork Trapmaker tools (50 gp, PHB) add +2 to the Craft check.

 

[MerakSpielman]

OK, this I think is how I'm going to do it.

Going by the trapmaking rules in the DMG, a bell-and-twine trap would be attained by reducing the search and disable DCs to 15 each, resulting in a trap that's essentially free.

However, my character considers anything so crude as a ball of twine and a bell to be far too primitive for him to bother with.

His version of the trap is going to involve an actual wire. This very thin, strong wire will be attached to two base plates, designed to be screwed into any vertical surface softer than metal. It can cover an opening 20' wide. One of the base plates is actually a small box containing a clockwork mechanism, including a spring and a small alarm-clock style bell. The decice is set to go off if the wire is either tightened (by somebody stumbling into it) or if the wire is loosened (by somebody cutting it). Both the wire and the base plates are darkened to be more difficult to spot at night.

Considering the exacting specifications and the quality of clockwork/spring pieces required, I think this trap might actually be worth the 1000gp price for DC20 search/disarm checks.

 

[aco175]

I can't believe nobody has come out with a PDF on basic traps like this, maybe somebody can whip one out.

Anyway, you could always make a houserule that non-damaging traps reduce the overall price, maybe not the time though, by some factor such as 1/2. Or, just have them reduce the CR of the trap by 2 or 3.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I'd use the new rules in CV for Craft Poison for Trapmaking.

Make material costs either 1/6 of value for readily available materials (i.e. stone in a dungeon, vines/wire for snares - simple traps) or 3/4 for specialized parts (complex traps) and then set creation amounts per week at Craft check times DC in gold rather than silver.

Then reverse engineer the market price based on how long you want it to take. Setting Price based on the DC squared and what fraction of a week your target time is.

For example, a simple non-lethal snare for a small creature might be DC 15. That squared is 225 (in GP/week). Let's say we want it to take an hour, which is 1/40 of a week's work. 225/40=5 5/8. or let's call it 6gp.

Market price is 6gp. Material cost is 1gp.

 

[taliesin15]

Great thread, glad someone brought this up--I've been doing a lot of world and NPC design of late, and of all the Crafts for the 150-200 NPCs I've come up with lately, Trapmaking is by far the most common, in fact, its at least a skill of half the NPCs. Which stands to reason--anyone out there ever do any real world hunting? For a large number of the character races in AD&D they live at least partially on hunting (not to mention the assumption that most of them would know how to clean and gut and skin a deer or whatever)--trapmaking's going to be a pretty common art. And mainly here I'm talking about simple snares. Like snares that mid level commoners would put up around their barns or chicken coops to catch wolves or wild dogs. Seems logical to me that the first level ranger/barbarian/druid/rogue/fighter or whatever who buys 4 ranks of Craft: Trapmaking is going to at least have familiarity with simple traps they could make out of materials costing maybe 15 silver pieces--pits with stakes, snares, nets and the like.

The notion that making them portable would add weeks and hundreds of gold pieces to them seems specious.

The first four ranks or so of Trapmaking should maybe also include some familiarity with trap design, more complex traps, like yr standard CR 1 Dart and Arrow tripwire traps that Goblins are setting up in their dungeon area.