D&D 5E New DMG Excerpt: It's A Trap!

[SkidAce]

I thought static DCs were okay, because after all they were applied against the passive perception (with Indiana Jones being trained).

As such, the DC was set when they created the trap. A quick trap that the kobolds set up in the path of the party? 1d20 + mod. A permanent traip in their lair? 20 (no roll) + mod. i.e. the best they could do.

If you are chasing the kobolds through the woods, you will prob notice the traps...if you are divining into their tunnels, you better be looking actively, not passively.


But I think I need to think further.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, that's... disappointing. No longer is a Rogue even good for getting past traps, because now it requires a completely different skill - keying from a completely different ability score - to disable magic traps. If you want to be able to find and remove all traps reliably, you need Wisdom and Dexterity and Intelligence andPerception and Arcana and proficiency with Thieves' Tools. And you can only start with expertise on two of those!

The main recommendation is to have rogues have a high Int, rather than a high Wis.

Leave the passive detection to the party cleric/ranger/druid/elf/dwarf/whatever. Your job as a rogue is to actively scout, using Investigation pro-actively to determine if there's anything hazardous, usin' your noodle. More Sherlock Holmes' deduction than Spiderman's spidey sense.

There's room for Wis-focused spidey-sense, too, but such a rogue would be more useful at noticing traps (and setting them off or routing around them) then disabling them. Which makes sense: "Don't step on that weird flagstone, guys." vs. "I've determined that the mechanism is triggered by the body heat produced by warm-blooded individuals, rendering kobolds immune, but if you set one on fire, then, in principle..."

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I get what you're saying, but I assumed (possibly incorrectly) that the DC value accounted all those points? After all, the trap is meant to be hidden so lighting, etc shouldn't make a difference (it's captured in the players passive perception).

And if they're looking for it, they're no longer using passive perception anyway....

Here's the problem with this entire thing. Bounded numbers mean that a 1st level party generally has PP somewhere between 9 and 16. This is only a 7 point difference. Also, the spread is normally less than that. So far, it's been my experience that the "practical" spread is between 10 and 14.

Which means, that when you are making up a trap and setting a DC, you are purposefully choosing how many of the party members can spot the trap passively. This is especially bad when you are writing an adventure specifically for one group of players you already know their PP. Let's assume you are writing a generic adventure that you plan to run multiple times or publish.

If you set the DC at 17 or higher you are saying that the trap can never be spotted.

If you set the DC at 15 or 16, you are essentially saying that most groups will not be able to detect it at all. Only those with a super specialist will detect these traps.

If you set the DC at 13 or 14, you are essentially saying that the trap will be immediately spotted by all groups except the ones lacking all Wisdom based classes.

If you set the DC at 12 or lower you are saying that all groups everywhere will spot it immediately. It essentially isn't hidden.

It takes all the randomness out of finding it. I'd like a system that says "Your character has keen eyes and is on the lookout for trouble, therefore you have a better chance of finding this trap than a different group that doesn't have someone as keen eyed in it." But the key words in there are "better chance". There should be a chance but we need a die roll in order to model all the things we're uncertain about. How distracted is your character? Did your character happen to look in the exact right place to notice the details he needed to? That kind of thing. That's why we normally use die rolls for skills, to prevent the binary nature of "Sure, you're good enough, you succeed all the time."

Unfortunately, in this situation, you don't want to tip off the players when you are rolling to see if they spot traps. So the die roll needs to be made by the DM. When Mike Mearls posted that traps would all be rolling their stealth checks against the PP of the party, I jumped for joy because this seemed like the simplest and easiest solution to this problem. I'm very disappointed that it got lost somewhere along the line.

I think if I use this system there's only 2 ways this goes:

1) The PCs spot the traps 100% of the time. Most adventures will read like this: "You walk down the hallway, you spot the trip wire and step over it. You spot a trapped stone slightly past that and be sure not to step on it either."

2) I will set the DCs too high for PP to work and then the PCs will be forced to roll continuously. That'll end up like this: "A hallway? I assume its trapped. I search. I roll 15." "You don't find anything." "Yeah, 15 is too low to spot traps, I obviously failed. Everyone else in the party searches the hallway as well. The highest is 22." "*sigh* Yes, you find all the traps. You continue on to the next room." "A room? I assume that's trapped too. Everyone make checks!"

 

[Hussar]

Well, that's the problem with traps in general. The players never know where they are, obviously, so, they have to treat everything like it's a trap. Which is cool for about five and a half minutes and nothing but a boring dice fapping waste of time the rest.

I don't know what the solution is, but, it is a problem.

 

[The_Gneech]

After mucking about with PP a bit, I've decided to use it only to set the DC for NPCs to spot sneaking characters and the like. If there's a trap in a hallway, and the PCs aren't looking for it, I just say, "You've discovered a trap! Roll on Perception to see if you discovered it by spotting it, or by setting it off."

Similarly, the party was ambushed by an owlbear that rolled so high on its Stealth that they didn't have a chance to see it until it one-punched the cleric to 0 hp, which felt cheesy. (Yeah, I know old-school rat-bastard yadda yadda, but I know when I'm a player that kind of thing does not make for a fun night.) So again, in the future, "You've been stalked by an owlbear for an hour, which has now decided to make a lunch out of the cleric. Make a Perception check to see if it gets a surprise round or not." In that particular case it probably wouldn't have changed anything– as I say, the owlbear rolled huge– but it would have felt like the players had more control over their fate.

-The Gneech

 

[Remathilis]

Well, that's... disappointing. No longer is a Rogue even good for getting past traps, because now it requires a completely different skill - keying from a completely different ability score - to disable magic traps. If you want to be able to find and remove all traps reliably, you need Wisdom and Dexterity and Intelligence andPerception and Arcana and proficiency with Thieves' Tools. And you can only start with expertise on two of those!

Jeez, it almost seems like traps are dangerous rather than free XP.

Now, I'm a long-time rogue player who revels in trapfinding, but I'm actually OK with this. You need to specialize and diversify a bit, and perhaps get some of your allies in on the fun. Your rogue might be great at disabling mechanical traps (perception, thieves tools) at first level, and later on you can master investigate and arcana. Or, you can let your wizard friend do the arcana-magical traps; makes more sense than using thieves tools on them.

That's also assuming you stick straight to die-rolls; the DMG encourages "discovery" via textual means too (looking under the rug for a pit trap) and bypass (put a plank over the rug to walk safely across).

Anything to make traps a bit scarier without making them overly complicated is a good thing to me.

 

[Remathilis]

Well, that's the problem with traps in general. The players never know where they are, obviously, so, they have to treat everything like it's a trap. Which is cool for about five and a half minutes and nothing but a boring dice fapping waste of time the rest.

I don't know what the solution is, but, it is a problem.

Which is really why traps should be used like how traps are used in the real world.

1.) Guard entrances to important places.
2.) Guard important objects
3.) Have some method of bypass to allow residents to move freely there.

Ignoring Deathtrap Dungeons, traps should really only be used where it makes sense. DMs who spring traps in random places to play gotcha deserve their 20-minutes-per-5-feet-of-movement playstyle.

 

[the Jester]

Bit sad if it devolves down to this. "Ok, you spend an hour meticulously searching the corridor for traps, nothing. So far you've moved through two rooms and a corridor, it's taken you all morning." I'm sure it can be made clear to players that constant dice-rolling to check for traps would become pretty tedious!

I find that random encounter checks every 20 to 60 minutes does a lot to make the pcs consider choices that take a long time. Sometimes it's worth it- especially if they are somewhere where the owners/builders seem to have been trap-happy- but sometimes the danger of an overlooked trap is less than the danger of yet another squad of hobgoblins stumbling on the depleted party.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Jeez, it almost seems like traps are dangerous rather than free XP.

I just hate specialized tools that don't work for exactly what they're designed to do. Pathfinder is full of this stuff, where you'd get a special tool or item that's a one-shot that gives you +1 to a specific task, so it has a 95% chance of doing nothing. I hate that.

The Rogue is a specialized tool. You bring one with you because you don't want to worry about traps, at the cost of not bringing another Fighter or Wizard or whatever. It just seems really cheesy to say that, even when you have a character that is hyper-specialized to exactly this one issue (traps), you can completely negate all of that by designating the trap as "magic".

That's also assuming you stick straight to die-rolls; the DMG encourages "discovery" via textual means too (looking under the rug for a pit trap) and bypass (put a plank over the rug to walk safely across).

Agreed, and in this manner you might be able to get by without even having a Rogue, but it's less likely that you'll find a mechanical trigger or bypass for a magical trap. Magic traps can go off via magic sensors, which are unlikely to be found unless you have someone specifically looking for magic stuff.

Actually, given how much easier it is to bypass a mechanical trap than a magical one, a Wizard might actually be better for the party - the Wizard can disable or dispel magical traps, and you can narrate your way past mundane traps; but a Rogue can only really disable mundane traps, leaving the party helpless against magical ones :-/

 

[Psikerlord#]

The rogue can just take arcana though, and expertise in Arcana, and boom he is a magical trap expert. I dont think there's any real issue. It costs a bit more resource wise, but makes good sense to me, and also encourages Int as a more useful stat (yay!)