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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6966281" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a straight forward summoning trap with a simple proximity trigger.The first thing you should obviously do IMO is double the chimera's HD and increase its size category to make it a more creditable foe against such a potent party.The second thing you should do is decorate the presently uncarved walls with serpents, goats, and lions to subtly reference the trap.The third thing you should is reduce the area of the trap trigger so that it only involves the middle third of thee room, otherwise the trap is stupid.  Every party I've ever been in would simply step back and close the door.  Thirty minutes (1e turns are 10 minutes long) of polishing armor later, the room is deactivated.  Blah.  Worse, only an idiot would design the trap this way, since it goes off literally before the party can get into the room, so who is even trapped?  To enhance the design, the copper doors to the room should slam shut when the trap activates.   This at least means that evading the trap is non-trivial and requires anticipation on the party of the party.There isn't a lot to do with this encounter because a chimera is a fairly boring monster with no particular advantage in mobility, resistances, tactical weaponry, or skills to be taking advantage of.  It is a nice somewhat scalable brute with the sort of suite of abilities you'd expect in a scalable brute (flight, at least one ranged attack, multiple attacks), but that's it.  Anything you could do to make the encounter harder would only be additive rather than multiplicative in difficulty and interest.  About the only thing that its got going for it is dark vision, so you could conceivably do something to 'turn off the lights', but a party of this level has little difficulty lighting an area and probably has magical objects that shed light (and if they don't by now, they deserve to die), so I don't see that as necessarily worth the effort.  Other than delighting the room when the doors slam shut with some sort of dispel light type effect (???), the only other interesting option you have is if the colored tiles in the room debuff who ever steps on one in a way that doesn't debuff the chimera.  That's not easily managed in this case, as the chimera as I said isn't immune to anything and being summoned is also magical so you can't even go for the good old fashioned 'dispel magic' trap (which itself is pretty pointless in 5e anyway, given how harsh 5e is on buffs).   The other option is to go for the chimeras flight and sprinkle the room with small pit traps, that the bulky winged chimera automatically is not effected by when he triggers them.Rather than buffing the terrain, you might look to make the chimera a more interesting monster with more abilities that interact with the party as a group - in 5e terms, give the chimera some legendary abilities/points to let it take extra actions, roar as a sonic attack, refresh its breath weapon, increase the area of effect of its breath weapon, toss/throw foes with an effective attack by the goat head (PC lands 20' away, is prone, and takes falling damage), and so forth.  Combined with the increased HD, this might make the chimera an interesting 'mini-boss'.  Just don't get too disappointed if they cast detect magic, fly over the floor, and avoid the encounter entirely.Note the encounter explicitly says this is a one shot, and I don't think the encounter is interesting enough to warrant loading lots of chimeras depending on which square the party steps in.   Additionally, since the chimera(s) can't escape the room, that might lead to unintentional hilarity and death of the foes by asphyxiation.UPDATE: I just noticed that the chimera keeps coming back when it despawns.  That makes the trap slightly less stupid, but not much less stupid, as now the tactic is open the door, move back 60' and pepper the trapped beast with arrows or other ranged attacks.  Since its the same beast every time, even if it tries to evade this tactic, you can just wait for it to despawn and repeat.One possible work around is to introduce the 'white flame' healing at an early point, so that the poor creature doesn't die to attrition.</blockquote>

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