How to trap a Spectre

[The Red King]

Skill challenges are the most unfun, dreary and uncreative way to solve a DMing problem in the history of D&D mechanics. Unless one is a really, really good DM, it's hard to make them work, like, at all. Basically what you communicate to the players is: "no matter what cool ideas you might have, it just boils down to you making such-and-such number of whatever successful skill checks before rolling such-and-such many failures. Have fun, guys!" I hate skill challenges. My own humble opinion, of course, YMMV.



I'd imagine that Ghost Touch nets would just force incorporeal creatures into the ground, slap them away or something like that. After all, spectres not only have no strength score, they have no mass at all to resist the net's impact. So how would the net be able to actually wrap around the spectre's form?

In combat, you make tactical decisions. Even a pure fighter type does. Movement, terrain, special abilities, feats, spell effects and other stuff comes into play.
In a skill challenge, you basically just roll your best applicable skill against a fixed DC until the DM says "stop".
Hardly even remotely similar, much less the same.



Contact, sure. But how?
The net probably falls on the Spectre from above. The 3D form of the Spectre has no mass, unlike the net, and no Str to push against the net, so it is irreistibly forced into the ground, which offers no resistance to incorporeal type. It can then slip through the ground to exit it outside the area covered by the net on its next turn, and has total cover until then.
Or you throw the net horizontally, so it hits the Spectre in the face. The massless, frictionless, inertia-less Spectre proceeds to be knocked back the instant contact is made, before the net can even deform to enclose it. Similar result.

Nets you would use to scoop it up. lay it out, then pull the corners up and tie them.

If not a net, what about a mirror of life trapping. I know it is old school, but it seems to me that it might work.

 

[Empirate]

"As the net counts as incorporeal, it should act against the spectre in precisely the same manner a corporeal net acts against a corporeal creature. That's the magic of Ghost Touch, and it effectively counters the magic of the target's incorporeal nature."

Alright, this I can get behind.

As regards the "physics have no place in D&D" thing - sometimes it's just fun to try and bring basic physics and basic magic together, see what happens. Most of the time, it's stuff like the cannon that shoots hamsters into space based on reduced/increased mass from size-changing magic.